China Fishery Group

Mr Nobody Wrote:Our ( investment ) time span is too short to worry about fish going extinct.

How long is your horizon? One day? Two weeks? Because if it reaches to one year, within that one year the jack mackerel and anchoveta fisheries could very well be commercially extinct. Read the article and decide for yourself.

And they could be subjected to political and environmental pressure. you can check out the Iceland and British Cod Wars in the 1950s and 1970s where Iceland was trying to expand their economics esclusive zone to prevent overfishing.

It is sad that the quota system is not working due to conflicting vested interests. Advancement in trawler technology had so far leads to faster depletion of fish population.
Capitalism way to resolve the situation is to let the reduced fish population leads to reduction in fishmeal tonnages and hence reduced revenue. Fishery groups which cannot maintain a profitable operation will be bankrupt. Unfortunately, this is a long drawn process as some fishery groups enjoy government subsidies.

why not commerised fish farms in large scale?! using economy of scale, make it cheaper to farm fish, than fish fish... :O

brattzz Wrote:why not commerised fish farms in large scale?! using economy of scale, make it cheaper to farm fish, than fish fish... :O

Many of the wild fish are in fact ground up into fishmeal and used to feed farmed fish such as salmon. So fish farming doesn't solve the problem - the farmed fish still need to eat, and fish eat fish. Only a few kinds of fish eat plankton - everything else is programmed to eat other fish. So you still end up depending on wild fish at the end of the day.

You can of course trick/force the farmed fish to eat other things, and at fish farms the cheapest feed ingredients are used e.g. modern salmon feed can be 50% fishmeal, 8% soymeal, 8% wheat/wheat byproducts, 2% vitamins and 31% fish/soy oil. The proportion of fishmeal can be decreased by using more soy (pure soy-based feed is possible), but then the proportion of omega-3 fatty acids (the basis of all the "eating salmon is good for health" claims) will decline, making such salmon less marketable.

Talking about fish food. I remember the last trip to cambodia, the cambodians sell something that looks like "Red Sands" in abundence amount as fish food. They basically need to use shoval to scope them up to sell. Not sure what it is made of.

The fishes will not go extinct but the fishery groups will likely to go bust sooner than later.
Given a few years of lower intensity fishing, the fishes will be back.

However, the prices of the seafood and also, any food that is linked to fishes will likely to see price appreciation.

(25-02-2012, 03:50 PM)d.o.g. Wrote:

Mr Nobody Wrote:Our ( investment ) time span is too short to worry about fish going extinct.

How long is your horizon? One day? Two weeks? Because if it reaches to one year, within that one year the jack mackerel and anchoveta fisheries could very well be commercially extinct. Read the article and decide for yourself.

My horizon is 40 years, health permitting... Can't they catch other fishes?

Mr Nobody Wrote:Can't they catch other fishes?

Commercial fishing doesn't work like that. There are only particular species of fish that are in demand e.g. salmon, tuna, sardines, jack mackerel etc. If you catch other species of fish they have basically no market value, and they are ground up into fishmeal, which is very low value.

Jack mackerel IS often made into fishmeal, but that's because it's used to feed farmed salmon, which fetches a much higher price. Jack mackerel used to be extremely abundant so it was easy (read: cheap) to catch, so even when sold for fishmeal it was still profitable.

At the rate of (over)fishing going on, it may not be long before jack mackerel becomes commercially extinct, like cod (you can still buy cod today, but it's expensive). This could happen in 1 year, it could happen in 10 years. But if nothing is done then the outcome is certain.

In Singapore you can get canned jack mackerel in tomato sauce, masquerading as sardine. Wonder why? Because true sardines are no longer abundant...

On the subject of fish and fishing.

I used to be avid angler in my early 20's every 2 weeks we would go to south china or around malaysian waters to fish over weekends.

Local fishermen in malaysia who do this for their living have a hard life they fish year round without fail sometimes they get a good catch but sometimes return empty handed their life is like a "straw in the wind" I ever seen a fisherman caught 200m of telco copper cable from his fishing handline worth about $40 scrap value he didn't get anything else that night but he was quite happy, then they also make extras ferrying tourists like us for weekend fishing excursions but sometimes tourist season is bad. Except for monsoon season where it is too dangerous to go out or ghost festival which they "pantang" only malay fishermen will go out to sea during ghost festival and when we follow them we usually get a bonanza catch because nobody else is fishing in the waters for a month which often surprises me how quickly fish stock will replenished.

In my opnion there's actually a lot of fish still in the seas, not all fish end up as fish meal, does it make any sense that mackerels caught in these waters are sorted and exported to a factory to ground into feed and sold to maybe countries that farm salmon, sorting and exporting labor transportation all cost money. Maybe in those countries that farm salmon they buy locally caught mackerel then it makes more sense.

My view is a lot of the fish that are caught around these waters are sorted. The good quality fish that can fetch high value like ikan kurau, red snappers, mackerels are sold to various small distributors in malaysia who then bring the fish to nearby cities like KL or singapore which are again sorted sold either to domestic market or packed and exported to other countries in the region like japan. So not all fish in japan are caught off japanese waters are radiated many fish in Japan are imported from around the world.

The not so common fish caught by malaysian fishermen are sold in local markets in fishing villages, if you go to the local fishing village markets during early mornings can see a lot of weird and interesting fish and many of them are fresh off the boat quality which are not more than 3 days old compares to the fish brought in by trawlers here which are still fresh because of deep freeze but are more than 2 weeks old already.

In singapore there are some areas that are protected and off limits to all civilian boats like around the live firing islands. I hear from the rumour mill that these waters are loaded with huge fish left to grow wild and undisturbed for many decades.