"How much is a pound of yellow croaker?"
When you ask this sentence at the seafood market, buy a large yellow fish for ¥30/kg, take it home and make a "dry roast yellow fish" and eat it satisfactorily, you don't actually know, and you may not care about the origin of this fish...
30 years ago, yellow croaker was the most common dish on the Chinese table. But wild yellow croaker is on the brink of extinction due to overfishing, and artificially farmed yellow croaker supports the demand for this delicacy.
In order to let more people know the story behind the fish, Greenpeace conducted a "field trip". And invited the famous photographer Steven Chow to shoot a short film "Every Year There Are Fish? 》
After watching this film, you may have a new understanding of the delicious seafood on the plate...
Stefen is a commercial photographer in Malaysia who has taken portraits of Big Guys such as Wang Jianlin and Liu Qiangdong. An adventurous person, Stefen climbed Everest at the age of 25 and has participated in more than a dozen everest climbs.
Together with the economist Lin Huiyi, he also created two long-term works, "Poverty Line" and "Equality", using art to pay attention to and express the social issues of the differentiation between the rich and the poor.
Equality
Between 2011 and 2016, the value of used cans has been reduced by 60%. 1,000 cans are worth as much as a plastic iPhone case.
This time, Steven was invited by Greenpeace to go to Fujian Province, China's largest yellow croaker farming site, and together they did an experimental shoot.
Based on local research, they found that when high-quality big fish are not caught in the sea, fishermen retreat from the sea to the coast to raise groupers, large yellow croaker and perch that can be sold at high prices.
But these fish are carnivorous, so fishermen go to the sea to catch small fish and shrimp that have not yet grown up to feed.
Yellow croaker farmers will use the machine to beat the small fish they catch into a fish pulp and feed them directly. This method not only has a low feed usage rate, but also pollutes the water quality and increases the pathogenicity rate of fish stocks.
The Stefen team and photographer randomly purchased 7.15 kg of feed needed to farm one kilogram of yellow croaker. Species identification and individual statistics are carried out in situ.
A total of 39 species of fish were found, including our common striped fish. Found a total of more than 4,000 ...
The team went to the fishing port early in the morning to buy fish, and then spent the whole day on a basketball court taking "portraits" of more than 4,000 small fish. One person swings the fish, one person shoots, and one person is responsible for spraying water on the small fish to cool down and prevent the small fish from being exposed to dried fish.
A photo was taken of each fish and all the photos were put together into one huge picture.
In the middle are three large yellow croakers, and around them are small fish of 7.15 kg
Cut out the size of the net they could have grown to, and compare it to these small fish:
If not caught in advance, the value of these small fish can increase several times or even dozens of times
If not caught, these small wild fish could have grown bigger. In China, the demand for fish in the seafood market is increasing day by day, and the cultivation of yellow croaker alone requires the consumption of at least 400,000 tons of juvenile trash fish per year.
There are fewer wild fish in the sea. The species and scale of culture are increasing, but the types and quality of fishing are declining. This "unsustainable" approach to farming has distorted the natural ecological environment of the ocean.
China is the world's largest ocean fishing nation, with more than 13 million tonnes of fishing in 2015, more than Indonesia and the United States, ranked second and third in the world combined.
China is also the world's largest aquaculture country, accounting for more than 60% of the total global production. Behind these data, hidden is the crisis of the serious decline of China's offshore fishery resources!
Since 2003, more than 90 percent of China's offshore waters have been virtually fish-free. Fishermen's "destructive" fishing practices have caused great disasters to species diversity. They use fishing nets with very small mesh holes, and even small fish and even shrimp rice of 2-3 centimeters can not escape.
Commonly known as the bottom trawling net of the marine killer, dragging back and forth on the seabed, corals, stones, seaweed, and fish are also included in the net, and all the large and small creatures on the seabed are spared...
In addition to these, grid fishing, light fishing, sonic fishing... The fishing methods of fishermen racking their brains and exhausting their resources have caused great damage to the offshore marine ecological environment. This fishing, which is beyond the capacity of the ocean, has been going on for almost 20 years...
We often say, "big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp" This is the ecological law of nature, due to people's large demand for fish products, directly blocked the marine ecological chain, but also to promote this unsustainable artificial breeding method. So the figures in the ocean gradually disappeared.
The ocean is everyone's, the marine ecological environment needs everyone to do their part, behind a small move, but implicated in a huge industrial chain...
Perhaps, before today, we never cared about the life of a big yellow croaker, but now, when we see this video, do we think about the seafood fish on the table...
<h2 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > in addition, the fishery resources of the Yangtze River are also not optimistic. The yangtze river's natural catch has fallen from 427,000 tons in 1954 to less than 100,000 tons today, accounting for only 0.15% of all freshwater aquatic products in China, and the biological integrity index has reached the worst "fish-free" level. Following the implementation of the spring fishing ban for 17 years, in January this year, China issued the "Implementation Plan for the Prohibition of Fishing and the Establishment of a Compensation System in key waters of the Yangtze River Basin", which set a clear timetable for the ten-year fishing ban.
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According to the plan, by the end of 2019, the Yangtze River Aquatic Biological Reserve will complete a total ban on fishing; by the end of 2020, the main stream of the Yangtze River and important tributaries will achieve a total ban on fishing in waters other than protected areas. The scope of the ban on fishing includes 14 provinces and cities, running through the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. All fishermen must be re-produced and disembarked, and all boats and nets will be uniformly recovered and destroyed by the state.
Saving fish is more to "save people". Long-term overfishing has led to the Yangtze River falling into a vicious circle of "less and less resources, worse and worse the ecology, and poorer fishermen". Changing the pain of the Yangtze River and the pain of fishermen is just the beginning.
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Han Changfu also said that the central government has arranged 9.2 billion yuan of subsidies to be allocated for implementation on an annual basis, but compared with the task of completely banning fishing, the funding gap is still very large.
The ten-year ban on fishing in the Yangtze River is a historic measure to maintain the healthy development of the ecological system. On the one hand, it is necessary to prohibit the fishing of all kinds of Fish in the Yangtze River, and at the same time, it is also necessary to properly arrange fishermen who rely on fishing for a living, adhere to the people-oriented approach, ensure people's livelihood, actively and steadily guide retired fishermen to transfer to work and start a business, ensure the basic livelihood of fishermen who have withdrawn from fishing, and ensure that fishermen can retire, live steadily, and be well-off. Establish a card for eligible retired fishermen to ensure that the reward and supplement funds are fully paid to households and supporting measures are guaranteed to people.
The article was compiled and distributed by Longchang Dongbao