Boom industry with a catch

Hong Kong's appetite for seafood is among the strongest in the world, which means people here are contributing more than many to the alarming depletion of the world's fish stocks.

If the World Bank is right that our oceans contribute US$3 trillion in goods and services every year to global economic activity, and the WWF is correct in its assessment that half of the seafood eaten comes from unsustainable sources, this is a troubling situation for Hong Kong.

Hong Kong's average annual consumption of 71.6 kilograms of seafood per person ranks us alongside Japan as the biggest consumers in Asia and behind only Chile worldwide.

So it is timely that the one-year-old Global Ocean Commission should be meeting here until Sunday to finalise recommendations aimed at restoring the ocean to ecological health and sustainable productivity.

The timing was even cuter than the commission probably realised: today is the celebration of the Hung Shing Festival in Hong Kong's 800-year-old Ho Sheung Heung village near Sheung Shui. The festival marks the birthday of the Tang dynasty official famous for forecasting the weather for Hong Kong fishermen.

The commission's focus is doubtless on the more practical matter of how to improve the governance of oceans that it has declared to be a "co-ordinated catastrophe", with a baffling tangle of overlapping authorities. Then again, the "blue economy" has plenty of overlapping challenges - not just overfishing, but also seabed mining, shipping, coastal tourism and marine pollution, in particular plastics waste.