Transcript

Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing companies, transforming the lives of villagers—and the ecosystem. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism who reported on the fish maw trade for Nature magazine. 

Image: c/- Jo Chandler, Veraibari Village 2024.

Jo’s fieldwork was supported in part by the Walkley Foundation Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism.

 

Graeme Smith  00:04

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I’m Graeme Smith from the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, and I’m joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We’re on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. And we’re coming to you from the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

LOUISA LIM  00:33

In one of our very first episodes, we devoted the whole show to the fate of the humble sea cucumber, which is being harvested out of existence to meet the demands of the growing Chinese market. This month, we’re visiting another of these boom-and-bust stories, this time, the Cocaine Of The Seas. That’s the nickname of fish maw, the swim bladder of fish, which is a culinary delicacy in Asia and particularly in China. It sprang back into the public consciousness a couple of years ago after an appearance in Bling Empire, the reality soap opera about rich Chinese, when it featured a couple of the characters in a store looking at shark’s fin and coming across fish maw.

Clip  01:23

This is like a fish maw? 15,000 what? 15,000 that’s like yen or something? Who would buy that? You’d have to be an idiot. Wait, do you buy that?

Graeme Smith  01:37

Our guest today is also a repeat offender, Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the Melbourne University Center for Advancing Journalism, a colleague of Louisa’s. Welcome back to the program Jo!

Jo Chandler  01:48

Thanks Graeme, thanks Louisa.

LOUISA LIM  01:50

So Jo, let’s talk about the genesis of this story, which you just kind of chanced upon when you were on a reporting trip to Papua, New Guinea. Tell us how you stumbled on the story.

Jo Chandler  02:02

I was preparing to do some field work in Papua New Guinea in 2022 and I had a commission from The Monthly to do a long form piece about climate impacts that were playing out in Papua New Guinea right now. So, I put out feelers over a few months to my networks: conservation people in Papua New Guinea, because I’ve been up and down from PNG for about 15 years, I’ve got quite a good network. And I was put in touch with this woman called Yolarnie Amepou, who is a zoologist who works down in the Kikori delta, which is a really remote part of Papua New Guinea on the southern coast. And I had heard that initially, my contact with Yolarnie was around the fact that in the Delta communities that she works in, sea level is coming up really fast. And several of those communities, in particular, one called Veraibari, which sits right down on the mouth of the Gulf of Papua and the Kikori Delta. And it was, you know, sort of sinking fast. This community had lost a lot of houses. It was losing, it had lost its schoolhouse, and it was preparing to move the entire village, about 200 households, and all of its community infrastructure, churches and marketplace, move it all further inland, a couple of 100 meters inland. So, it was the climate change story that I was going to look at in Kikori with Yolarnie, and so I rode along with her in a little small boat over in the rain and the humidity down deep into the Kikori delta. And that’s when we accidentally, I guess I came across this other story, which is that this community piled high on this vanishing beach, where the sea level is, you know, pushing up high, and there are drowned palm trees, sort of, you can see them just sort of surfaced along the shoreline are these piles and piles of gill nets, commercial gill nets.

LOUISA LIM  04:06

So that’s just a gill net, is just a fishing net?

