Saving Seafood

China’s seafood demand could triple, researchers predict

May 14, 2021 — China’s requirements for seafood imports could more than treble to as high as 18 million metric tons (MT) by 2030, according to a report published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “China at a Crossroads: An Analysis of China’s Changing Seafood Production and Consumption.” Imports hit a high of 4.3 million MT in 2019, but fell 20 percent last year. The report was coauthored by Beatrice Crona, the executive director for Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Emmy Wassenius, a doctoral candidate at the academy. SeafoodSource interviewed them to find out how the 2030 figure was calculated and to ascertain the economic and political context of the report.

SeafoodSource: You have determined China will have a significant shortfall of seafood supply by 2030. How big will the shortfall be and how did you make that determination?

Crona and Wassenius: Our analysis shows that by 2030, China is likely to experience a misalignment of 6 million to 18 million tons as domestic seafood consumption outstrips production. This corresponds to a gap of 9 to 27 percent from the 2020 targets for production. We arrived at these figures through a series of simple steps. First, we synthesized national and international statistics to estimate total seafood production in 2014 – the most-recent year for which data was available – to compare Chinese seafood imports, exports, and domestic production, using Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Sea Around Us data. This amounted to 63 million MT. We then estimated the projected production in 2020 based on the targets set in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan. This amounted to 66 million MT. Next, we estimated a lower and upper range of Chinese domestic consumption for 2020 and 2030. The lower range was calculated from consumption data from 1978 to 2016 and linearly extrapolated to 2020 and 2030. The upper limit assumed a more exponential growth, and consumption figures were therefore arrived at by calculating the overall average using the same 1978-2016 data and applying it as a yearly increase until 2020 and 2030, respectively.  For 2020, the upper and lower consumption amount to 56 and 58 million MT, respectively. For 2030, the figures rise to 72 and 84 million tons in live weight.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Maine fishermen: adapting in a sea of change

September 21, 2017 — ORONO, Maine — Increasing environmental uncertainty coupled with rapidly changing market conditions in the Gulf of Maine raise important questions about the ability of Maine’s commercial fishermen to adapt. How resilient is the industry to these shifting waters? Who is best positioned to adapt and who is most vulnerable?

“We have started to explore these questions by studying the relationships fishermen have to marine resources in Maine,” says Joshua Stoll, assistant research professor at the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences and lead author of the paper “Uneven adaptive capacity among fishers in a sea of change” published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE.

“Most assessments of adaptability are conducted at the community scale, but our focus is on individual-level adaptive capacity because we think community-level analyses often obscure critical differences among fishermen and make the most at-risk groups invisible,” says Stoll, whose research was funded in part by a grant from the UMaine Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, where he is a Faculty Fellow.

In their analysis, Stoll and co-authors Beatrice Crona and Emma Fuller identified over 600 types of fishing strategies in Maine based on the combinations of marine resources that fishermen target to support their livelihoods.

Read the full story at the Penobscot Bay Pilot