May 14, 2021 — China’s requirements for seafood imports could more than treble to as high as 18 million metric tons (MT) by 2030, according to a report published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “China at a Crossroads: An Analysis of China’s Changing Seafood Production and Consumption.” Imports hit a high of 4.3 million MT in 2019, but fell 20 percent last year. The report was coauthored by Beatrice Crona, the executive director for Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Emmy Wassenius, a doctoral candidate at the academy. SeafoodSource interviewed them to find out how the 2030 figure was calculated and to ascertain the economic and political context of the report.
SeafoodSource: You have determined China will have a significant shortfall of seafood supply by 2030. How big will the shortfall be and how did you make that determination?
Crona and Wassenius: Our analysis shows that by 2030, China is likely to experience a misalignment of 6 million to 18 million tons as domestic seafood consumption outstrips production. This corresponds to a gap of 9 to 27 percent from the 2020 targets for production. We arrived at these figures through a series of simple steps. First, we synthesized national and international statistics to estimate total seafood production in 2014 – the most-recent year for which data was available – to compare Chinese seafood imports, exports, and domestic production, using Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Sea Around Us data. This amounted to 63 million MT. We then estimated the projected production in 2020 based on the targets set in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan. This amounted to 66 million MT. Next, we estimated a lower and upper range of Chinese domestic consumption for 2020 and 2030. The lower range was calculated from consumption data from 1978 to 2016 and linearly extrapolated to 2020 and 2030. The upper limit assumed a more exponential growth, and consumption figures were therefore arrived at by calculating the overall average using the same 1978-2016 data and applying it as a yearly increase until 2020 and 2030, respectively. For 2020, the upper and lower consumption amount to 56 and 58 million MT, respectively. For 2030, the figures rise to 72 and 84 million tons in live weight.