China will scrap 30,000 fishing boats in the coming eight years to limit its total fish catch and better protect offshore fishery resources, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The ministry released a regulation recently to decrease the number of fishing boats to 192,000 by 2010 from 222,000 in 2002. The total power of fishing boats in the country will be decreased to 11.4 million kilowatts from 12.7 million kilowatts, down by 10 percent.

The policy will affect 300,000 fishermen, said Zhang Hecheng, vice director in charge of the fishery department under the ministry.

Zhang said the government will try to help these fishermen transfer to other industries, such as aquatic products cultivation, circulation and procession.

To help the fishermen, the central government has decided to allocate 270 million yuan annually in 2002-2004 period as "specialuse" fund. After 2004, the government will decide whether or not to continue such a fund according to the effect of boat scrapping and the state economic power then.

Zhang said with the increase of the economic power in the country and the improvement of the management, the boat scrapping policy will be further strengthened.

With the fund, each fishing boat being scrapped could get at least 15,000 yuan of compensation from the central government and money of various sums from local governments.

China is the largest fishery producer in the world and has the largest number of fishing boats. But fishing resources have dwindled significantly in the country because of years of over-fishing and water pollution, said Zhang.

China has adopted measures to control the number of fishing boats from 1991. In addition, the country adopted a policy of "zero growth" of offshore-fishing in 1999, and a "negative growth" in 2002.

Zhang said the number control of fishing boats is the first and basic step for the control of fish catches.

"When the time is mature, we will adopt a quota policy on the fish catch."

Zhang said China is still in the primary stage of a feasibility study of the quota policy. Involving the investigation of fishery resource quantity and the setting up of an effective supervision system, the implementation of the fishing quota policy has a long way to go, said Zhang.

Currently, some countries, including Japan, Korea and some European countries have adopted a quota policy for some certain varieties of fishes.

Zhang said that the number decrease of fishing boats will not affect the country's foreign trade of fishery products as cultivation has taken the lion's share of export and China only imports fishery products which are scarce in the country.

China's fish catch has been stable at some 14 million tons for some years and will continue to be so in the future, said Zhang.
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(Xinhua News Agency November 29, 2003)