Jo Chandler  04:08

Gill net are these, you know, big, long fishing nets, yeah. And they’re calibrated according to the sort of the gills to catch the gills of the fish that you’re after. So, if you’re after little fish, you’d have little holes in your gill net. And if you’re after big fish, you have bigger holes in your gill net. And until about 10, 15 years ago, maybe there would have been a few homemade gill nets being used by the local fisher people in this community. Mostly, they were still fishing using long lines and in canoes, but now they were in tin boats with dinghies with powered motors and with no shortage of fuel to run them. This is really unusual in a remote rural community, and basically they’re in the grip of what Yolarnie describes as a fisheries gold rush. And all of this bonanza of money has come into this community from the fishing of fish maw, maw? Fish maw? Fish maw? I will take advice on the best way to say it. But this bonanza, this windfall, is now being used by this community to fund its move inland away from rising seas. So it’s this kind of crazy powerful intersection of different issues, and made even more interesting by the fact that along the Kikori Delta, and not very far from these villages, are the big pipelines that bring gas and oil down from the highlands and then into the Gulf of Papua, where it is either piped or shipped off to the wider world, bringing sort of, you know, comfort and money to communities far away. And all this community really are getting back from that are the rising sea levels, and now they’re having to find the money to move away from those. And fish maw, fish bladder has become their lifeline, and they are aware that it’s precarious, and they know it won’t last, and they’re really concerned about what will happen longer term. One of the village leaders who is in Veraibari, and he’s actually one of the agents for the Chinese seafood companies who are buying this fish. He’s also the guy coordinating the move inland. But he said to me, we know that when we kill the mothers of all the fish, we will be in trouble, but we have no choice at the moment. If someone else wants to come and help us save our village from rising seas, you’re welcome to come and we’ll stop fishing. But at the moment, this is our only option.

Graeme Smith  06:46

Now before we dig too much into what this fish maw trade has done to this very remote community in Gulf province, maybe tell us a bit more about fish maw itself? Yubiao 鱼鳔 in Mandarin and sincere apologies for my Cantonese, faagaau 花膠 in Cantonese, I mean, what does it look like, and why is it so expensive?

Jo Chandler  07:08

It looks like an old lemonade plastic bottle that’s kind of been screwed up and tossed around for a while, and sort of, yeah, it does look like a screwed-up balloon, maybe? It doesn’t look particularly appetizing. So, it’s kind of extraordinary to think that this, that this, you know, strange, unappetizing, little dried morsel is worth so much money, but it’s apparently prized. It’s long been coveted within, you know, Chinese culture for it’s a sign of wealth. And, I mean, you know, jump in here, you probably know much more about this than I do, but wealth, prosperity, status. It’s used in traditional Chinese medicine, but these days it’s also being used a lot in, you know, sort of newer medicine. And, you know, here, it’s a marine collagen source. So, there’s all sorts of new markets that are rising that are kind of cashing in on this idea of marine collagen. And you know, over the centuries, or over the years, it’s actually been used, it was used extensively in Europe, and still is, to some degree. They’re pretty cagey about telling you about it, but it’s often used to clarify wine and beer, you know, Guinness. So, this particular, yeah, the fish maw, the fish bladder, has been used in in sort of, you know, liquor-making, alcohol, for a very long time. And so when you see companies now championing their vegan products, it will be, in theory, because they’re not using something like this. It’s kind of been phased out. But when I was talking to the Hong Kong researcher Yvonne Sadovy about this, she was saying she had been trying to get information out of the Guinness company about how much they use this, and they were really not inclined to tell her terribly much about it.

Graeme Smith  09:01

I mean so what bit of the fish is it, and does every fish have this thing, or are some species more valuable than others?

