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Marine Policy

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The fisheries of the South China Sea: Major trends since 1950

Daniel Paulya,∗, Cui Liangb,c

a Sea Around Us, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4, Canadab CAS Key Laboratory of Marine Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, 266071, PR Chinac Laboratory for Marine Ecology and Environmental Science, Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266237, PR China

A B S T R A C T

The catches taken from the South China Sea (SCS) by the bordering countries and others are presented for the period from 1950 to 2014, with emphasis on catchesthat were ‘reconstructed’, i.e., corrected for completeness. Following a rapid increase in the 1980s and early 1990s, catches from the SCS reached about 10 milliontonnes per year, then stagnated despite increasing fishing effort. Some details are provided by (i) functional groups containing hundreds of species, (ii) fishing gears,of which trawls and purse seines are dominant, (iii) fishing sectors, with artisanal fisheries currently taking ¼ and industrial fisheries nearly ¾ of the catches, and (iv)by ex-vessel value, i.e., about 16 billion USD per year. It is also shown that the 10 million tonnes level was achieved by ‘fishing down,’ i.e., catching smaller fish lowerin the food web, and through a demand- and subsidy-driven offshore expansion that ended engulfing the entire SCS. Finally, we introduce global warming and itseffects on the SCS, and the need to mitigate its impacts, along with the other impacts (acidification, plastics) that will add to the pressures on the SCS ecosystem.Cooperation between the countries bordering the SCS, even if fraught with difficulties, is seen as the only avenue to mitigating these impacts.

1. Introduction

The South China Sea (SCS), which ranges from 104 to 122° east andfrom 25° north to 3° South (Fig. 1), is near the world centre of marinebiodiversity [1]. Thus, although it covers 3.1 million km2 and re-presents only 8.6% of the ocean's surface, it harbours 3790 fish species,i.e., 22% of the 17,200 reported from the world's oceans [2].

For millennia, the shores of the SCS were the sites where membersof multiple cultures met, and from which they drew their sustenance[3]. Japan [4] and various colonial powers (France in Vietnam, the U.Kin Malaysia, The Netherlands in what is now Indonesia) made un-successful attempts prior to WWII to introduce industrial fishing, no-tably trawling, into Southeast Asia [5–7]. However, it was the post-WWII rebuilding in the Philippines that saw the first massive motor-ization of marine fisheries in the SCS region, mainly via engines sal-vaged from abandoned US military vehicles [8].

This development was monitored by a German fishery developmentexpert, who helped transfer the concept to Thailand, where trawlingtook off in the mid-1960s. Then, the Manila-based Asian DevelopmentBank, “commencing with its first fisheries loans in 1969 […], madeloans of US$ 1055 million to a total of 51 fisheries projects in 17[countries]” [9]. This enabled trawling to burst out of the Gulf ofThailand into the SCS and to become adopted by Malaysia, Singapore,Indonesia, Brunei-Darussalam and Vietnam. Similar developments oc-curred in southern China, where coastal trawling became the main toolof fisheries industrialisation [10].

This expansion of trawling led to intense competitions with thehundreds of thousands of traditional artisanal fishers operating alongSoutheast Asian coastlines [3,11], generating conflicts [12] that remainunresolved to this day.

The SCS was described as a Large Marine Ecosystem (LME [in Ref.[13]]) based mainly on physical oceanographic data [14,15], andfisheries catch data [16] consisting of a spatialized version of themarine catch data from 1950 to 2004 assembled and disseminated bythe Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO[17,18].

The catch data presented here cover the years 1950–2014, and theyare more complete than the FAO statistics, which do not include dis-cards and omit the bulk of small-scale fisheries catches (see below).Thus, we first present the catch reconstruction approach used by theSea Around Us to improve in the generally deficient catch statistics ofthe countries surrounding the SCS. Then, we discuss the primary trendsin these catch statistics, along with some associated issues, notably theeffects of global warming, and our thoughts about their mitigation.

2. Materials and methods

Regional studies of fisheries are usually based on the catch statisticssubmitted annually by member countries to the FAO [17]. These data,however, do not include catches that are discarded at sea, rarely includefull coverage of artisanal (= small-scale commercial) catches, and, evenmore rarely, subsistence and recreational catches, not to mention illegal

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103584Received 12 March 2019; Received in revised form 13 May 2019; Accepted 12 June 2019

∗ Corresponding author.E-mail address: d.pauly@oceans.ubc.ca (D. Pauly).

