Everywhere you look in the world of seafood, there’s China. It produces more than a third of the world’s seafood each year. It’s been the world’s largest exporter of seafood since 2002. And it’s also the largest consumer of seafood. 

China’s fishing industry is massive, and highly regulated. An estimated 14 million people work for its fisheries. Regulation of the seafood industry kicked off in 1986 with a law that concentrated much of the industry’s power into local governments. The government incentivizes fishing with subsidies for things like fuel. In 2018, China distributed $7.2 billion in fishing subsidies — more than any other country, and a fifth of all such subsidies globally. 

But with the rapid expansion of fishing came controversy. After decades of overfishing, large Chinese trawlers now go beyond the country’s waters to look for seafood in open and sometimes contested waters, which creates conflicts with neighboring countries. And the fuel subsidies have been found to be harmful for the world’s fish stocks since they incentivize overfishing. Preventing this requires close monitoring of fish populations, restrictions on how much of particular species can be harvested, and most critically, enforcement of the regulations. But local governments, tasked with the job of enforcing fishing regulations, sometimes have different goals than the national agenda, says Zhang Hongzhou, a research fellow at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Provinces may prioritize, for instance, supporting the local economy with caught seafood rather than meeting large-scale limitations on overfishing. 

What China and the rest of the world’s seafood economy looks like 10, 20, or 50 years from now largely depends on how threats like overfishing and climate change are addressed. A 2020 study published in PNAS found that countries with more intensively managed fishing do a better job of maintaining the level of fish in their waters, while countries with looser management (typically poorer countries) tend to have overfishing. Such a disparity is pushing a trend toward overfishing throughout the world. Rising ocean temperatures have concurrently driven many species of fish from their habitats, dramatically affecting supply and causing economic disruption.

This week, The Wire looks at China’s seafood production, its biggest export markets and some of the major Chinese companies that ship seafood to the United States. 

The Long View

Demand for seafood has been steadily increasing, but there simply aren’t enough fish in the sea to sustain global appetites. The solution is fish farming, or aquaculture, massive indoor and outdoor facilities that farm fish in cages or contained facilities. This large scale development has resulted in a doubling of seafood production between 1985 and 2018. 

The Wire examined the shift in production between 1990 and 2018, about the time aquaculture started to take off as the primary driver of global growth. Up through 2018,¹The most recent year for which the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has data China’s annual capture — the seafood that are caught rather than farmed — more than doubled by weight. But the country’s production of fish through aquaculture went up more than sixfold. In that same time period, the world’s seafood production increased by 83 percent overall, according to FAO data, with capture increasing by just 14 percent and aquaculture jumping by 527 percent. 

China’s production far outstrips any other country. Today, China accounts for more than a third of the world’s seafood supply, and since 1990 has accounted for more than 60 percent of the industry’s growth worldwide. The world’s second and third largest producers of seafood are Indonesia and Peru, which each contribute about 7 percent of global production.

Although there are frequent news stories about China’s fishing fleets pushing further offshore, marine capture still accounts for a tiny percent of its overall production.

Imports and Exports

China is the world’s biggest exporter of seafood. The top ten importers alone take in nearly $8 billion in seafood from China. More than half of seafood that Kenya, Senegal and Fiji import comes from China. And even bigger countries with large seafood industries, like Mexico, the Philippines, and Malaysia, import huge proportions of their seafood from China. U.S. imports are dominated by Canada (15 percent), and then India (11 percent), Chile (10 percent) and China, which accounts for about 9 percent of America’s imports, according to data from the UN International Trade Statistic Database. 

The demand for seafood from increasingly wealthy countries has had big ramifications for poor countries. China is the second largest importer of seafood by value, behind the U.S., which Dr. Rashid Sumaila, a professor with the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, attributes to its processing power and growing affluence. “The income increase has led to China eating more fish, but not only more fish… now they like to eat carnivorous fish,” Sumaila says. “Instead of the freshwater fishes that are vegetarian and very productive, like the carps of the world, they want to eat salmon.” As a result, nutritious seafood is shipped away from where it’s naturally found. 

Who Does the U.S. Buy From?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has tracked the top five Chinese fish exporters to the United States, all of which export white fish. The FDA does not track the trade value or weight of the imports. The five companies listed below are ranked by the number of import lines — in other words, by the number of deliveries to the U.S. — in 2020.

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