Jo Chandler  09:09

It’s very much some are more valuable than others. So many of the world’s bony fish, sort of is the broadest. Most fish will have this, but they have that at different sizes. And the reason that Papua New Guinea is particularly being targeted is that it’s got a couple of species of really big fish with really big swim bladders. So, the swim bladder is an organ that these fish use to regulate their buoyancy and it’s really easy to extract, which is another reason why it’s so profitable commercially for communities like this one in Kikori. Because you don’t need a fish plant to process and keep the meat cold and be able to transport the fish to a market. And that’s why the fisheries around the Kikori Delta have traditionally, really not been commercially exploited because they are so remote, and the fisher people there can’t get these big fish that are all through their waters, processed and to market. But with this product, all they have to do is slit it open and cut out this organ, and then dried in the sun, or you’ll see it hanging on little clotheslines, pegs all around the villages in the windows. So, there’s no infrastructure required, no energy required. You can keep it, you know, forever. It’s this dried thing. And then some guy, an agent, will turn up from one of the companies and offer you these staggering amounts of money for these dried fish. And just to give it, or the dried swim bladder, to give it some context. So they, Yolarnie Amepou and some of her research colleagues, a guy called Michael Grant from James Cook University and a couple ofothers, they documented that in Veraibari, they, agents, were offering over 15,000 US dollars per kilogram for fish maw. So that’s not for the fish, just for the bladder, and so the flesh basically gets chucked away most of the time. They just want, a bit like shark fin, you know, they just want the fin. So this price is believed to be the highest available anywhere in the world. And it’s because of the kind of texture and thickness and quality of these particular this particular species. It’s scaly croaker. Some call it jewel fish. Some call it jewfish. It grows to about a metre long. It’s, the locals don’t like eating it. They don’t like the taste, and they’ve got lots of other, better fish. So they’ve intended to not bother with this one. And now, of course, suddenly, everybody wants this particular species, and there’s a couple, there’s also a barramundi in that area that similar sorts of prices and similar size. So, it’s the size and the texture. And Yvonne Sadovy, this Hong Kong researcher I mentioned, she likens the market for fish maw or to the diamond trade, you know, where you’ve got kind of rubbish diamonds at one end of the extreme, and then you’ve got the really high-quality diamonds at the other end. And when you get into that high quality end, you know, where you might be looking at color and carats and cut. With these, they’re looking at sort of the texture and the size and the thickness of these particular swim bladders. And that’s why these ones from this area are being really snapped up. And then, you know, there are other parts, other swim bladders, you know, I think if you go into a market, you’ll see them at all sorts of prices, but these are the ones that are going to be kind of under glass.

Graeme Smith

So Jo, I quickly googled the per capita GDP of Papua New Guinea and the per capita GDP is under $3,000. So, a kilo of this is equivalent to five, six years pure income for the average Papua New Guinean. And Gulf is probably one of the poorest places in PNG.

Jo Chandler

So it’s extraordinary. It is. And I look, I worked quite hard trying to figure out the same thing and but the problem with Papua New Guinea is, as you probably know, with money and with income and with so many other things, is that there’s so little data that’s up to date. The best I could figure and I checked it out with a couple of other local economists at the time, and we figured that for rural Papua New Guineans. So, one of these swim bladders say you had a really nice, luscious, scaly croaker, 100 gram bladder. And so, you might have earned, then 5000, 6000 kina [US$1250 to $1500] for that one swim bladder. That’s about one year’s income in a household in rural Papua New Guinea, roughly, you know. So that was the that was, it’s pretty hard to nail those figures down, but that’s the closest I could get to it.

LOUISA LIM  14:02

So, when you were staying in that village, how did you see the fish maw changing people’s lives?

Jo Chandler  14:09

Oh, profoundly. And you know, you could see it the house that I was staying in, which was… I was staying in the house of a gentleman called Mr. Arakuo, who is a pastor in the community, and he’s the head of the relocation committee. And he is the agent for one of these seafood companies, and so he’s got one of the kind of, I guess, the fanciest houses in town. But it’s in a lot of trouble because he’s right down on the waterline. So it’s, you know, it’s a two story timber house. So, it’s not traditional. It uses modern materials. It’s still pretty basic, and it’s sitting up on stilts over the water to allow the tide to come in and out underneath it. But he’s got a generator running. He’s got solar panels. He’s got a big screen TV in the corner. And, you know, half the village come to watch it together and that’s what when I laid down to sleep, I stayed overnight in his house, which was as the king tide came in. And I just kept thinking about this juxtaposition, because hanging over my head were two of these little plastic, round clotheslines that you would, you know, clip your knickers to or something, and on them were maybe eight or nine fish bladders drying.

LOUISA LIM  15:28

$50,000 worth?

