Matthew 0:01
Xuefei Shi is a fisheries and aquaculture researcher based in Bergen, Norway.
Xuefei 0:04
My entire life has been around aquaculture.
Matthew 0:08
He grew up in a region of eastern China known as the hometown of rice and fish.
Xuefei 0:15
We used to fish from the pond, crayfish. So we caught water snakes and then we skin them and use that as bait to fish the crayfish.
Matthew 0:27
This is an example of wild caught fish, harvested straight from the seas, lakes, rivers and oceans.
Xuefei 0:33
We have experienced a huge transition with wild catch to farmed fish. So let me give you an example: when I was young, so there's a fish imported from North America. We call it California sea bass. It was super expensive and we could only have it maybe once a year. Later it became so common because we realized that this sea bass has been farmed extensively.
Matthew 1:04
In a single generation, across dozens of species, China shifted its production from wild caught fish to fish raised in ponds and tanks. This type of fish farming is called aquaculture and it now makes up 80% of China's seafood supply.
In this episode, we’re moving away from the cities and away from the mountains. We’re headed to the coastline of the South China Sea.
Matthew 1:04
In a single generation, across dozens of species, China shifted its production from wild caught fish to fish raised in ponds and tanks. This type of fish farming is called aquaculture and it now makes up 80% of China's seafood supply. In this episode, we're moving away from the cities and away from the mountains. We're headed to the coastline of the South China Sea.
Xuefei 1:31
If you ever have the chance to fly over by plane along China's coast, you can just pay attention to how the coast has been transformed. The entire coastline of China. So there are like ponds, hundreds or thousands of ponds along the coast. That's how the Chinese are producing fish.
Matthew 1:55
This is Feeding One in Six: China and the Future of Food. Presented by TABLE. I'm Matthew Kessler. This is our fourth and final episode. Small mighty fish farms.
Xuefei 2:13
Actually aquatic foods are a bigger part of Chinese diets than most people outside China realize. So first of all China is the largest producer of aquatic foods in the world.
Matthew 2:25
And the largest consumer. In the US and UK, seafood makes up less than 10% of animal protein intake. While in China, aquatic foods account for 20% of animal protein. With pork and with rice, China produces almost entirely for itself. But fish tells a different story. China is a major exporter. They're an aquatic food system superpower. Roughly a third of all internationally traded fish and seafood passes through China at some point, whether it's farmed, processed, or both. That goes for the tilapia in an American supermarket, the frozen fillet on a plate in Lagos, the processed seafood in a European ready meal. The volume to support this is kind of mind-blowing. China produces roughly 76 million tons of aquatic food every year. To put that in perspective:
Xuefei 3:24
1 million tons equals the entire aquatic output from all the systems in Brazil, and Brazil is a large aquatic food country too.
Matthew 3:35
And beyond volume, there is a lot of variety.
Han 3:40
Generally speaking, in our daily diet, Chinese consume over 200 species of seafood every day all over the country. All kinds of shrimps, crabs, fish, both freshwater and marine, and also a lot of shellfish and the seaweeds as well.
Matthew 4:02
The scale of that production is overwhelmingly delivered by smallholders.
Han 4:07
In fact, these kinds of big figures come or are composed by over tens of thousands of small scale farmers and fishers.
Matthew 4:18
That's Han Han, founder of China Blue Sustainability Institute - the first NGO in China to work on sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. Before she founded the NGO, Han spent fifteen years working with China's seafood industry, mostly in fishing villages.
Han 4:36
We see ourselves as a translator or interpreter, building the bridge among all these different stakeholders.
Matthew 4:49
We're going to start with Han, for a history lesson, and the story of an influential government decision to deliberately do nothing.
Part 1 — The experiment
Han 5:03
Most of the Chinese, if we don't have enough pork for even one day, that's not bearable. It will turn out to be a crisis. But if you don't have fish to eat for one day, maybe it's still acceptable.
Matthew 5:21
It's funny to think of fish as an afterthought, in a country where half the population lives on the coast. Still, that logic pushed fish to the bottom of China's food production hierarchy.
