Fish Fight

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Fish Fight

"An Indonesian patrol vessel... did seize a 300 ton Chinese trawler. And arrested their crew for illegal fishing. But as Indonesia was trying to bring that trawler in, Chinese coastguard vessels entered the scene and rammed the trawler free, pushing it back out of Indonesian waters. The Captain here is saying that's not the first time that something like that has happened.

'The Chinese coastguard come with the fishing boats from the Chinese mainland. They are always on standby near the Spratley islands. We move in and try to arrest the Chinese vessel that is fishing in our waters, the Chinese coastguard moves in to try and free them'
'Often they make threats, he says'
'You must release my ship. If not, we will shoot you'...

'You're actually not helping the wild fish stock when you eat a farmed salmon. Why is that? Farmed salmon is a carnivore. In order to farm that fish, you gotta feed it wild fish. The salmon farmers of the world are voracious customers for wild ocean fish that are caught and ground up into little pellets that look like dog food but smell like fish and are fed to the farmed salmon. In the process you put about 4 pounds of wild fish in, and you get about 1 pound of farmed salmon out. Completely inefficient. In fact it's reducing and is a very big way, the amount of healthy wild ocean fish that humanity could be eating by a factor of at least 4:1. In fact it's called a reduction fishery - that's the technical term for that reason.

Now at the other end, the quite good end of farmed fish is the farming of oysters, clams, mussels, why are these good? Because what do they eat? They eat algae. They're filter feeders. And so when you eat a farmed oyster, you're eating something that's made a really tasty and healthy marine protein for you out of algae. And in the process it's even helped to clean the water.

And so I encourage our listeners to eat as many farmed clams, oysters and mussels as they can stomach, and feel very very virtuous in the process...

[Fish stocks] build so fast compared to so many things in nature... if you do the right things, which are quite simple: set quotas and catch limits that are in scientific boundaries, within a 5 or 10 year period in many species you can get a full recovery. It's one of the wonderful things about ocean conservation and the ocean food opportunity is that this is not like waiting 100 years for the rainforest to rebuild. Fish are an incredibly resilient and robust part of nature'...

'Andrew describes fish as the perfect protein'"

China's peaceful rise...