Jo Chandler  15:29

But I calculated about 40,000 Australian dollars, you know, up, you know, up or down, depending on the size of them. Some were a bit smaller. Some were a bit larger. So that’s floating over my head. And then in the night when the sea came up, because the king tide was just about there, Mr. Ara’s whole family were out in the water wading around in the dark, pushing the debris away from the house so the house would not get knocked down in the night. So, these are the conditions that, this is the reality of what they’re living with. And right next door to his house, there used to be, they’d managed to get some money, or funding somehow, to get a water tank that was going to serve this community, because it’s struggling to get good clean water, because, again, inundation is ruining some of the fresh water supplies. And people are having to walk further and further. They managed to put a tank up, but the previous king tide had knocked that down. So these are the realities that they’re struggling with. So, you know, on one hand, $50,000 worth of or, sorry, what did I say about thirty-eight, forty thousand dollars’ worth of, Australian dollars’ worth of dried bladder hanging over my head? And then there’s incredibly precarious conditions for life.

Graeme Smith  16:40

And how did the Chinese kind of come to find this place? It’s for those who don’t know, PNG, it’s almost hard to overstate how remote this part of the world is. I mean, you have eight metres of rainfall a year. There’s pretty well no tourists. I don’t imagine you even have Chinese shopkeepers. How did, how did they come to find this place?

Jo Chandler  17:01

The best we can figure, Yolarnie Amepou, the zoologist who I mentioned, and she’s a Papua New Guinean, but she’s from the other side of the country. Her people are from Madang. And she had just graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree, I think it was, from the University of Papua New Guinea, when she heard a visiting specialist come in to talk about a particular species of turtle, the pig nose turtle, that was endangered and so she volunteered to go to Kikori for a summer to collect data about the pig nose turtle. So that was 2012 and that’s when, when, even in that year, she heard rumors about people coming across the border from West Papua, and keeping in mind that that border is quite porous and it’s a very remote area, and there was… So, there were Indonesians coming across that border, and they were going to villages asking for what they called fish bell, which is sort of a mashed up pidgin kind of word that they’ve developed in that particular area for the bladder. And so word got out that these strangers, were coming over the border from West Papua, which is about maybe six to nine hours in a fast boat and reasonable weather away from the Kikori Delta. So they must have picked up on this, and they were getting the money, good money, selling it back over the other side of the border to Chinese seafood companies. And then, because Papua New Guineans and Australians are not too fond of people wandering back and forth over this border. I was told that, you know, the authorities, the police, came in and chased these agents away, which probably means that things probably got pretty lively. And so then the next thing, the Chinese agents started coming in themselves and building relationships with people in the local villages, and they obtained licenses. About half a dozen companies got licenses to collect fish bladder from the Kikori or Gulf province, is the province that Kikori is part of, and Western Province, which is the one next door that borders onto the Indonesian-West Papua border. So, about half a dozen companies have then bought in, developed networks and are coming in to buy this product regularly. But a couple of years ago, the Papua New Guinea fisheries department put a stop to that. They’re actually concerned about the unregulated activities, the illegal activities. There’s a lot of concern around potentially organized crime gets involved with something that’s worth so much money, and so they’ve stopped issuing any new licenses, but the half a dozen companies that are there already can keep doing business. But one of the things that has occurred is that, because there’s so much money to be made, the Chinese companies are now offering loans to the local fisher people to basically, “We’ll give you the money, we’ll give you the nets, we’ll loan them to you. You can pay them back. We will give you the boats, we will give you the motors, and you can pay that off with what you earn.” And so that’s why there’s been this sort of massive expansion of the activity over a really short period of time, because all of the infrastructure that you need, you know, boats and nets and motors have come into the place so quickly.

LOUISA LIM  20:27

So what are the other impacts in the village?