Han 5:34
You would see that the fishery is always the lowest part in the list of the National Agriculture policy. We look at the administration departments. There's Nong. Ling. Mu-Fu. Yu is fishery. Yu is the last one. So Nong is like agriculture. Ling is forestry. Mu is the grassland.
Matthew 6:02
Agriculture. Forestry. Grassland. Fishery. In that order. With fish at the bottom. And in the early 1980s, with a government that was beginning to cautiously test market reforms, the bottom of the list was the safest place to start.
Han 6:19
So the seafood sector has been somehow given the opportunity to become the experiment.
Matthew 6:27
This was just as Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms were getting underway. But the political stakes were high. You don't start experimenting with rice or pork. You start with fish. The government made a choice: to entirely step back from regulating fisheries. Leave it alone and see what happens.
Han 6:47
So basically, the fishermen and fishing villages back 40 years ago, they have the very first permission to try with the market, with a commercial business.
Matthew 7:02
To understand what that meant, you need to know what came before it. Under Mao, the economy was collectively owned and centrally planned. Fishing was no different. Vessels belonged to the village or the township. Limits on which days you could go out to sea, how far, how much you could take. The fish you caught didn't belong to you. It belonged to the collective. And in the 80s, almost overnight, those publicly held fishing vessels moved into private ownership. Fishers could go out to sea where they wanted, farm what they wanted, and sell to whomever would buy. What grew out of that space was sort of what you would expect — both remarkable innovation and significant harm. It was an unregulated wild west in the water.
Han 7:51
On one hand, the seafood industry benefits from that kind of early time of freedom or flexibility, because that really gives them space to rapidly develop with the markets. But on the other hand, unfortunately, the public resources has been degraded, and there's no or not sufficient management system installed over these years.
Matthew 8:24
So let's break down the pros and cons. First, the pros. Production exploded. New species were farmed at scale and made available to wider publics who before didn't have access to affordable fish. It was also a boom for livelihoods. Tens of thousands of families set up ponds along the coast. But the costs were real, and they largely stemmed from a lack of record keeping. When the government stepped back, they also stopped counting. So there's no baseline data and no stock assessments.
Han 8:57
How many ponds have been used for aquaculture and what kind of species have been stocked in the ponds.
Matthew 9:06
Nobody was measuring how the rapid expansion was contributing to water pollution, to overfishing, and to land use conflicts. It's difficult to correct course on something that hasn't been properly measured. And by the time the environmental problems became serious enough to demand a response, the sector had been operating without meaningful oversight for nearly two decades.
Han 9:30
I think it's up to the recent 10 to 20 years that the government started picking up or rebuilt this management regulation system.
Matthew 9:48
This is the state of the aquatic food system that Han stepped into when she founded China Blue in 2016. To see what that looks like on the ground, we're going to a place that captures almost every dimension of this story at once. A tropical island in the South China Sea with a coastline that produces shrimp seedlings for the entire country, grouper for the luxury restaurant trade, tilapia for supermarkets in the American Midwest, and wild fish that local fishers have harvested for generations. We're headed to Hainan.
Part 2 - The silicon valley of shrimp
Matthew 10:26
Hainan is China's southernmost province - a tropical island roughly the size of Belgium, sitting at the northern edge of the South China Sea. Its climate gives it something no other Chinese province has: year-round warm water.
Han 10:48
Hainan, because of the tropical climate, it gives the privilege to stock the seedlings in a very early time so they can become the very first supplier to the whole country of the shrimp seedlings. So Hainan becomes, they call it a nickname of the Silicon Valley of the Shrimp for the hatchery.
Matthew 11:14
Sixty to eighty percent of the shrimp fingerlings farmed across China start their lives in Hainan. Hainan has another distinction that sets it apart from every other province in China.
Han 11:26
Hainan is still very interesting. I think it's the only province in China now that have the higher amount of production from the wild fishery than aquaculture. All the rest of the province in China, they all have larger production in aquaculture, but Hainan is the only one.
Matthew 11:50
Most of Hainan's fishers still go out to sea in small vessels. Over eighty percent of Hainan's fishing fleet is under twelve meters long. That's a boat you could park in a large driveway. Though it's worth noting that this large fleet of smaller operators hasn't become a point of pride for the state government.
