One of my jobs is to help people deal with IUU fishing. Yet I can see how this fits the picture since crime is part of life and when you do the rules, desperate people will find the way around. Ergo I try to not only focus on how to control it but equally important, how to disincentivise it. Yet subsidies are my limit, stuff like the one publicised here does irk me deeply. Subsidies causes an equivalent amount of damage yet they are legal.
one can afford to abandon boats like this only if getting subsidies... (allegedly Bolivian Longliners abandoned in Phucket)
I wrote a lot about them over the years... but this article is just revolting to me.
One of China’s leading fishing companies has booked more than CNY 100 million (USD 15.1 million, EUR 12.8 million) in government subsidies for 2017.
CNFC Overseas Fishery Co., Ltd announced to its shareholders that the payment was received and would have a “material effect” on the firm’s profits for the year.
CNFC badly needed a break after seeing the price of its shares collapse from CNY 14.00 (USD 2.11, EUR 1.80) in June to CNY 8 (USD 1.21, EUR 1.03) in July due to ongoing uncertainty over the risk posed to the company by a lawsuit filed against one of its subsidiaries. The company’s valuation dive also coincided with an ongoing examination of the company’s books by the Chinese stock market regulator.
Government subsidies have become vital to the profitability of China’s large state-owned fishing firms, which also benefit from access to low fuel prices for their long-haul fishing operations in international waters.
CNFC had a negative operating margin of 8.8% in 2016, but still managed to turn a profit margin of 5.27 %.
You get the fact that if it wasn't for the subsidies they be out of business, does not occur to anyone that they are losing money because there is too much overcapacity for the available fish? That they consumers are paying twice for the same fish? That everyone loses in this game?
What can be done is totally out of my depth... China would rip apart in terms of trade any small or big country tackling them, but it may be done as a coalition of many good countries via WTO? Yet on the other side, who is clean? See this post on the subsidies of others
I don't know.... But this shit cannot be going on.
Update
I love the readers of the blog! Gabriel Gomez (the GM of Marine Instruments) sent an image of Spanish newspaper reporting that the Chinese government has injected 13 million euros in a company above the 19 Million they put last year in its parent company Shangai Fisheries.
Yet we go more hard on skippers or crew members that earn very little for fisheries offences, while the processors and mother companies that should have ceased operation get handouts from the government. Not right.