Jo Chandler  20:30

Keeping in mind, these are, you know, rural and remote Papua New Guineans who basically exist largely without the benefit of the state at all in many parts of their lives. I mean, you may have a school, if you’re lucky, that’s functioning and the schoolteacher has managed to be paid, then they might still be there. There are health services up in town in Kikori, but they’re a couple of hours away. And they’re heavily overused. Or there’s a lot of people waiting for those basic services. And really, existence is in many ways, not very different to what it’s been for centuries. It’s very hand to mouth. People live… it’s, you know, sustenance activities for their gardens and their fishing, and they look after themselves. And so just the fact of this money coming into the village has meant now that if somebody needs to go to town because they’re having an emergency medical event, they’ve got the fuel and the boats to put them into the boat and take them the three or four hours back to Kikori town. Which was a basic service that people didn’t really have before. They’re able to bring down water. So, when Yolarnie Amepou comes in and out of these villages doing her field work for the turtles and other creatures, she was always being asked to load her boat up with just drums and drums of fresh water, because they didn’t have fresh water. And now they’re able to bring that in and out themselves. They can send their kids to school in back in Kikori to high school, which many families would have struggled to do before. They can send them to university in Port Moresby, which, again, they couldn’t do before. So, it’s making a huge difference, materially to people that have really had very little in the way of, you know, money or state support at all.

Graeme Smith  22:18

And maybe one impact that I’m thinking about giving you’re talking about your researcher studying the pig nose turtle, and these nets being very fine, fine enough to catch these fish. I mean, what’s being caught in the nets, apart from the fish and their swim bladders?

Jo Chandler  22:35

Oh, so many creatures. And this is the problem. So, the Kikori Delta has been put forward to UNESCO as a place of significant, you know, world value, international value, because of its biological diversity. And these are incredibly, I think it’s the biggest mangroves in Papua New Guinea. And so you’ve got these wild mangrove forests. And to float, to fly in and out of Kikori, you know, there’s just these avenues of sort of dull, murky water twisting and turning through this vast mangrove wilderness. And so, you’ve got an enormous species, a range of species there that exists there, endemic, that don’t exist anywhere else. And so, when they’re… now that you’ve got these massive gill nets that are floating sort of the length and breadth of the Delta, they’re pulling up, there are a couple of endemic and highly endangered, critically endangered, local dolphin species. They’re getting caught and drowned in the nets. There was one case where ten dolphins were caught in a single net and drowned in that net. The pig nose turtle that Yolarnie went there to study, it was already in danger because of changes to its habitat, and it being exploited for its eggs and its meat by a growing population, and now it’s being caught in the nets. Dugongs. I think Yolarnie said on one occasion, they found a pygmy whale. Leatherback turtles have been caught there. So this, they did a survey Michael Grant and Yolarnie a couple of years ago and monitored the catch from boats going out of a particular village over a several months period. And I think from memory, only about twenty, twenty-two percent of the catch was the target species. The rest were these critically endangered, a whole range of things, but amongst them, critically and endangered species of sawfish, river fish, dolphins, you name it. And so, this is the really big concern, is that not only will the target species possibly vanish pretty quickly, because nobody has any idea how many there are. But meanwhile, you’ve got this collateral damage of all these others species and the community are aware that this is a problem. And again, it was something that Mr. Arakuo said to me, we don’t want to take the dolphins. You know, there’s long story and lore and spiritual stories attached to dolphins. They don’t eat dolphins. They never have. But they know that, basically, at the moment, as he put it, they have a choice between saving their children and saving the dolphins? So, they’re saving their children.

LOUISA LIM  25:23

So it’s a really basic question, but all those animals, if they get caught in the nets, they die?

Jo Chandler  25:28

If you get to them fast enough, you can maybe save them. So, dolphins, for example, if you were going to check your nets every couple of hours, if you happen to get there in time, you might be able to pull a dolphin up and save it. But in reality, if you can imagine what it’s like, if you’re, you know, you’re a village person, a not particularly well-nourished village person. They, the people of the fisher people in this area are very, you know, they’re very strong and but the idea of being in a boat and pulling up a net with a 50, 60, 70-kilo thrashing dolphin in it, and being able to cut it out and let it go. It’s just not, generally speaking, viable. It is one of the things that Yolarnie is working with the fishing community to try and encourage them to check their nets more regularly and come up with sort of strategies and ways to help them, sort of release animals that they find still alive, but mostly they’re long gone, or they’re not able to save them when they get there.

Graeme Smith  26:30

And Jo it’s an extraordinary story, but I did a very unscientific survey of my own in a corridor where I’m surrounded by the world’s highest concentration of Pacific academics, and not one of them had even heard the word fish maw or heard the words fish maw. I mean, why has this flown so far under the radar if it’s having these huge impacts?