Han 12:10
The government still think this is disadvantage. Their target is to increase the aquaculture portion.
Matthew 12:21
To reach this target, Hainan province has a three-part modernization strategy.
Han 12:27
So they have this slogan saying moving towards the shore, towards the deep sea, and towards the recreational fisheries.
Matthew 12:38
The first part, towards the shore, calls for moving small-scale cage farmers into land-based recirculating indoor tanks - the shift would be higher yielding and less polluting, but it's also expensive to set up and demands a lot of technical knowledge. The second, towards the deep sea, calls for building massive offshore cage farms for state-owned enterprises. These would target high-value species like golden pompano and tuna. These systems typically generate a lot of income, but they come with real environmental pressure on the surrounding ecosystems. The third part is towards recreational fisheries. So that means transforming traditional fishing communities into tourism destinations. Fishing villages become experience centers, and fishers become tour guides.
Han 13:34
We try to help the small scale traditional fish folk, especially during the long closing season, fish moratorium. It lasts from May 1 to August 15, three and a half months. During those months, the fish folk, they don't have any income.
Matthew 13:57
Every year for three and a half months in early summer, fishing across China's coastal waters is banned. China introduced this moratorium in 1995, as the environmental costs of two decades of unregulated fishing were becoming impossible to ignore. It now covers the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea, involving nearly 120,000 vessels. Fisheries scientists broadly support it. Fish stocks need time to recover, and juveniles need time to grow before they're caught. It's one of the largest fisheries management interventions in the world. But for small-scale fishers, it means three and a half months every year without income.
Han 14:42
So then we help them to become temporary tour guides, to transform their traditional like nets weaving techniques into some more experiential tour package.
Matthew 14:56
Net-weaving workshops. Boat-crafting experiences. Guided trips for families visiting fishing villages. It's a creative response to this problem. Which is needed, because this three-part modernization strategy has created a tough economic situation for the small scale farmers and fisherfolk who don't have the finances to shift and significantly grow their operation.
Han 15:20
Those investments often marginalized the traditional fish folk, because the bar is really high. You have to invest millions of yuan to build a vessel.
Matthew 15:34
You also need to build large docking stations to support these ships, and traditional fishing ports that aren't meeting the new requirements. You see a similar dynamic with the deep-sea cage farms. These are designed for state-owned enterprises and not small-scale family operations.
Han 15:52
The policies, it's still not very efficiently helping this traditional fish folk.
Matthew 16:04
We've seen a version of this across this series. The government has a vision of modernization and pulls the country in one direction. And the smallholder, which remember, represents hundreds of millions of people, is trying to adapt. With pork, consolidation in the sector happened fast, and smallholders went from around 90% of production to a few percent in a few decades. In rice, it became more economically prudent to work in the city, even with fewer worker protections, than to farm back home. Here in Hainan, the smallholders are still there. And the government is starting to pay attention and invest. But are they aligned on what the future looks like?
Part 3 — The gap
Matthew 18:26
Let's first picture a tilapia fish farm in Hainan. Let's say it's a couple that manages it. There's maybe ten ponds in total, a hectare each, so think of a football field, but filled with water and dug several meters deep. The deeper water stays cooler, holds more oxygen, and can support a higher density of fish. The ponds are earthen - dug straight into the coastal land, bordered by low embankments of compacted soil. Below the water, there are paddlewheel aerators bringing oxygen into the pond. Above the water is a large feed tower. A hopper filled with pellets, connected by tubes and pumps that spread feed across the surface at timed intervals. No one is standing and throwing feed by hand anymore. The couple can manage all ten ponds with two sets of hands, but it's still hard work. They're up before dawn to check oxygen levels and the equipment and to monitor the fish. In early spring, the fish go in as fingerlings. Over six or seven months they're fed, monitored, and grown. And in the autumn, it's time to harvest. The fish are pulled, they're packed, and they're shipped to a processor. And then the hard part begins.
Han 18:26
The discharge from the pond, like after one crop, they have to release the water. They have to clean up their bottom, the sediments.
