The problem is farming seafood in its contemporary best-practice manner which is focused on output rather than maintaining a sustainable ecology.
All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.
The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.
You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.
PRC fishing mostly on international waters is an act of war now? NVM PRC DWF about as well behaved as other distant fishing fleet in terms of clipping EEZs and they're still underfishing per capita relative other large fishing powers, i.e. they're taking less from commons then entitled.
Countries dependent are migratory transnational resource extraction are frankly living on a retarded business model and have only themselves to blame. Reminder 80% of PRC fish comes from sustainable aquaculture that control in their soveign waters. That's your sustainable ecology model, but it requires capex / infra to manage husbandry instead relying on gaia like some hunter gather.
Because they are different goods that can't be aquacultured locally. Because PRC fisherman gets to make a living selling higher value wild fish like everyone else. Because it's simply not a problem when PRC decides to fish in international waters, again like everyone else, all of whom are similarly poorly behaved, i.e. SKR, JP, TW, ES... but you know 3/4 of those are US partners vs PRC, so they don't get the smear campaign.
Good thing it's not their food then. Again most of fishing done legally in high seas, international waters, where commercial fishing at industrial scales now sufficient to alter coastal state ecology. And that sucks for them. But UNCLOS gave these fishing states 200nm which is fuckload more area historic fishing practices need. Meanwhile PRC, one of the largest countries with the smallest coastal entitlement / EEZs due to regional geography means they have to fish on high seas for proportional access. That's baked into UNCLOS, coastal states gets to milk their EEZ, everyone else gets access to the commons. If someone wants to start a war over that, they can, but let's not pretend they'd be anything but pirates, because DWF pillaging he commons is both legally allowed and intended.
The edge of EEZs, aka the high seas, aka fucking international waters. There's lots of documentation of PRC DWF legally fishing where they're entitled that useful idiots think is illegal activity because US was pumping propaganda bux and generating false narratives / wedge issues countries PRC was cozying up with and rationalize deploying their coast guards to undermine PRC interests.
There's occasionally misbehavior, i.e. AIS shenanigans for incursions from minority of vessels, but PRC bheavior proportionally is slightly BETTER than other DWFs, i.e. SKR, TW, ES. TLDR if an a countries entire extract model falls because some foreign vessels pops a few nautical miles into 200 mile long EEZ, i.e. a few % of occasional incursion, then their national fishing managment models are not sustainable.
BTW, there's a reason only few ships are ever interdicted, because in aggregate, PRC DWF is just not a fucking issue. There were actual attemps where US coast guards tried to board PRC DWF fleets on high seas, again, international waters, and was lolled off. So the answer to all those asking why DWF fleets aren't sunk (I assume in good faith they mean all DWF and not just PRC's), the answer is simple: most operate legally, in international waters, pillaging the commons unsustainably as they are entitled to.
There are studies of AIS disabling events, highest proportion of ships/time. IIRC, avg worst is Spain, ~15% obscure. Then US, ~8%, then TW ~5% then PRC slightly less. US gets pass since US fishing happens in North West Atlantic - US has big EEZ. Not much info on SKR/JP (other biggest DWF) except they tend to fish where PRC fishes and do all your slave labour that other DWF does, so hard to believe they don't do AIS shenanigans. IIRC worse (by type) absolute was JP for tuna longliner. There's other consideration that DWF has global players interacting, i.e. JP doesn't do destructive trawling, but they run big transhipment reefers (fridge boat) to support to fish longer.
MSM will focus almost exclusively PRC. It's spiked narrative. TLDR, go track "research" on PRC DWF since ~2020 when the champaign started. The estimate of PRC DWF by west aligned research... laundered by western news went from something like 3000 to 6000 (reasonable), to 10000 to 18000... in 5 years. Meanwhile PRC wild catch increased from 12m tons to 15m tons, i.e. PRC somehow built ~30000 new fishing ships in 5 years, 950% increase... only to fish 25% more. It's all stupid all the time.
Where's the whataboutism? It is, in fact, super dooper helpful to remind people that US lawfare/propaganda has it's limits and in many domains, geopolitical reality has a PRC bias. Maybe it'll help some people understand why reeeing about US narratives against PRC keeps being futile.
It is all a collective action problem. The gains you get now by fishing more are real, the loss you get from overshooting the limits is hypothetical and ind the future and the present always wins.
Fisheries off the coast of New England have consistently gone through the cycle of fisherman arguing with ecologists, being right in the good years, having a bad year, having a fishery collapse, a few years of recessions and then finding some other population of fish which is less desirable, further away, more expensive, etc.
Yeah, the only real solution is to eliminate commons.
In case of the ocean I would say that every country should have the economic right to all points in the ocean closer to them than to any other country. Everyone else gets free passage (subject to your reasonable environmental laws) and to engage in scientific operations, but only the country has any right to remove anything beyond scientific samples.
It's not perfect given that some species move about, but it would go a long ways towards controlling the problem.
What you’re describing is different from what the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is doing. They’re essentially strip mining the ocean thousands of miles away from China, leaving the locals to deal with the ecological damage and resulting consequences.
Different and the same. What's the same is that it is a shared resource that people benefit privately from and there is no authority that can manage it globally. Like I say, those fish the Chinese caught are real, people are not sure what the long term consequences are.
Sink boats until the behavior changes. Behavior won't change until a sufficient number of boats sink. Decades of talking and explaining and diplomacy and politics have failed. The only two options remaining are accepting the status quo or sinking boats. Anything else is performative.
I dunno, drones and missiles are probably the most cost effective way. I was in favor of diplomacy 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, but I'm completely and totally done pretending diplomacy and education and hearts and minds type campaigns have any value, anymore.
I also think it's worth going to war over. The threat of killing the oceans is a pretty drastic and permanent threat to the entire world, and it can cascade into apocalyptic conditions.
Having a coherent frame of rules that allow conservation actually increases the fish yield, but China's treating it like a zero sum game. It's gotta be stopped, since they're entirely and brazenly unwilling to stop. The same drones used against the venezuelan drug boats could be targeted at the exploitative fishing boats, and a consistent year or two could force international agreements and some sort of collaborative enforcement. Drone platforms and satellite monitoring could even make it mostly autonomous.
This is so delusional and siloed from current geopolitical realities. This will lead to war and/or sanctions by China on multiple exports and imports with the offending countries.
All other issues - be it wild-caught marine-animal ingredients being eroded as a finite input, or simply killing off all-around it due to the increased prevalence of sea lice and industrial activity - are a product of the practices, not the concept.
The problem is exacerbated in a grotesque feedback loop as well as the sea lice can transfer from farms and reduce the health and survival of wild salmon and trout in particular - leading to chemical treatments and other practices which result in everything from algae bloom to facilitating invasive species to straight-forward pollution.