Video | Eating fish sustainably: how Hong Kong is decimating fish stocks with its appetite for seafood, and what you can do to stem pillage

It’s 7.30am and the Aberdeen wholesale fish market is buzzing, the air a heady mix of fish and diesel fumes. Boats are “bumper-to-bumper” as fishermen negotiate prices before loading their catches into styrofoam boxes of oxygenated water and onto trucks for distribution to restaurants and markets (more than 70 per cent of the city’s live seafood is traded in Aberdeen).

Every day the market opens at 4am and about 60 to 110 fishing vessels unload about 50 to 80 tonnes of seafood. It might sound like a lot but Hongkongers are big consumers – the second-biggest in Asia (behind Japan), and eighth in the world. Hongkongers also like to see their fish alive, preferably swimming in a tank at a restaurant or wet market.

But environmentalist Doug Woodring, founder of charity Ocean Recovery Alliance, wants to remind people that the fish in those tanks aren’t sourced from local waters, or nearby in the South China Sea. They come from fish farms or are imported from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and “other spots in that region popular with Hongkongers who love to snorkel with those very same fish while on holiday”.

“Our consumption is depleting these areas that we visit on holiday,” says Woodring, adding that fishing in local waters stopped in the 1980s as a result of over fishing.

Government figures show Hong Kong imports live reef food fish (LRFF) from more than 40 countries and territories worldwide, a reason why Hong Kong plays a vital role in driving the sustainable trade and consumption of seafood, says Allen To, manager, oceans sustainability, for the WWF.

“As much as 90 per cent of the seafood consumed in Hong Kong is from overseas, and we consume a lot, so our footprint is big because it’s sourced from more than 170 territories and countries worldwide,” he says.