Matthew 18:38
There's fish waste, uneaten feed, and decomposing organic matter - all of it rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, built up over an entire growing season. When that water gets released into surrounding waterways it pollutes rivers, canals, and coastlines. There's also the invisible greenhouse gasses released from the aquaculture sediment — methane and nitrous oxide, both incredibly potent. This happens on every farm, every cycle, across hundreds of thousands of ponds along the entire Chinese coast. The government knows this. This is a problem that they've identified and invested a lot to fix. They treat it as an engineering problem, and decide to build out treatment infrastructure.
Han 19:25
The government invest in those big projects - they build like the wastewater treatment facilities, but that's only the station to treat the water. Water should be collected into this spot. The problem is: there's no canals or the lines pumps to, you know, draw the wastewater into this one central station.
Matthew 19:54
So you've got hundreds of ponds, and one large wastewater treatment facility, without the pipes to connect them. This is almost too on-the-nose an example of how local needs and central government efforts don't always align. It's well intentioned towards scaling green production, but it's using the wrong tools. The situation calls for a scalpel and they pull out a sledgehammer.
Han 20:20
The very fundamental infrastructure, I think, really needs to be redesigned, reshaped. It has to be fully considering the realities of this such diverse of production model, like different species, different size of the production.
Matthew 20:37
There's another issue on top of that. Even if the connective pipes existed, where would the treatment facility even go? Every inch of a family farm is already a pond.
Han 20:48
There's no space, because people have maximized the land by digging the ponds. Or they agree to use one of their ponds, one or two of their ponds, design that as a wastewater treatment facility.
Matthew 21:05
Meaning it would cut into their production. With thin margins, that's a big ask. And even for the farmers willing to make that sacrifice, the technology designed to treat this kind of wastewater wasn't built for them.
Han 21:18
Even though the environmental engineer would say, huh, treating the fish wastewater is easy. It is easy in terms of the technical issues. But the technology was applied to the industrial sized but not designed for the small scale farming. So basically, it's not economically viable for the small scale farmers and not very user friendly for these operators.
Matthew 21:50
Which is difficult for the small farmers to accept, because they want to solve this problem.
Han 21:56
They also hope that their water could be cleaner, could be better managed. They do understand that will eventually benefit their own fish. The fish will get less sick. They can save on buying the medicine for the fish. They all know the benefits. They also would cooperate if that technology really works, or if that management model makes sense.
Matthew 22:22
They're waiting for a solution that actually fits their reality, which is basically the gap that China Blue is trying to fill.
Han 22:30
So we are trying to work with the local government, local scientists to design shared wastewater facilities. How to use more like the affordable, cost effective technology. Try to lower the bar in terms of, you can hire the local people to maintain the facilities, instead of hiring people with a high education to operate like the machines or complicated procedures.
Matthew 23:02
There's nothing very eye-catching about what they're advocating for. They're calling for shared facilities, keeping jobs locally and keeping technology affordable. They're not asking for a mega project with a press release.
Han 23:15
The central government tends to invest a huge size of the projects, like over millions of dollars of equipment, and that kind of projects are so welcomed by the companies, by the research scientists, that means a lot of money grants, but nobody cares, after all these projects finished, whether these projects continue effectively operated, so that's still the gap there. We see that lots of government did invest a lot over the years, but it gets distracted in the process of all kinds of layers of contract, subcontracts. Till the end, the small scale farmers, they're still left behind.
Matthew 24:18
For now these cycles continue. The water is still being released. The sediment is still accumulating in the waterways. The farmers are still waiting for a solution that fits them. That's what is happening on the ground in Hainan with tilapia farms. Now let's follow the fish out of the pond, and into the wide, wide world.
Part 4 — A truly transnational fish
Matthew 24:58
If you wanted to pick one fish to tell the story of China's role in the global food system, you'd probably pick tilapia.
Xuefei 24:58
I call tilapia a transnational fish, a truly transnational fish.
Matthew 25:03
Xuefei Shi, an aquaculture researcher in Bergen who you heard in the intro, has traced this fish across borders, supply chains, and continents. And the journey tilapia has made is genuinely remarkable.
