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by pphysch 892 days ago
I know China-bashing is popular on this website, but a quite search of market data reveals that China isn't even in the top 10 of tuna producers NOR consumers.

Basic economics would suggest that a country with low nominal GDP/capita would not be the final destination for a global commodity (with relatively high production cost) like deep sea fish. Given that your production site is in the Pacific Ocean, why would you sell in Shanghai when you can sell in San Francisco where the average person spends ~10x or more USD on food?

TFA even says the West Pacific (i.e. China, Japan, Korea) is the region suffering the least, due to local conservation measures.
3 comments
strangattractor 892 days ago
Maybe their population size explains a difference. Say 10% of a billion people can afford expensive fish - 100 million people. 1/3 the population of the US. One might also notice the preponderance of Chinese fishing vessels in areas far from China. [1] And just maybe those vessel are not properly identifying themselves so the true numbers are unknown. [2]

Just maybe the fishing grounds close to Chine are all fished out.

[1] https://dialogo-americas.com/articles/chilean-navy-increases...

[2] https://globalfishingwatch.org/data/analysis-reveals-false-v...

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pvaldes 892 days ago
> but a quite search of market data reveals that China isn't even in the top 10 of tuna producers NOR consumers.

To be in that rank, a country would need first to declare the real number of the captures officially.

But it does not really matter. Is all about collateral effects.

"we catch only herrings and respect the Tuna (liar, liar, fins on fire), so why 9 of each 10 tuna in the planet vanished?".

Hem... Are we talking about the herring-eating tuna?"

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pphysch 892 days ago
It's global market data, not political propaganda. If people get these numbers wildly wrong, they lose money. The "Chinese numbers can never be trusted" canard can only be stretched so far when it comes to global economic data that is materially validated on a daily basis by countless non-Chinese stakeholders.
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pvaldes 892 days ago
> If people get these numbers wildly wrong, they lose money

Oh, my sweet summer child. Is more like the opposite of losing money, in fact.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X1...

Take a look to the keywords section first

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actionfromafar 892 days ago
Not tuna, but China sends fishing boats for other kinds of fish to South America.
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