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PRC taking measures to ensure sufficient food supply

FORUM Staff

The convergence of a spate of natural disasters, fallout from the coronavirus and limited purchasing capacity is leading to challenges in ensuring adequate food supply in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), according to media reports.

Potential manifestations of this challenge include the PRC’s increased overfishing in waters that encroach on the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of nations ranging from Ecuador to Indonesia and Japan to the Pacific islands.

In August 2020, Ecuador’s naval forces said about half the 325 vessels from a mainly Chinese fishing fleet operating near the Galapagos Islands turned off their satellite systems and cut communications to avoid being tracked, according to TheTelegraph newspaper. Ecuador first detected hundreds of vessels in the area outside the marine reserve in late July 2020.

Since 2017, Chinese fleets have fished in the area during the summer, but the 2020 fleet is the largest ever, Fox News reported.

“Having depleted the seas close to home, the Chinese fishing fleet has been sailing farther afield in recent years to exploit the waters of other countries, including those in West Africa and Latin America, where enforcement tends to be weaker as local governments lack the resources or inclination to police their waters,” investigative journalist Ian Urbina wrote in an August 17, 2020, article for The Outlaw Ocean Project and the online magazine Yale Environment 360.

Globally, the PRC accounts for nearly half of all fishing activities and more than a third of fish consumption and is the largest seafood exporter, Urbina reported. It has hundreds of thousands of fishing boats, with as many as 17,000 operating far from its coastal waters, according to a June 2020 report by the Overseas Development Institute. The U.S. has fewer than 300 distant-water fishing vessels.

“Most Chinese distant-water ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in one week as local boats from Senegal or Mexico might catch in a year,” Urbina reported.

The PRC also continues harassing other nations’ fishing fleets closer to home. In August 2020, the Philippine government filed a diplomatic protest after Chinese forces seized fishing equipment set up by Filipino fishermen on a South China Sea shoal off the coast of the Philippines, control of which is disputed by the two countries, The Associated Press (AP) reported. (Pictured: Filipino fishermen climb aboard a transfer ship after a Chinese trawler sank their fishing boat in the South China Sea in June 2019.)

The PRC’s fishing fleet often functions as a paramilitary force to assert territorial domination, especially in the South China Sea, analysts assert.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said his nation was powerless to stop Chinese nationals from fishing in its EEZ.

“When Xi says I will fish, who can prevent him?” Duterte said of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping in late July 2020, AP reported. “If I send my Marines to drive away the Chinese fishermen, I guarantee you not one of them will come home alive.”

Meanwhile, at home, Xi has initiated a campaign to limit food waste, calling it “shocking and distressing,” according to the state-controlled news agency Xinhua, the Nikkei Asian Review reported. State-run media have flooded the airwaves with stories about food waste, advocating that the public “applaud thriftiness.”

That may be obscuring the real issue, however.

“Purchasing capacity, not food availability, seems to be the biggest threat to food security” in China, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a May 2020 report by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Roughly 42% of the PRC’s population, or 600 million people, earn 1,000 yuan (U.S. $145) per capita a month, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said at a May 2020 news conference.

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