Xuefei 25:18
So first of all, it's in history. So it's an African fish. So it moved from Africa to South East Asia first. Vietnam and then later Taiwan began farming and then later in South China. And then eventually China became the largest tilapia producer in the world and became the exporter of tilapia to the global market, including the largest one in North America and back to Africa.
Matthew 25:53
An African fish, farmed in China, fed with fish meal and soybean from South America which we'll get to soon, and exported across the world. In China, that chain might start with a couple managing some ponds in Hainan like the type we just heard about. In Hainan, 80% of tilapia is destined to overseas markets. But the farmers don't control what happens to the fish when it leaves the farm. That's where the middle-men come in. These are the large-scale stakeholders in the value chain - the feed mills, the processors and the traders.
Xuefei 26:26
When we talk about soy input, they make up a big share of fish feed in China as well.
Matthew 26:32
So soy isn't just fed to chicken and pigs, but also fish. It's a significant part of tilapia's diet. But it's not the only feed input coming from South America. On the western coast of the continent in Peru, Ecuador and Chile, there's an industry focused around catching smaller fish - anchovies mainly — to feed to larger farmed fish. These are caught, dried and processed into fishmeal and then shipped across the Pacific, which is crucial for farmed shrimp and salmon. So stay with me here. Wild caught anchovies from Peru and soy from Brazil are feeding shrimp, salmon and tilapia grown in China, and then being sold back to North America. That's a lot of global infrastructure and movement for one fish. Which raises an obvious question - is this an efficient system? Well, that depends on what you're measuring.
Xuefei 27:30
In the industry tilapia is equal to the chicken in the water and of course salmon is a pig in the water.
Matthew 27:37
Here the industry is comparing the feed conversion ratio - how much food goes in versus how much meat comes out. Tilapia converts around 1.5 kilograms of feed into 1 kilogram of fish. Pork, or salmon, needs roughly double that. And there's another factor.
Xuefei 27:56
Tilapia has fewer bones, so then it means it has more meat.
Matthew 28:02
Within the pond system, it's a very efficient fish. It turns almost all the food it eats into flesh. And it's easy to fillet and freeze. The fish itself is almost absurdly well suited to industrial production. So the fish makes sense. But how do you explain the global infrastructure around it?
Xuefei 28:21
This is truly like a global production system, or you can say global capitalistic system. In one way, it follows the same logic of all the other manufacturing industries. So China produce cheap products. Of course, with investment from Western countries, then sell them back to the Western market.
Matthew 28:42
This is pure capitalism. Exploit the comparative advantages of different regions - cheap labor, warm water, established infrastructure, accumulated expertise - and scale production accordingly. It's the same logic that moved textile manufacturing to Bangladesh and electronics assembly to Shenzhen. Fish, in a way, is the latest iteration. But Xuefei makes a point that often gets lost in critiques of this system.
Xuefei 29:11
Aquaculture and fish, especially tilapia in China, follow the same logic. But still, it's a better alternative than fisheries.
Matthew 29:21
Wild caught fishing vessels, sometimes operating in poorly regulated international waters, are pulling large volumes of fish. These fish are then processed in China and sold back to Western markets at very low prices.
Xuefei 29:35
There's no value addition. But for aquaculture, so it provides jobs and it provides investment opportunities and it's still like do some good things to the society.
Matthew 29:49
Western consumers have been benefiting from this for decades without thinking much about it. Farmed tilapia, for all its supply chain complexity, does create jobs and takes some pressure off wild fish stocks. Though the system isn't harmless. In coastal communities across West Africa and the west coast of South America, the fishmeal industry has disrupted local fishing livelihoods and changed the ecology of those waters. Those effects are real and significant. But unregulated deep-water fishing to supply the same demand is not a cleaner alternative. And then there's one more detail. The fish ends up where it began.
Xuefei 30:36
Many African countries these days, they rely on imported Chinese tilapia as their main diet. But of course it's controversial. But let's just talk about the production. China is really important in providing some necessary protein for African consumers.
