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My 2020 prediction that there will be no more wild caught fish in markets by 2030 seems ever closer... The truth is, Argentina knows what’s happened but is lik

• toyg 5y ago
  > China would stop bribes to the Argentina leadership No need to inject unsubstantiable allegations in an otherwise sensible comment. The power imbalance between a small country with long-standing financial issues and a history of inability in enforcing its complex borders, and a rising global superpower, is quite evident.
  • waheoo 5y ago
    What do you mean unsubstantiable? https://theglobalamericans.org/2021/02/new-directions-in-the-deepening-chinese-argentine-engagement/ https://theglobalamericans.org/2021/02/new-directions-in-the...
    • toyg 5y ago
      In a quick read, I don't see anything in there that could be qualified as "bribe to the leadership". The Chinese finance a lot of countries to ingratiate themselves, but outright bribes to this or that person is another thing. It might well be happening, but stating it with certainty when there is no proof just comes off as a conspiracy theory.
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      • snthd 5y ago
        https://chinadialogue.net/en/business/6270-illegal-fishing-by-chinese-boats-aided-by-argentine-officials/ https://chinadialogue.net/en/business/6270-illegal-fishing-b... (2013) >Corruption fuelling illegal fishing >[Argentine journalist Roberto Maturana] says that in Argentina, these arrangements are facilitated by corrupt officials at the government sub-department of fishing, responsible for granting fishing licenses. ‘Often officials will issue an Argentine license to two different Chinese boats. So whilst one is in port, the other will be out fishing’. Given Argentina's corruption problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Argentina), and China's fishing agenda (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-africa-north-korea-south-china-sea/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/30/china-beijing-fishing-a... ), it would be a surprise if corruption was not happening.
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  • jakobdabo 5y ago
    What do you mean a "small country"? Argentina is 8-th largest country in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
    • eliseumds 5y ago
      Shanghai alone has a larger GDP than Argentina, and that's pre-pandemic data. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_prefecture-level_cities_by_GDP https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_prefecture-l...
    • u8mybrownies 5y ago
      Probably referring more to GDP
    • toyg 5y ago
      In a world of continent-sized superpowers, any country with less than 100m people is objectively small; and Argentina definitely does not compensate for that with high per-capita GDP (they are not even in the top 50).
      • retrac 5y ago
        There's probably only three large countries in the world by your definition then: the USA, China, and Japan. (India, Brazil and Russia's economies are probably too small to meet your standard, all being smaller than the UK's or Germany's.)
        • lenkite 5y ago
          India is actually ahead of the UK and immediately behind Germany.
  • oefrha 5y ago
    https://www.nationalfisherman.com/national-international/oceana-reports-chinese-spanish-squid-vessels-going-dark-off-argentina https://www.nationalfisherman.com/national-international/oce... > South Korean, Spanish, and Taiwanese vessels conducted 26 percent of estimated fishing activity in the study with nearly 200 vessels. Almost “90 percent of the Spanish vessels that fished along Argentina’s national waters appeared to turn off their public tracking devices at least once, and Spanish vessels spent nearly twice as much time with AIS devices off as they did visibly fishing,” according to the report. If power imbalance is the main issue here, surely something can be done about the other 1/3 at least?
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    > a history of inability in enforcing its complex borders, and a rising global superpower, is quite evident Can't tell if this was a Falkland Islands / Great Britain reference or not.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  The fascinating question is what happens if China tries to back this up with force. The US would probably feel the need to intervene, but I’m sure most of South America would be more than a bit wary having American war ships in the area given what we’ve done down there. On the other hand, better than Chinese warships perhaps?
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  • stefanfisk 5y ago
    Does China even posses the ability to project power that far in any major sense?
    • ForHackernews 5y ago
      Not really, no. China does not (yet) have a blue water navy. They have one, non-nuclear, carrier: https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/with-its-new-aircraft-carrier-is-china-now-a-blue-water-navy/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/with-its-new-aircraft-carrie...