Jo Chandler  26:50

It’s absolutely fascinating. And this is Yvonne Sadovy, who I spoke about before. So, she’s a fisheries expert who worked for many years in Hong Kong. And she tells the story about how it was only around the 2000s and she was working with a PhD student, and they sort of came across this mystery of this vanished species. It’s one of the largest of the croaker species, and the croaker species are coveted for their swim bladders. And this Chinese bahaba, there were records and photographs from the 1930s showing this is like a two-metre long fish that weighed like 100 kilograms, and now it was almost nowhere to be found. And what they discovered was that this fish only lived in a very small amount of waters around Hong Kong and China, southern China. And it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as they say, it kept… it’s very big, it’s always in the same place. It reliably turned up to swarm in big groups at the same time every year. And so, these fishers just went in there and scooped them up, and they were selling these enormous fish bladders. And basically, it’s commercially extinct, this particular species, but it had kind of vanished without anybody really noticing. Sadovy says that the point at which the world began to recognize there was a problem was really when the Totoaba, which is another big croaker, giant croaker, which existed in Mexico’s Gulf of California, and this, again, was once one of the most, you know, prized marine biodiverse areas in the world. Cousteau famously went to this area and filmed these beautiful documentaries and said it was, you know, one of the great natural aquariums of the world. And then it was discovered by the fish, the swim bladder, the fish maw business, and they came in with the gill nets looking for this Totoaba. And again, it was point, it was basically fished to the point of being critically endangered. It’s been banned since 1975 because the numbers are so low and because the damage from this fishery is so profound, and yet it still finds its way onto the market through various illegal channels. And one of the casualties of that is that there’s a tiny little porpoise called the vaquita that lives in that area, and because it kept getting caught up in the nets, last I heard, there’s maybe ten individuals left of the vaquita porpoise, which is the world’s smallest porpoise. It’s crashed entirely, and will probably, it won’t recover. So that’s a casualty of this market. But getting back to your question, Graeme, so really, this was all under the radar. And then, because Sadovy started to put the pieces together, she asked, one of the problems was that fish maw, fish bladder when it hits the market in Hong Kong or whatever, it’s all lumped in with other dried fish products. So, like the sea cucumber and the shark fin is, it’s all dried seafood, all dried luxury seafood. So, there was no commodity code to know how much of this was actually going through the markets. So she and a few others petitioned the Hong Kong industry, the market, to make sure that they could create a specific commodity code. And when they did that, and that came in in 2015 and she says, you know, when we did that, we looked at the data and “Wow” was the word that she used. They found that 3000 plus to nearly 4000 tons of dried maw was imported annually to Hong Kong, from 2015 to 2018 worth about 390 million US dollars. But think about the fact that the maw is only five percent of the weight of the animal. So, think about the tons and tons of animal that was once attached to that amount of maw, and you begin to get a sense of how big this market is. But so now in Hong Kong, which is the biggest market, they can trace this because of the commodity code. But the initiative that she and other fisheries experts are desperately hoping will be introduced is that other markets worldwide introduce a specific commodity code so that they can begin to track this market. And what she discovered in her research, when they looked at this, they tracked back, and they found the maw was coming from about 110 countries. When they went to those countries to ask about it, hardly anyone had heard about it. Nobody knew about it. It’s all under the radar, and it doesn’t require infrastructure, so you can kind of get in and out. The village people know that they can sell this material for these huge amounts of money, but the larger marketplace doesn’t… has really not been very aware of it. It’s been really under the radar.

LOUISA LIM  28:39

I remember when we did the sea cucumber story, what had happened in so many villages was that the cucumbers had been harvested to extinction, but because they were worth so much, the villagers had stopped doing all other trades. They didn’t even grow crops anymore, because they were just out picking up sea cucumbers from the seabeds, and when the sea cucumbers were finished, some of the villages were at risk of starvation. Are those kind of dynamics being repeated with fish maw in Papua New Guinea?