Matthew 30:58
In some markets, imported Chinese tilapia has provided affordable protein to people who couldn't previously access fish at all. In others, cheap imports have undercut local fishing industries and displaced the livelihoods of small-scale fishers. There are always tradeoffs. Who benefits, who loses, and who gets to decide — these are persistent questions in our highly globalized food system. So to recap. There's an African fish, it's farmed in China, fed primarily with soy from South America, some fishmeal from West Africa, and exported back to feed African consumers. Next up, we explore this relationship between China and African aquaculture, because fish isn't just about feeding people, it's also about foreign policy.
Part 5 — South to South
Matthew 32:47
China is the world's largest importer of agricultural products. It buys soybeans from Brazil, corn from the United States, dairy from New Zealand. Africa already has a growing relationship with China through the Belt and Road Initiative - and as China's economy has grown and its global footprint has expanded, some in Western media and policy circles have started asking: is China looking to secure food from Africa's farmland too? To answer that and to speak to a longer and deeper relationship between China and Africa, I spoke to James Keeley, a food and agriculture consultant based in Oxford who started his career as a volunteer in Guangxi in the early 1990s.
James 32:47
When you actually look at the overall numbers of China's food inputs, the percentage that comes from Africa is tiny. It's like one or two percent, not like this 35 percent for Latin America or something. So it is objectively, it's a tiny amount.
Matthew 33:01
And here's the detail that tends to surprise most people: China actually exports more food to Africa than it imports from it. The trade flows run in the opposite direction from what the narrative suggests. To gain a better understanding of China's presence in Africa, you have to go back further than the recent headlines.
James 33:21
Goes back to before the reform and opening to Friendship Farms in Zambia and Tanzania and Mali and elsewhere, date from the 1960s. This sort of model was part of China's South-South solidarity and particularly with the socialist countries like Tanzania where there was that connection.
Matthew 33:43
Long before the Belt and Road, China was establishing what it called Friendship Farms - state farms of up to a thousand hectares. They were built as expressions of South-South solidarity with newly independent African nations in the 1960s. China leased land from local governments, sent small teams of Chinese managers and technicians, employed local farmers to work alongside them, and grew for the local market. At one point in Tanzania, these Chinese-assisted farms were responsible for roughly a quarter of Tanzania's domestic rice production. China was trying to position itself as a peer and partner rather than a colonial power, and you can draw a line from these friendship farms all the way to China's agricultural engagement with Africa today. It isn't a strategy invented by Xi Jinping. It's more than half a century old and a lot is based around knowledge sharing. James has been involved in multiple exchanges in both Africa and China, recently leading a study tour for aquaculture specialists who came from around Lake Victoria. So experts from Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya came to visit fish farms and research centers in central and southern China.
James 35:07
And I think what they particularly liked was getting to visit fish farms and see how people they could relate to people had fish farming businesses, how they worked, what they were farming, what sort of equipment they had, how their systems operated, how do they connect to markets, how do they link to government and so on. People were very interested in the sort of Chinese equipment for aquaculture. This is one of the things there's a lot of potential transferability. Different types of fishing nets, feeding machines. A lot of that's quite small scale and applicable, so people took some stuff back with them.
Matthew 35:48
They also noticed that their ponds differed, not only in size, but in depth.
James 35:54
Ponds were often a lot deeper than they would be in Africa and that you'd had a range of different fish at different profiles within the pond and then could be harvested at different times. People also commented that they were impressed how close researchers were to the farmers and the businesses, that they really knew them, and you can see this aquaculture researchers are often even part of the companies or on the boards. They're very linked in and their research is very much geared to solving sort of practical problems.
Matthew 36:25
And then there are some simple but very important details, like reliable roads and consistent electricity, which in parts of East Africa where power cuts are routine, stood out as much as anything else. James has also seen this exchange work in the other direction. On a separate program, Chinese fishery technicians spent years in Malawi. This time, it was the Chinese researchers who saw real similarities between the regions.
James 36:56
People would often comment that what they were seeing reminded them of what China was like in the 1980s and 1990s. They could see parallels.
