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Marine Life Declines for Another Year in Contested, Overfished South China
Sea

Ralph Jennings

   TAIPEI, TAIWAN - Marine life in the politically disputed South China
   Sea took another hit over the past year, researchers said, due to
   overfishing and lack of international efforts to protect species.

   Vessels from multiple Asian countries are going farther out into the
   3.5 million-square-kilometer sea and casting deeper because coastal
   waters yield increasingly little, scholars and published research
   indicate. Giant clam harvesting, added to use of cyanide and dynamite
   bombing for fish, damaged coral reefs last year, the analysts said.

   Marine life in the sea that stretches from Taiwan southwest to
   Singapore comes into focus every May, when China declares a moratorium
   on fishing above the 12th parallel, which encompasses waters most
   frequented by China but bisecting both Vietnam and the Philippines. The
   bans that began in 1995 will last this year from May 1 to August 16.

   "We're all in this pretty rapid decline when it comes to biodiversity
   in the South China Sea and we certainly don't see any evidence that
   anybody is doing anything about it," said Gregory Poling, director of
   the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under the Washington-based
   Center for Strategic and International Studies.

   Fishing in the sea expanded rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s, to
   about 10 million tons per year but then started stagnating, researchers
   Cui Liang of China's Xiamen University and Daniel Pauly from the
   University of British Columbia said in a 2017 paper.

   Since then, the study said, boats have fished deeper and caught smaller
   fish. Still, the South China Sea accounted for 12 percent of the global
   fish catch just five years ago, according to CSIS. Analysts could not
   estimate the total 2019 catch volume because of lack of national-level
   data.

   "The coastal areas are already overfished, so that means that fishing
   fleets from China, Taiwan, Korea, even Japan would actually be swarming
   now into the center of the South China Sea area, which means there is
   that concern about overfishing, and then, not to speak of that
   island-building processes that China conducted," said Herman Kraft, a
   political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.

   Among the problems is continued use by Asian fishing crews of dynamite
   and cyanide bombing, the conservation group Global Underwater Explorers
   said on its website. The practice, which wrecks coral reefs and fish
   spawning zones, is "widespread throughout Asia and the South China Sea,
   from Indonesia to southern China," the website said.

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