Jo Chandler  32:22

That’s the concern. There’s certainly and there’s an anthropologist called Simon Foale, who’s part of the network of researchers working with Yolarnie and Michael Grant. And they’re now trying to get some funding to look at the social impacts of this, because they are very concerned, exactly as you say, people give up other fishing activities. They don’t plant gardens because they don’t need to feed themselves out of their gardens. And so you end up with, you know, hunger. And, you know, sort of famine situations when the market busts. So, they’re very concerned about that. And there’s also, you know, so far, there hasn’t, doesn’t from what we’re hearing, there hasn’t been a lot of kind of piracy or people moving in on this market. In this particular area, the understanding of who has fishing rights in these waters appears to be sort of holding so far. But you would imagine that, given time, and when there’s more awareness, they’re going to be some kind of entrepreneurial criminal types who are going to muscle in and try and get some of this action. So that’s another concern down the track.

Graeme Smith  33:32

I think we’re ready for the Bling Empire question Louisa.

LOUISA LIM  33:36

I’ve been dying to ask about Bling Empire because it is my favorite reality soap opera. So $15,000 for a single piece of fish maw?

Jo Chandler  33:46

I think it was per pound. And I have to say, I had never, I was unaware of the joys of Bling Empire.

LOUISA LIM  33:54

Now you know.

Jo Chandler 33:55

But it popped up in my research. There was a story in the South China Morning Post a couple of years ago about the exploding fish maw market, and it blamed it in part, on, sort of on the Bling Empire on that particular episode saying it had, it had sort of fueled an already pretty dynamic interest in this product. And that now it was driving it even higher. So, I went down a very deep tunnel. And I ended up watching an awful lot of Bling Empire and found the episode and then freeze framed and took pictures to try and get, see if I could see what the label said about where it was from. And I think the product in that scene the best I can figure out, most of it was from Pakistan, which is not unusual. And the prices there were about $15,000 per pound, but yeah, I spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out whether that, whether or not Bling Empire was really to blame for the exploding market.

Louisa Lim  34:55

And what did you conclude?

Jo Chandler  34:56

Well, I think it’s broader than that. When you talk to the experts, and the papers that Sadovy, and there’s half a dozen other or there’s actually a couple of dozen experts that have had quite a growing kind of tempo of papers looking at this issue in major journals over the last, probably the last five years. And they say that they see a lot of the drive coming from increasing incomes and urbanization in China, in Hong Kong, and also diaspora, which is the Bling Empire market, I guess, where you’ve got wealthy people that are willing to pay this money. But for some people, they never eat it. It’s not about the soup. It’s literally kept under lock and key, and there are collectors of maw that are, you know, considered, you know, sort of priceless. And, for example, some of the species of that vanished Chinese bahaba, they are probably the most valuable maw in the world. And no one’s putting that in their soup. They’re investment pieces like diamonds.

Graeme Smith  35:59

Wow. So it’s like French wine almost. I mean, yes, perhaps we should declare interests here, like I’ve never had fish maw in my life. Louisa, have you ever had it at a wedding banquet?

LOUISA LIM  36:08

No, I haven’t. I was not a fan of the sea cucumber either.

Graeme Smith  36:13

No, well, I mean, that’s well established on this podcast. But the only person in the corridor I could find who’d heard of fish maw was, of course, my Chinese friend who immediately pronounced it delicious. His only knowledge of fish maw was it’s great. You know, you’ve mentioned organized crime in passing there, Jo. And given the value of this is perhaps not surprising. But is it using sort of similar networks and similar players, or is it a thing all to itself?