Matthew 37:06
This gave both sides a sense that they were peers, in a shared trajectory, at different points in the timeline. And this strengthening relationship is also showing up in where African agricultural scientists are choosing to study.
James 37:20
I think one change you're seeing is a lot of people are now doing sort of masters and PhDs in Chinese agricultural universities where they might in the past have gone to do things in Reading or Wye or whatever in the UK or the US. The points of reference are definitely changing and the opportunities, the scholarships and so on. And that's also having a rippling effect.
Matthew 37:44
A generation of African agricultural scientists are having their mental models shaped by time in China rather than the UK or US. That influence operates slowly, over decades. But James has also seen a faster and more immediate exchange. He managed a triangular cooperation program - between the UK, China and Africa - that placed Chinese fishery technicians in Malawi for three to four years to work alongside local counterparts at the National Aquaculture Centre.
James 38:17
After a period of back and forth, it got to the point where the Chinese technicians were demonstrating some really interesting approaches, which were really welcomed and were, I think, genuinely seen as making a useful contribution. Certainly that would be evidenced by incorporating some of the approaches into extension training manuals, and running trainings.
Matthew 38:43
Specifically, they were digging deeper ponds, implementing faster-growing tilapia breeds, and using different aerators.
James 38:51
One of the interesting things about the Chinese system is that you do have a lot of these technicians in the provinces who work very closely with farmers. So, and are kind of happy to do that. And that was one of the amazing things that we're sort of living in quite, not super easy conditions perhaps, in quite a remote bit of Malawi. And there's a sort of like, "you know, there's a job to do, can kind of get on with it." And other people have written about China and Africa and how Chinese researchers talk about eating bitterness as a sort of philosophy to achieve something, something you need to do sometimes.
Matthew 39:28
It's a compelling model, and being on the ground for extended periods and developing trust goes a long way. But let's not romanticise it either - there are certainly limits to what these programs can achieve and deliver.
James 39:41
So it's sort of successful in terms of the outputs were endorsed and had a certain level of integration within the system and recognition but does that really transform value chains? And probably didn't have long enough either, you know, this project was like four years long and so probably needed longer than that to really be effective.
Matthew 40:05
The Malawi program is a long way from the land-grabbing narrative we started with. James sees this model of international agricultural assistance as slowly changing. Historically it's been supply-driven — experts arrive with a package of technology, transfer it, and leave. There's a growing recognition on the Chinese side, and within the FAO's South-South cooperation programs, that interventions need to be demand led and better aligned with local realities. In a way, that's the same challenge China faces at home. And it raises a question we've been circling throughout this series. How successful has China been at navigating its competing priorities: feeding 1.4 billion people safe food, supporting a countryside that's aging and emptying, and responding to rising concerns around health, environment and biosecurity. How they're doing, and what comes next, is where we'll close.
Part 6 — The course correction
Matthew 40:05
I want to step back for a moment. We made this series because however China decides to feed its people has a huge impact on the global food system. Whether China decreases its agriculture and food imports, increases its exports. There are serious ripple effects. Entire regional economies are based on their relationship to China's food needs. And right now, China's food system is in the middle of something, a course correction of sorts.
From collectivization under Mao in the 60s, to opening up under Deng in the 80s, to going global and joining the WTO in the 2000s, to Xi Jinping's strategy today, which seems invested in both increasing domestic supply and having more of an international presence. The question is, what comes next? We started this episode with an image. The coastline along the South China Sea transformed into ponds. Hundreds of thousands of them. An aquatic food system built by smallholders and scaled by large processors over decades of largely deliberate inattention. Then the government started to intervene. Like we saw with rice and with pork, the goals were to increase and scale production. And we've talked about the real social and environmental tradeoffs with this transition. With seafood, Han has watched the course correction begin. And she has seen enough to be cautiously optimistic.
Han 43:13
I would still keep optimistic attitude towards the future, because I've seen that over the years, the both the central government and the provincial government are constantly trying, installing new regulations, new technologies, even though I understand the process, it won't be easy, but the overall, the goal, the direction, I think it's the right direction, and they have the commitment or the determined the mindset in terms of the overall policy.
