How Hong Kong can build on its trawling ban to become a champion of sustainable seafood

Hong Kong’s love of seafood shows no signs of abating. Fortunately, as an article in the Post reported, an increasing number of restaurateurs are insisting that the seafood they serve is not only of the finest quality, but caught sustainably.

This is not a passing trend, but a pragmatic approach to ensuring continued access to supply. WWF’s 2015 Living Blue Planet report found that populations of 492 fish species that we eat had declined 50 per cent globally between 1970 and 2010, and continue to decline. Consequently, seafood from unsustainable fisheries will become scarcer and scarcer, and likely undergo price hikes.

Less materialistic young people are leading the charge to a sustainable future

While the rampant overfishing of our oceans is one of the tragedies of our generation, one of the major success stories of the past decade has been the rise in independently certified sustainable fisheries.

However, as chefs in Hong Kong know well, many of the city’s most desired seafood species, particularly in Cantonese cuisine, are not available from sustainable fisheries anywhere. This is due to several factors. Firstly, modern-day sustainable fisheries management first developed in the colder waters off North America and Europe, where fishing fleets tend to target fewer species. Ensuring that overfishing does not occur is more straightforward when only a few species are taken. Fish and invertebrate species diversity is naturally higher in tropical waters, and a fisherman using the same gill net, for example, will typically catch more species in the tropics – increasing the complexity of management.

Secondly, weak enforcement in many marine fisheries in Southeast Asia, where many locally favoured seafood species occur, has led to a free-for-all. As a result, very few fisheries in Asia have been certified as sustainable.

Hongkongers willing if not quite ready to embrace sustainable consumption