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  • hatchnyc 5y ago
    Argentina is a signatory of the Rio Treaty, as such any attack against Argentina would we considered an attack against the United States and most of the rest of South America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-American_Treaty_of_Reciprocal_Assistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-American_Treaty_of_Recip...
    • galangalalgol 5y ago
      So mostly safe from violent retaliation. How important is their trade with China? If they impound Chinese fishing vessels (assuming they have a coast guard capaple of keeping up with this many intruders?) a loss of trade mught occur.
• BurningFrog 5y ago
  We farm instead of hunt & gather on land since a long time. The same has to happen in the oceans.
  • booleandilemma 5y ago
    Interesting perspective, I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
  • pibechorro 5y ago
    Ya, no. Nothing wrong with hunting straight from nature. The key word is sustainable. If you live on the ocean, you have every human right to fish fo nourishment. The issue here is militarized mass scale industrial fishing, illegally raping reassures to feed foreign people, mostly landlocked people sushi rolls and fish fillet. What we need is a culture that eats local. Its a consumption issue. Farmed fish are most of the time also destructive to the environment, they are fed less than ideal and sustainable feeds, are not as healthy to eat, and most importantly are not healthy and happy fish, they are slaves in horrible life cycles.
    • pibechorro 5y ago
      *reasources
    • giantg2 5y ago
      So what are the city people going to eat if it has to be local? My perspective is that there are simply too many people and they are leading an increasingly modern (high consumption) lifestyle.
      • tharkun__ 5y ago
        I would tend to agree. Cities breed lots of problems. Social, economic, environmental, every kind you can imagine. And it creates very very small communities outside those cities which comes with its own problems too (think small town sheriff's tyranny type stuff - yes there's racial profiling etc in big cities as well, didn't say it was a unique problem). Bigger numbers do have an advantage but there is definitely a number that is too large. I would advocate for lots of intermediate size cities but that doesn't seem to be what anyone in power wants. Also, are you advocating for Thanos like mercy here? ;)
• baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  I'm genuinely curious when all of this will catch up to us. I spend a relatively large amount of my spare time keeping up with myriad of ways we are destroying our environment, the fact that our ecosystem is in deep danger is without question. At the same time, while I am anecdotally aware we are experiencing a range of shortages right now, it never seems to quite show up in our economic data. Take for example the FRED data on global fish prices [0]. When you look at that chart you see nothing particularly interesting. You can pore over all of the commodities charts and if that was all the data you had you would soon come to the conclusion that nothing obvious is wrong with our environment (at least from an economic standpoint). To be absolutely clear, I'm not questioning that something is wrong, I think we're in major trouble. But I am still genuinely surprised that this peril doesn't present itself in any economic data I can find. Any insights into when we will feel this our how/when this environmental destruction will become visible in our economic data would be appreciated. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSALMUSDQ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSALMUSDQ
  • mason55 5y ago
    I’d guess given technology advances you’d expect prices to go down, so the fact that they stay flat is actually indicating that fish are becoming harder to find. Similar to how if the price of something stays the same then it’s becoming cheaper because of inflation. Also, fish are not a long term investment. The price only depends on how hard they are to find combined with demand to eat them sometime soon. If you could buy a fish now with the expectation of selling it later when stocks dry up then I think you’d see a lot more upward pressure.
    • HappyDreamer 5y ago
      Another thing cold be if costs for transportation and preparing the fish, storing it etc, grocery store salaries, as of now outweighs the cost of fishing it up from the ocean? (But if so, maybe not much longer.) (I don't know, just wondering.)
  • lupire 5y ago
    Animal species almost always grow to consume more unless they are destroyed by predators or exhaust their environment.
• Gustomaximus 5y ago
  Some areas are getting destroyed but other countries are very good at managing their fisheries, England, Norway, Australia, Canada and more will be producing wild fish ongoing I would expect. There definitely seems the need for some international waters rules to be agreed on, but given today's politics it seems unlikely the major powers would approach that with goodwill.