Marine Policy xxx (xxxx) xxxx

0308-597X/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Daniel Pauly and Cui Liang, Marine Policy, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103584

industrial catches. Moreover, several countries bordering the SCS havestatistics that are often aspirational, i.e., that reflect hoped for, ratherthan observed catches (see details in the references cited in Table 1).Thus, the FAO data cannot be used ‘as is’. Moreover, the FAO statisticsare not georeferenced beyond being assigned to giant ‘FAO MajorFishing Areas’. Thus, the catches taken in the SCS proper could not bedistinguished from the catches taken in FAO areas 61 (Northwest Pa-cific) and 71 (Western Central Pacific), with which the SCS overlaps.

The Sea Around Us has developed “catch reconstructions” proce-dures to (partly) mitigate for these deficiencies and they are describedin general terms in Zeller et al. [19], and in the contribution cited inTable 1 for the countries bordering the SCS. The catch time series thusobtained, which all start in 1950, are documented in detail on the

website of the Sea Around Us (www.seaaroundus.org). Therein, catchesare presented by the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) claimed by themaritime countries of the world, including those bordering the SCS.These catches are also assigned to cells of ½ degree latitude andlongitude, of which there are about 150,000 in the ice-free world'socean and 1185 in the SCS. Thus, it is straightforward to re-expresscatches by an LME, here for the SCS.

Once catches are available for a given LME, they can be combinedwith specific traits of the taxa in catch reports. Here, they were com-bined with the mean trophic level of each taxon, as obtained fromFishBase (www.fishbase.org) for finfishes and from SeaLifeBase (www.sealifebase.org) for marine invertebrates such as to be able to check forthe occurrence of the ‘fishing down’ phenomenon [30]. Also, these

Fig. 1. Map of the South China Sea (SCS), with all the countries surrounding it. As defined, the SCS covers an area of 3.1 million km2, of which 1.9 km2 are shelf(< 200m deep). The SCS contains about over 7% of the coral reef area and 1% of the seamounts of the world (see www.seaaroundus.org).

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trophic levels were used to infer the primary production required by thefisheries of the SCS using the method of Pauly and Christensen [31].This method also relied on the reconstructed catches and a world mapof average primary production data produced by averaging ten years ofSeaWIFS satellite data [32].

Finally, we present estimates of the mean temperature of the catch(MTC, [33]) for the SCS as a tropical LME (based on the preferredtemperature of 221 species; [34]). This allowed contrasting the re-sponse of the MTC in the SCS to increase in Sea Surface Temperature(SST; [14]) with the response of the MTC to SST increase in temperateand subtropical LMEs [33].

3. Results and discussion

Fig. 2 summarises the reported (black line) and reconstructs catches(stacked grey surfaces) from the SCS. Following a rapid growth in the1980s and early 1990s, this catch stabilized at about 10 million tonnesper year since the mid-1990s, despite an increasing fishing effort [35].Moreover, since the 1990s, the catch of low-value fish and juvenile fishin the SCS by China has accounted for more than 70% of its catchesfrom the SCS [36].

The cause of the massive expansion of the fisheries in the SCS isincreased demand due to the increased incomes and populations in thesurrounding countries. Another cause is the tendency to increase thesize of national fleets as long as economically feasible and beyond, asenabled by massive subsidisation [37].

Fig. 2A illustrates the catch trend in terms of functional groupsbecause of the national statistical systems of the countries bordering theSCS report most of their catch by higher taxa (genera, families …). Thisis due to the taxonomic diversity of the catch, especially from trawlers,which is so great that reporting at the level of species is largely im-practical. Obviously, this also has implications for single-species stockassessments, which are hampered by lack of species-specific data. Onthe other hand, single-species assessments are not very useful to trawlfisheries that simultaneously exploit hundreds of species [38]. The si-tuation is different for pelagic fisheries, which tend to be reported at thespecies level, and for which stock assessments using the CMSY method[39] have been performed for a number of SCS stocks (see www.searoundus.org).

