[dwd]

There's a good reason other countries are not heavily investing in aquaculture.

Pollution, pathogens and heavy use of antibiotics and vaccines required to keeping large numbers of fish in confined areas. It's not a solved problem at least in Australia and consumers prefer wild caught.

15% is still a large number. 15% of the Chinese population is 2/3 of the US population and 15x the population of Australia. That's a lot of wild caught fish.

But it's not just China. Fishing boats from Indonesia and other SE Asian countries are more often intercepted within Australia's economic exclusion zone.

[maxglute]

You can make the same criticism for all terrestrial live stock, at least aquaculture has lowest feed conversion ratio, i.e. lower than chickens. World, especially east asia not going to go vegetarian, so aquaculture probably most ecological path to animal protein sufficiency / efficiency.

>That's a lot of wild caught fish

Note half of 15% wild catch is east sea, i.e. it's mostly in PRC EEZs. Most of other half in SCS, which is dispute shit show. We're really talking ~3% that is legitimately distant fishing, and to be blunt PRC, who due to geography as one of the LEAST EEZ to population / shore ratio (being surrounded by other island neighbours), only capturing 3-7% (if you include SCS) of total consumption via distant water is reasonable. Which is the "real" reason why PRC double down on aquaculture, they're simply large land country with huge population with high aquaculture appetite with limited EEZ resource.

Ultimately this something for UN to sort out, and because PRC reliance much less on high seas fish resource, you're going to hear bitching from other DWF actors way before PRC. In the meantime there's simply no reason for PRC to not DWF at her current per capita rate just because people who can't compare per capita eat up propaganda. The reality is PRC is 20% of global pop and wild catches about 20% of global catch. Has about comparable IUU misbehavior. Useful idiot behavior singling out PRC when many other fishing nations... who happen to be US partners, are not getting same lazy propaganda talking point for extracting much more per capita.