  • Tams80 5y ago
    The thing with all those areas is that those countries have the resources to police their waters and would absolutely seize vessels that were in breach of their or international laws. And if an illegal fishing armada turned up would very likely sink a few vessels to send a message.
    • rorykoehler 5y ago
      Argentina should lease their waters to a country with the means to defend them.
      • usrusr 5y ago
        A country leasing would care just as little about overfishing. But yeah, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. But who would be willing to mess with China?
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    Add Korea and Japan to that list. They are very careful about managing their own fishing grounds, but, sadly, much less so for international waters.
• elliekelly 5y ago
  I’m fairly certain I’ve commented about this on HN before but when I went to Antarctica (via ship from Argentina) in 2018 we saw tons of these vessels because the ships fishing for squid use huge bright lights to attract them at night. They looked like UFOs on the horizon. It was a really strange sight. It was definitely well-known amongst the scientists on the ship that the operations were illegal. I know they made an effort to report as many as they could but my impression was that officials were overwhelmed by complaints and the illegal ships would work together to avoid detection/quickly move to international water so, since it was a losing battle, the government didn’t put forth too much effort. Whether that’s the real reason nothing is done or just the good reason used to justify their inaction is anyone’s guess. I will say there were a shocking number of ships that I could see and I wouldn’t be surprised if they outnumbered the Argentinian navy.
  • galangalalgol 5y ago
    It seems they outnumber the Argentinian fishing fleet 4 to 1, just counting the Chinese vessels which make up only 66% of the total intruders. So probably they outnumber the navy by quite a bit more. Impounding all these vessels would probably not make economic sense. They cant utilize that many vehicles and the people that might buy them would be the people they took them from. They would have to escort each one back to harbor and what do they do with the sailors? Feed and house them for free? Sinking these vessels with all hands with no warning would be the most effective way to handle it, no time wasted escorting and the impact psychologically would be outsized to the vessels sunk. Of course, that would gain them a great deal of negative publicity.
    • yumraj 5y ago
      > Of course, that would gain them a great deal of negative publicity. Negative publicity where? I’m sure within Argentina this would be very popular and if China protests it’ll have to own up that these illegal boats are coming from there, which it may not want to do.
      • galangalalgol 5y ago
• HappyDreamer 5y ago
  I wonder, isn't it 1) obvious for the CCP what this amount of overfishing will do? And, 2) > These distant-water fleets mainly fish for shortfin squid, which are vital to Argentina’s economy 1 and 2 combined make me wonder if destroying the ocean ecosystem, and damaging Argentina's economy could be a goal in itself, somehow. Maybe to (now I'm guessing), in the future, get to lend out money to the government in Argentina, if they're in a bad economic situation -- and make the country depend on the CCP or something like that? I'm just guessing and wondering. However it'd be weird to me if the CCP hadn't thought about what'll happen, because of the overfishing, and they said that, yes this is good for us; it's something we want (the party, probably not the people).
  • fencepost 5y ago
    isn't it 1) obvious for the CCP what this amount of overfishing will do? It's not in their territory, they likely don't give a rat's ass. Ecosystem damage in the western hemisphere might actually be a good aspect for some of those who might crack down on this. I suspect we're all well aware that vessels and crews of any nation pulling this in China's territorial waters would not be treated kindly.
  • Quarrelsome 5y ago
    It might be an error to attribute this to centralised planning. While that is eminently possible (and much easier for the CCP than other governments) this also could just be someone min/maxing their little slice of the pie or anything in between. Agents of the imperial European powers used to act in the "interests of the empire" abroad without significant oversight ~200 years ago so this situation could be similar with the Chinese fleet being paid with incentives that encourage bending of the rules.
