Anyone taking a cab to the airport in Dalian, Qingdao or Yantai will encounter waves of beach-side apartments as real estate and tourism have combined to annex much of the country’s coastline. The situation is far more intense in tropical Hainan, the country’s leading tilapia producing region (and ‘China’s Hawaii,’ as the local slogan goes) and the Bohai region encompassing Shandong, a key fisheries region. More than 80 percent of the Bohai Bay coastline has been crowded by factories and buildings, according to Li Xiaoming, director of the department of marine environment protection wing of the State Oceanic Administration (SOA).
His office this week issued its annual report on the state of the country’s seas — it makes for grim reading. China’s ambitions for offshore aquaculture look challenging given the latest data for water quality, released to little fanfare in Beijing.
“Increasing discharge of pollutants and booming offshore human activity, such as oil exploration,” are ravaging China's fragile marine environment, according to the SOA report. The administration rated the quality of 44,000 square kilometers (km) of coastal waters “below Level IV — the lowest level in the organisation’s rating system.
“Inorganic nitrogen, active phosphate and fossil oil were the main pollutants,” according to the report, pointing to damage caused by raw sewage, industrial waste and oil spills. Astonishingly, the report said that the quality of 88 percent of waters surrounding China's 431 coastal pollutant discharge outlets failed to meet standards. Approximately 77 percent of maritime ecosystems at estuaries and bays monitored by the administration were rated as "sub-healthy and unhealthy.”
Aside from the obvious environmental alarm, there’s a big challenge here for Chinese firms with big plans to expand seafood output and domestic sales. They face a crisis of trust among local consumers, whose increasing purchasing power will likely switch to imports given the evidence of such polluted domestic waters. “Local consumers don’t trust local marine products, so they’re turning to imports.” That’s the line taken by an official journal in Ningbo, one of China’s wealthiest cities and a hub for tuna processing.
The official website of Zhejiang province (of which Ningbo is part) last month reported that Ningbo Customs data shows the city imported 3,538 tons of aquatic products in 2013, worth RMB 36.79 million: up 94 percent and 20.5 percent year on year, respectively. “Imports are rising because consumers believe the nutritional value is higher… there is a growing demand for clean water seafood…this will continue to drive rapid increases in imports.”
Even as the country’s fisheries researchers and corporate players talk up the prospects of coastal fish and crustacean farming, the outlook for China’s water quality looks grim. The SOA’s findings in 2013 reported 68,000 square km of “near-shore” waters were graded at the worst level of seawater quality in 2012, a sharp increase from 2011’s 24,000 square km. A total of 170,000 square km of water didn’t meet the SOA’s ‘first grade’ of seawater quality required for fisheries.
The freshwater situation is equally dire. In a survey of the water released into the sea by 17 major Chinese rivers, 13 were given a rating lower than 'V' standard, indicating that the water released is not safe for any kind of use, being loaded with ammonia and phosphorus, among other pollutants. Water released into the sea by the famed Yangtze River (once a source of fish, now better known for the petroleum installations dotting its banks) was rated as safe for general industrial use but not safe for skin contact.
In 2011 the SOA said more than half of China's outlets for releasing sewage into the ocean are “excessively polluted” that means they’re pumping excess amounts of feces and ammonia into the water. And it’s to these polluted seas that China is turning in a bid to ease water shortages on land: China will take 2.2 million cubic meters of seawater-converted freshwater per day by 2015, compared with 660,000 cubic meters in 2011, according to a five year plan (the format most official solutions take in China) spanning 2011-2015.
The situation is perhaps worse on land, where large numbers of chemical plants and paper mills (many of them state owned) have been found to use high pressure wells to illegally dump their hazardous chemical waste underground, contaminating the ground water. Official data from across 118 cities now shows that about 64 percent of urban groundwater is heavily polluted and only 3 percent of groundwater is classed as “basic clean.”
Energy to fuel its economy matters more than fish to Chinese planners, and the Ocean & Fisheries Bureau has little power next to the country’s energy sector. Notably, the country’s 12th five-year plan (2011-15) promotes the prospecting and drilling of oil and gas in the country’s seas. Marine experts in China have claimed it will take 30 years to clean up the effects of the Bohai Bay oil spill, which in June 2011 polluted a 6,200-sq km area.
Fisheries will also continue to struggle against the manufacturing and petrochemical sectors, whose jobs and taxes are good enough reason for Chinese authorities to not enforce environmental laws. In China alone there are 435 discharge points spanning the coast that release 32.2 billion tons of wastewater into the sea each year. Almost 70 percent of manufacturers had records for illegal discharge, while 25 percent had never met national environmental standards, according to the State Oceanic Administration.
The SOA classified 83 percent of the country’s coastline as a “fragile ecosystem.” Coastal areas like Fujian, Guangdong and Shandong (all three major seafood producers and shippers) contribute to 70 percent of the country's GDP, largely because that’s where the largest manufacturing and petrochemical facilities are located. Considering the country values its ‘oceanic sector’ at RMB5 trillion (a figure published by national government) there’s a lot at stake. But which of its ‘oceanic’ sector will it keep — the oil drilling or fishing and aquaculture/mariculture? Usually when forced to choose between environment and economy, China has chosen the latter.
