GLOBAL fish stocks may have declined without anyone noticing. For the past
few years, China has unwittingly misreported how much fish it takes from its
ocean waters, masking the extent of worldwide overfishing.
There have been long-standing concerns that China has been reporting
implausibly high fish catches. Now a computer model of the area developed by
researchers based in British Columbia suggests that, between 1995 and 1999,
China’s claimed ocean fish catch was about twice what should be possible based
on conditions in the area.
Estimates of annual global fish catches, which are in the range of 80 million
tonnes,…