  • istorical 5y ago
    I read a lot of Chinese fantasy fiction (xianxia and wuxia) online and its extremely common for the heroes of the stories to use potions or herbs or magical ingredients to increase their powers and abilities. Something unique about them though is it seems super widespread in these stories for the main character, neutral factions, and enemies / evil factions alike to exhaust discovered resources to extinction, with the main ethical / moral crisis being whether to distribute them according to power or according to fairness. Fights over how big one's share of the pie is are common, and 'evil' characters are often those that express greed by demanding an unfair share. But the question of whether it's a good idea or a moral choice to harvest an entire field of 1000 year old ginseng or stealing all of some rare previously thought to be extinct Phoenix's eggs vs tending to the field and harvesting only a small crop or only taking the resources of older birds rarely comes up. There are plenty of other cultural differences in these stories but overall I'm always left wondering whether some of these reflect broader cultural attitudes or if this is like if someone tried to get a deep understanding of western culture by reading Spiderman comics and that's it.
• nixass 5y ago
  Well, napalm carpet bombing and the fleet from the video is gone, and likely won't come back, ever
• paulcole 5y ago
  > My 2020 prediction that there will be no more wild caught fish in markets by 2030 seems ever closer... Are you talking worldwide freshwater and saltwater fish?
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• mastax 5y ago
  On average, fish sticks are increasing in much of the world: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/2218 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/2218 https://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/science-of-seaspiracy/ https://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/science-of-seaspiracy/ > Among the assessed stocks in the database, the average fishing pressure increased and the biomass declined on average until 1995, when fishing pressure began to decrease. By 2005, average biomass had started to increase (Fig. 1B). Averaged across all stocks in the database, biomass in 2016 was higher than BMSY, and fishing pressure was lower than UMSY. However, improvement is still needed for 24% of stocks, accounting for 19% of potential catch, which still have low biomass and high fishing pressure compared with MSY-based targets > Since the mid-1990s, catch has generally declined in proportion to decreases in fishing pressure and was, in 2016, at 54% of where it was in 1989 for assessed stocks (Fig. 1B). This pattern is also observed at the regional level, where the correlation between exploitation rate and catch is generally >0.8 (Fig. 2). Global catch as reported by the FAO also declined during that period, but less so than for the assessed stocks reported here, likely because fishing effort in the parts of the world without assessment has not declined (18). > Regions that have average biomass near or above BMSY are Australia, Atlantic Ocean tunas, Canada West Coast, European Union non-Mediterranean, Indian Ocean tunas, Norway/Iceland/Faroes, New Zealand, Pacific Ocean tunas, Alaska, the US Southeast and Gulf, and the US West Coast. Although these regions have not avoided the overfishing of all stocks, conservative management has kept most stocks at high biomass. Many areas where biomass was below BMSY in 2000 have seen reductions in fishing pressure and stock increases, including the Atlantic Ocean tunas; the East, Southeast, and Gulf coasts of the United States; the Canada East Coast; and the Northwest Pacific Ocean (Japan and Russia). Tuna stocks in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which were well above BMSY in 1970, were near BMSY in 2016. > Stocks in the Mediterranean-Black Sea have low biomass and continue to decline, whereas stocks in South America have declined considerably in the last 20 y and were below target levels in 2016. Fishing pressure in South America has been dropping since the early 2000s. Only 4 of 36 stocks in NW Africa have MSY-based reference points for biomass estimated, all of which are large-volume, small-pelagic fisheries and are therefore unrepresentative of the many demersal fisheries in the region. The stock abundance for those small-pelagic stocks is above MSY targets, but exploitation rates were high (2.5 times UMSY) for the 6 NW African stocks for which exploitation rate reference points exist. Regional assessments (19) estimated that most demersal stocks were overexploited by 2008 and recommended reductions in fishing pressure. It is of course difficult to create and enforce a regulatory regime to prevent overfishing, but there tends to be buy-in among fisherman once their fisheries collapse.
• soheil 5y ago
  > China would stop bribes What are these bribes you talk of? Can you provide sources?
  • jaimex2 5y ago
    It's well known how corrupt Argentina's government is. You don't need to look it up, its common knowledge.