jerry
Guest
A bladder for a rainy day
http://qz.com/468358/how-chinas-fish-bladder-investment-craze-is-wiping-out-species-on-the-other-side-of-the-planet/
Contraband bladders.(Reuters/Marty Graham)
But millions of Chinese didn’t suddenly develop a appetite for bladder soup, says Sadovy. What drove the demand was that in times of strife, Chinese households have been known to stockpile the more valuable bladders as speculative investments, on some occasions even trading them as currency.
That’s what happened after the 2008 global financial crisis hit. The Chinese government reacted with a stimulus package that sent easy money sloshing around the economy—adding up to 17.5 trillion yuan ($2.8 trillion) in 2009 and 2010 (paywall). Cash flooded into a dizzying array of speculative assets, from property and copper to modern art to pu’er tea—and totoaba bladders. Traders in Hong Kong tell of selling large bladders for HK$1 million ($130,000) in 2011 and 2012, according to a recent Greenpeace East Asia report (pdf). These merchants emphasized that buyers weren’t interested in health tonics; they were snapping up these “cash bladders,” as they call them, as investments.
You see fish innards. Others see a speculative investment vehicle.(Greenpeace Asia)
Though the trade in bladders is illegal, Hong Kong customs authorities are very lax about screening for them, traders told Greenpeace. That makes Hong Kong the bladder trade’s entrepôt. From there, the contraband is smuggled past mainland China’s more vigilant border agents, and sold in China’s major cities.
The bladder bubble builds—and bursts
Since the late 1970s, catching the endangered totoaba has technically been illegal. But Mexican authorities have seldom enforced the ban, says Andrew Johnson, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who studies Gulf of California fisheries. When the 2008 crisis hit, tourism—a leading industry in the upper Gulf of Mexico and the major alternative to shrimping and fishing—foundered. Totoaba bladders, however, offered a quick profit.
“A fishermen can make $3,000 to $4,000 for a swim bladder—it’s a good living to catch just one,” says Johnson. A big fish, in other words, could be worth three or four months of work.
“A fishermen can make $3,000 to $4,000 for a swim bladder—it’s a good living to catch just one.”
The Chinese investors’ appetite for bladders, the economic slump in Mexico, and lax enforcement created a perfect storm. Signs of the totoaba slaughter began showing up in the upper Gulf of California around 2011, says Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, head of marine mammal conservation and research for the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) in Mexico.
“Everybody knows that there has always been some totoaba fishing. But then everywhere you go there were plenty reports of totoaba nets and fishing—even reports of totoabas being thrown on the beach with their swim bladders removed,” he says. “You could suddenly see new cars and trucks in the fishing villages of the upper Gulf.”
Some of this trade went by the Tijuana route; between February and April of 2013, the US border patrol busted seven people in five different operations, seizing hundreds of pounds of bladders. But around this time, smugglers also began exporting the contraband straight from Mexico to China, says Johnson.
By 2013, so great were the influxes of totoaba bladders into Hong Kong that they began driving down prices, Hong Kong traders told Greenpeace. The Environmental Investigation Agency’s recent research corroborates that drop. “Prices have dropped considerably in recent years due to the massive poaching of totoaba and oversupply,” says Clare Perry, leader of the oceans division of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a nonprofit group. “So traders are hanging onto stock in the hope that the prices will rebound.”
Little cows to the slaughter
The world’s smallest porpoise.(Paula Olson/NOAA)
The totoaba, however, wasn’t the only victim of the Chinese bladder boom. So was the vaquita (“little cows” in Spanish), a small porpoise that lives only in a patch of the upper Gulf of California, one quarter the size of Los Angeles. Vaquitas are easily tangled and killed in gillnets used to catch shrimp and other seafood. However, the nets used for catching totoaba are particularly treacherous, says Rojas-Bracho, because their mesh is about the same size as a vaquita’s head.
http://qz.com/468358/how-chinas-fish-bladder-investment-craze-is-wiping-out-species-on-the-other-side-of-the-planet/
Contraband bladders.(Reuters/Marty Graham)
But millions of Chinese didn’t suddenly develop a appetite for bladder soup, says Sadovy. What drove the demand was that in times of strife, Chinese households have been known to stockpile the more valuable bladders as speculative investments, on some occasions even trading them as currency.
That’s what happened after the 2008 global financial crisis hit. The Chinese government reacted with a stimulus package that sent easy money sloshing around the economy—adding up to 17.5 trillion yuan ($2.8 trillion) in 2009 and 2010 (paywall). Cash flooded into a dizzying array of speculative assets, from property and copper to modern art to pu’er tea—and totoaba bladders. Traders in Hong Kong tell of selling large bladders for HK$1 million ($130,000) in 2011 and 2012, according to a recent Greenpeace East Asia report (pdf). These merchants emphasized that buyers weren’t interested in health tonics; they were snapping up these “cash bladders,” as they call them, as investments.
You see fish innards. Others see a speculative investment vehicle.(Greenpeace Asia)
Though the trade in bladders is illegal, Hong Kong customs authorities are very lax about screening for them, traders told Greenpeace. That makes Hong Kong the bladder trade’s entrepôt. From there, the contraband is smuggled past mainland China’s more vigilant border agents, and sold in China’s major cities.
The bladder bubble builds—and bursts
Since the late 1970s, catching the endangered totoaba has technically been illegal. But Mexican authorities have seldom enforced the ban, says Andrew Johnson, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who studies Gulf of California fisheries. When the 2008 crisis hit, tourism—a leading industry in the upper Gulf of Mexico and the major alternative to shrimping and fishing—foundered. Totoaba bladders, however, offered a quick profit.
“A fishermen can make $3,000 to $4,000 for a swim bladder—it’s a good living to catch just one,” says Johnson. A big fish, in other words, could be worth three or four months of work.
“A fishermen can make $3,000 to $4,000 for a swim bladder—it’s a good living to catch just one.”
The Chinese investors’ appetite for bladders, the economic slump in Mexico, and lax enforcement created a perfect storm. Signs of the totoaba slaughter began showing up in the upper Gulf of California around 2011, says Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, head of marine mammal conservation and research for the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) in Mexico.
“Everybody knows that there has always been some totoaba fishing. But then everywhere you go there were plenty reports of totoaba nets and fishing—even reports of totoabas being thrown on the beach with their swim bladders removed,” he says. “You could suddenly see new cars and trucks in the fishing villages of the upper Gulf.”
Some of this trade went by the Tijuana route; between February and April of 2013, the US border patrol busted seven people in five different operations, seizing hundreds of pounds of bladders. But around this time, smugglers also began exporting the contraband straight from Mexico to China, says Johnson.
By 2013, so great were the influxes of totoaba bladders into Hong Kong that they began driving down prices, Hong Kong traders told Greenpeace. The Environmental Investigation Agency’s recent research corroborates that drop. “Prices have dropped considerably in recent years due to the massive poaching of totoaba and oversupply,” says Clare Perry, leader of the oceans division of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a nonprofit group. “So traders are hanging onto stock in the hope that the prices will rebound.”
Little cows to the slaughter
The world’s smallest porpoise.(Paula Olson/NOAA)
The totoaba, however, wasn’t the only victim of the Chinese bladder boom. So was the vaquita (“little cows” in Spanish), a small porpoise that lives only in a patch of the upper Gulf of California, one quarter the size of Los Angeles. Vaquitas are easily tangled and killed in gillnets used to catch shrimp and other seafood. However, the nets used for catching totoaba are particularly treacherous, says Rojas-Bracho, because their mesh is about the same size as a vaquita’s head.