Fig. 2B shows that since the 1980s, bottom trawls are the dominantfishing gear (in terms of catch) in the SCS, followed by purse seines (tocatch small pelagic fish) and a variety of small-scale gears. Fig. 2Cshows that China has the greatest catch in the SCS, followed by

Vietnam. Other countries, both from around the SCS and further away,contribute the rest of the SCS catch. Fig. 2D shows that the ex-vesselvalue of catches from the SCS from 2010 on, reached 16 billion USD, ofwhich about 25% is contributed by artisanal fisheries (see also [40]).More detail and updates on these various catch-related metrics can befound on the website of the Sea Around Us (www.seaaroundus.org).

Fisheries in the SCS impact all components of the ecosystem, fromits inshore communities to its oceanic areas [41,42]. Fig. 3 illustratesthese impacts on the fish and invertebrate community in the form oftwo panels. The upper one consists of the trend of mean trophic level ofthe catch (i.e., the MTI or ‘Marine Trophic Index’ [43]), while the lowerone displays the results of an analysis using the Regional MarineTrophic Index (i.e., RMTI; [44]). The latter analysis accounts for off-shore fleet movements as inshore catches decline, which has the effectof making the decline of mean trophic level in inshore stocks [44]. TheRMTI analysis confirms the signal conveyed by the insert in Fig. 3A, i.e.,the Fishing-in-Balance index (FiB), which expresses the tendency forfisheries to expand offshore [44,45].

As might be seen, the RMTI analysis suggests that there was, fol-lowing the depletion of nearshore waters in the SCS [45–47], a clearshift toward offshore, deeper waters, as indeed occurred in the entireworld [48].

This offshore expansion is also illustrated in Fig. 4, which shows theprimary production required (PPR) by the fisheries in 1950 (left) and2014 (right). PPR, which relates the primary production (PP) embodiedin fish catches relative to locally observed primary production, allowscomparisons of the impact of fisheries of coastal areas (with high PP) totheir impact offshore (where PP is low). Here, the PPR maps of the SCSshow that the offshore impact of fisheries is currently almost as sig-nificant as the impact inshore.

In absolute terms, the computed PPR for the SCS as a whole, sincethe mid-1990s, has exceeded observed PP in that body of water (seewww.seaaroundus.org), which cannot occur in reality. This suggeststhat a combination of two biasing factors may be affecting this result:

1) The parameters of the PPR method of Pauly and Christensen [31]and/or the SeaWIFS primary production estimates for the SCS arebiased;

2) The catch estimates from the SCS are biased upward, despite efforts(documented in the contribution listed in Table 1) to minimise over-reporting.

While we cannot exclude a bias originating from (1), notably be-cause primary production in the SCS has changed [49], we believe that(2) has the stronger effect, given the demonstrated occurrence of over-reporting the countries surrounding the SCS. Over-reporting, in the SCSregion, tends to occur because of administrative or political incentives,as described for several SCS countries in the contributions cited inTable 1, which document catch reconstructions that could only partlycorrect for demonstrable over-reporting. Another contributing factor islanding in the SCS ports of fish caught outside of the SCS; this secondfactor is most likely to affect Chinese catches [50].

Finally, Fig. 5 shows that the Mean Temperature of the Catch (MTC;[33]) does not increase in the SCS, despite temperature itself increasing(Fig. 5A). Indeed, the MTC is the SCS in decreasing, which may be dueto a relative increase of catches in its northern part, whose exploitedfish and invertebrates will tend to have a lower preferred temperature(as suggested by an anonymous reviewer). This decrease is in contrastto the temperate and subtropical LMEs (Fig. 5B), where the increase ofthe MTC is almost parallel to that of SST. This is because the (tropical)species that inhabit in the SCS (including the 13 SCS species reportedfrom the Taiwan Strait [51]) - are not being replaced by species withaffinities to higher temperature [33,34]. In contrast, in the East ChinaSea, the influx of species from the SCS compensate, to a certain extent,for the species lost to the Yellow Sea, and the MTC trend thus followsthe SST trend [33,34]. This suggests that if ocean warming continues

Table 1Catch reconstructions directly relevant to the South China Sea (SCS) as definedin Fig. 1 (available at www.seasoundus.org).

