Top: Fish fry leave buckets for the Yujiang River, a Pearl River tributary in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on the day the fishing ban began. [Xinhua] Above: Weaving nets is one occupation fisherman can pursue while they wait to take to the water again. [China Daily]

Living without fishing

The fishing ban has won support from a vast majority of fishermen, according to sources with the fishery bureau. On April 2, the bureau sent 307 vessels to patrol the Pearl River and found no fishing boats.

The Pearl River supported some 127,000 fishermen in 2009, the fishery bureau said. They used 33,448 fishing boats and brought in 157,000 tons of fish.

"We promoted the ban in advance," Yang said. "Fishermen have shown great support for the move. In return, the move will help fishermen earn more in the near future" because their catches will increase.

But fishermen have more immediate concerns, including how they will live without fishing during the two-month ban. The local fishery authority will work with human resource departments to help fishermen find new jobs. Moreover, each city authority along the Pearl River will offer subsidies to fishermen during the ban period, sources with the fishery bureau said.

Authorities have not announced the amounts. Wei, the fisher from Zhaoqing, said her monthly income from fishing was usually about 1,500 yuan.

"I am too old to go to bigger cities for a better job," she said. "I will stay here and look for an improved fishing condition after the fishing ban."

Other fishermen doubted that two months would produce any positive results in sustaining fish resources. "According to my experience, it would take at least a five-year ban to increase the fishing output significantly," said He Yayou, 65, a fisherman in Zhaoqing.

Local fishery authorities will take additional action to increase the numbers and species of fish. They plan to introduce artificial repopulation measures such as discharging more than 6 million fish fry into the Pearl River. The fry will come from fish farms, Yang said. It will take at least a half-year for some common species, such as grass carp, to grow to catchable size.

First ban in 1995

The temporary fishing ban in the Pearl River system is not the first such move introduced by the government. China started prohibiting fishing in four seas in 1995 and introduced an annual three-month fishing ban on the Yangtze River in 2003.

"The fishing ban on the Yangtze River in the past nine years has proved the effectiveness of such measures," said the fishery bureau's Yang. For example, there was almost no mitten crab output in the Yangtze in 2000, but output surpassed 10 tons in 2007, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The ban on the Yangtze affects more than 8,100 kilometers, not the river's full length, and includes Dongting, Poyang and other lakes along the way. It covers 10 provinces and municipalities and affects some 50,000 fishermen.

Some fishermen, such as Hu Zhengbin, said fishery resources have improved. "I recently caught a knife fish, which was rarely seen in past years," he told Xinhua News Agency.

Hu, who is from Wuhan, Hubei province, has relied on fishing for more than 20 years. There were some days in 2002 when he caught no fish, he said. "Some fish, which are usually of great economic value, have returned after almost a decade of the fishing ban on the Yangtze River," he said.

Fishery experts said the ban on China's major rivers and seas should continue in the next decades, given that the rivers contribute less than 10 percent of the country's freshwater fish consumption. About 100,000 tons of freshwater fish come from the Yangtze each year, while the country consumes some 3.5 million tons of such fish, mostly from fish farms.

"We can rely more on aquaculture to produce freshwater fish," said Wang Zhaomin, director of Hubei bureau of aquatic products.

According to Wang, the number of fishermen on the Yangtze has declined in the past decade. Many have found new work with steadier income.

"Only the old fishermen still stayed," Hu said. "The young have gone to big cities for better jobs."