Matthew 43:52
That's Han's assessment after more than a decade on the ground. And there are specific things she points to as evidence.
Han 43:59
For example, over the years, at least 1/3 of the tilapia ponds were restored back to the mangrove and the watershed. So basically, we cut out 1/3 of the farming area. It's evidence to show how seriously the government really takes this.
Matthew 44:22
This is in only the last 7 to 8 years that China has helped restore coastal ecosystems by returning tilapia ponds into mangroves. That's a significant environmental commitment, and it's being monitored. The central government sends inspection teams every two to three years to check whether provincial governments are following through. But from Han's vantage point, there's still a major flaw in the government's strategy.
Han 44:50
Till the end, the small scale farmers, they're still left behind.
Matthew 44:56
Han thinks Hainan can be a model. An example of how to shrink the wide gap between policy intention and policy implementation. The island has just become China's largest free trade port. It's comparable to Hong Kong or Singapore. And it gives room to experiment in ways other provinces can't.
Han 45:16
We hope that Hainan could become some experiment site, because it has such an independent geographic environment, it could be a good kind of lab for testing the policy.
Matthew 45:32
It's interesting to me that Han uses the word "lab" - the same idea the government used forty years ago when it chose fisheries as its first market experiment. This time the focus is different. How to operate and produce at scale, in an environmentally-minded way, without destroying the livelihoods of the farmers and fisherfolk. As for the rest of the world — for coastal communities in West Africa and South America whose small fish are being processed into fish feed, for the American family buying frozen fillets, for the fisherfolk in China — the implications are still unfolding. China didn't create this global food system. But it has become its centre of gravity. And this rings true across Southeast Asia and the South China Sea.
Han 46:30
Last year, we started collaborating with the Southeast Asia countries, NGOs. They are also working with their local fish communities. We see we share the same challenges in terms of how to prepare ourselves in facing the climate change, like the more extreme weather - the typhoons, the tropical rains. We also share the same challenges, like the coral reefs bleaching, the overfishing over the very sensitive, vulnerable marine ecosystems.
Matthew 47:10
China Blue has been bringing them together, with field trips and exchanges between NGOs and fishing communities.
Han 47:18
Inevitably people have different opinions or perspectives when it comes to some sensitive geopolitical issues, but when it comes to more specific livelihood's issues or the general social economic issues, people are just the same. You know the people in Indonesia, in the Philippines, they also have a lot of complaints about their own bureaucracy, their own disconnection within the government and the communities. I think we do have more similarities than the difference. We are on the same boat.
Matthew 48:02
We are on the same boat.
There is only so much we can cover in four episodes. I hope we’ve given you some food for thought on what the future of food in China might look like, the conflicting pressures driving that future, and how that impacts the rest of the world.
We’re not done, done. We’ll have a few more interviews reflecting on some of the topics of this series that deserve more coverage, which could honestly be everything.
I just want to name it too, right now. That we basically didn’t talk at all about food demand, on diets, and the different ways that it’s influenced. Alternative proteins sure get a lot of investment in China but we barely spoke about it. Animal welfare was barely discussed. We’re going to come back to these topics in upcoming bonus episodes.
Making this series has been a genuinely fascinating journey and I haven’t done it alone. A huge thanks to all the reviewers and the dozens of people I spoke to who have lent their expertise and comments to the series. Tara Garnett, Carmen Lee, Beibei Yin, Jackie Turner, Jack Thompson, Tamsin Blaxter, Guoyi Han, Nico Heenrik, Vivian Huang, and many many more.
And all the brilliant people who lent their voices to this series. You can check out their bios, their books, articles and other relevant work on our website: tabledebates.org
Speaking of reviewers. Why don’t you rate and review our podcast? Or tell your friends and colleagues about it? It will remain free and accessible. No paywalls at TABLE.
And if you want to stay up to date with the latest on food system sustainability news, subscribe to our newsletter Fodder.
This series is a collaborative production between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust. Produced, edited and hosted by me, Matthew Kessler. Support on mixing and sound design by Martin Palmqvist. Podcast logo and design created by Jackie Turner. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you soon.