Country or part thereofa Domestic catch % in the SCSb Sourcesc

Brunei Darussalam 100 [20]China (Mainland) 41 [21]Hong Kong 100 [22]Indonesia 15 [23]Sabah/Sarawak (Malaysia) 85 [24]Philippines 27 [25]Taiwan 45 [26]Singapore 100 [27]Vietnam 79 [28]

a Thailand's domestic catches are not included because Thai waters are notpart of the SCS (see Fig. 1); however, Thai distant-water catches in the SCS areincluded in the catches taken from the EEZs of countries bordering the SCS, asare the catches of all other countries with distant-water fleets operating in theSCS .

b Cumulative catches from 2000 to 2014.c All of these documents can be downloaded from www.seaaroundus.org.

One-page summaries of each of them may be found in the ‘Global Atlas of MarineFisheries’ [29].

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(and there is, unfortunately, no reason to think that it won't), the SCSwill see a gradual temperature-induced erosion of its biodiversity [52].

Mitigating the impact of global warming onto the SCS would re-quire, however, rebuilding some of its previous abundances, since large

fish populations are more resilient [53]. The reason is that they willcontain more variant genotypes, including some that may be resistantto higher temperature [54].

Unfortunately, the SCS is surrounded by countries with overlapping

Fig. 2. Key features of the reconstructed catch from the SCS, also showing the catch reported to FAO (black line), and assigned to the SCS. A) Catch by functionalgroups, which plateaued around 10 million tonnes from the mid-1990s on; B) Catch by gears; C) Catch by countries; D) Ex-vessel value of the catch.

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claims to its waters and natural resources. Rather than their beingturned into marine parks, as proposed in a less challenging time [55],its fishing grounds have become the prizes of a zero-sum game wherethe win of one country is the loss of another [56]. In this context, thetragedy of the commons [57] is exacerbated, and fish populations thatonce migrated from the waters of one country to the next are now fa-cing the “double jeopardy” of unsustainable, competitive harvesting[58].

Still, there some reasons for hope, as several of the countries bor-dering the SCS have realized the importance of protecting their region'sfishery resources [59]. Thus, China, Vietnam and other countries haveestablished marine protected areas covering approximately 15,600square miles in the coastal waters of the SCS. This is not much if

compared to some of the giant marine reserves that have been createdin recent years, e.g., in the Chagos Archipelagos [60], but it is a positivesignal.

However, to make a dent in tackling the issues mentioned above,the countries surrounding the SCS should cease viewing “increasedproduction” as the primary objective of their fisheries. Rather, sus-taining the annual catch of 10 million tonnes presently being taken willbe enough of a challenge (see also [61]). Achieving sustainability wouldbe much advanced by reducing and eventually getting rid of the gov-ernment subsidies [37] which have allowed fishing effort to increase tothe extent that catches are now stagnating, or even declining in someareas (see contributions in Table 1).

Moreover, a slightly reduced catch caught by unsubsidized fleets

Fig. 3. Illustrating the impact of fishing inthe SCS through the reduction of the meantrophic level of catches. A) Trend in meantrophic level for all SCS catch, i.e., the MTI(insert: Fishing-in-Balance index); B) trendsin the Region-based Mean Trophic Level ofthe Catch, or RMTI, which account for thefisheries' offshore migration (see text).

Fig. 4. Primary production required by the fisheries of the SCS (left: in 1950; right: in 2014).

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would generate far more societal benefits [58], especially if the fractionof fish suitable for direct human consumption were to be increasedthrough policies encouraging the use of larger meshes in trawl nets[62].

There are numerous challenges to the SCS LME; we addressedfisheries resource depletion and global warming, whose effects are in-tensified by ocean acidification and deoxygenation, not to mention thedeleterious effect of plastic debris. It is clear that cooperation betweenthe countries bordering the SCS will be crucial in addressing thesechallenges. Such cooperation could use other semi-enclosed seas forreference (e.g., the Baltic Sea; [63]), and cooperate first on topics thatare less sensitive, for example, environmental protection and scientificresearch [64]. This will strengthen mutual trust and the ties betweenthe countries; eventually, this may help mitigate disputes over access tofishing grounds. We cannot definitely say that it will work, but we knowfor sure that non-cooperation would make things worse.

Declarations of interest

None.

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