Jo Chandler  36:43

I guess this is something that deserves a bit more scrutiny. I mean, certainly you know this reference to it as being the cocaine of the sea that comes out of you know, a lot of the places where this bladder is being collected are in areas where there’s not a lot of scrutiny of the fisheries industry. There’s not a lot of, you know, sort of government oversight. You know, for example, this commodity has exploded right on the Australian Border, but Australia and Australian fisheries experts and officials got onto this pretty quickly and introduced a whole bunch of rules and regulations to protect the fish that happen to be lucky enough to swim on our side of the border. But in places like Papua New Guinea and a lot of other places in the world where it’s being fished, there’s not that level of oversight. And because there is just so much money involved in it, this concern that organized crime interests are likely to begin to take a keen interest, it just kept popping up in the interviews I was doing all the time. I couldn’t find any kind of concrete evidence that about anybody digging into that yet. But it was one of the reasons that the fisheries, the National Fisheries Authority in Papua New Guinea cited for stopping, you know, putting a moratorium on this market was, you know, illegality. And certainly, you know, that border, that watery border between Papua New Guinea, Australia and Indonesia, West Papua. It’s a very interesting triangle. A lot of, you know, murky things occur there. We know there’s human trafficking, there’s gun trafficking, there’s drug trafficking. So, this is just another potentially problematic, you know, reason that people are going to be active in this area, and not necessarily particularly savoury types.

LOUISA LIM  38:35

So it sounds like there’s a sort of daily massacre of these fish, and not just these fish, but all associated other species. It’s happening under the radar. No one’s really paying attention. The attempts to regulate it seem like they’ve been quite ineffective. I mean, what happens? Is it too late to save these species?

Jo Chandler  39:02

What the researchers from everyone from Sadovy, who’s now based in the UK, and her colleagues in Hong Kong, and Yolarnie and Michael Grant and their team, what they want to see is more research to know exactly how many fish are there and how many target species are being pulled up. That’s basic information that you need to know before you exploit a resource. You need to know how much of it exists. They are really concerned about suddenly turning off the tap because of the vulnerability of these communities. And as you’ve said, you know, it doesn’t take long for a community to become quite dependent on income from something like this. And these people, you know, they’re going underwater, they have all sorts of issues, unless we’re prepared to put some other kind of resources and support into those communities, they need some of this action. So, what the hope is that you do a bit more research, you have better scrutiny by fisheries authorities. Maybe you have quotas on the amount that’s being pulled out over any particular period. And you know, Yvonne Sadovy says, well, as you know, even though the amounts of money that are being paid to fishers at the point of sale might seem incredibly high, they’re still only a fraction of what that fish is worth when it hits the Hong Kong market. So, she thinks that if the market was better regulated, more of that actual value would end up in the hands of the fishermen themselves, the people who have rights over this resource. So they wouldn’t need to pick up as much of it, and they would be, maybe supported to be a bit more discriminating about when they take it. I mean, at the moment, for example, they drape these nets over tributaries and areas of the delta where they know the big fish come in and out to spawn regularly. And so they’re catching, you know, the mothers. They’re catching the future resource is going to go pretty rapidly, as well as things like the pig nose turtle and these endemic dolphins. And they think these dolphins are down to a couple of hundred left. So there’s a very good chance of, you know, local extinction of those species. If they’re not extinct now, they could be within one to two years. So there’s no time to waste on this, but there’s also very little momentum at the moment, at least within the PNG end, I kept trying to get an answer from fisheries about whether they’re going to do anything. There’s been some talk that they want to regulate, and certainly some of their people who are working in the area are profoundly aware of the problems and they want to do more. But there’s inertia there around bringing in any of the kind of mechanisms that need to come in. They need, you know, support. They need regular regulatory support, and they need resources, and they need a political will to turn off the tap on this money, which is just as likely to start, you know, finding its way to powerful interests who won’t want to turn the tap off at any time soon.

Graeme Smith

Jo Chandler, thanks for joining us.

Jo Chandler  40:22

Thanks for having me.

Graeme Smith

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, which it brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests, Jo Chandler and my co-host, Louisa Lim. Today’s episode was recorded in Melbourne University’s Horwood studios with our old editor, Gavin Nebauer. Our editor for this episode is Andy Hazel. Our background research is by Wing Kuang, social media and transcripts by Juliette Baxter, theme music is by Suzie Wilkins, and our cartoons and gifts are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.