Towards Sustainable Development of Fisheries in the Yellow and East China Seas Shared by South Korea and China

Abstract

South Korea and China are located adjacent to Korea’s West and South Seas and China’s Yellow, Bohai, and East China Seas. These seas are semi-closed and are inhabited by many transboundary species. Korea and China signed a Fisheries Agreement in 2000, pledging cooperation for conservation in the Yellow and East China Seas. Discussions for collaborative fisheries management continued; however, competitive fishing has been occurring between them. Moreover, Korean and Chinese fisheries suffer overcapacity, deterioration, and decreased production. Accordingly, they strengthened the fisheries management of their own seas; however, issues continue to exist. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop more effective measures by evaluating and refining the existing system; fisheries management mainly focuses on fishing capacity control. Window-DEA is useful for analyzing the trend of efficiency over time and has been widely used as an evaluation tool for fisheries management measures, particularly fishing capacity. We comprehensively assessed the dynamic fishing capacity of the fishing ground shared by Korea and China per coastal region using Window-DEA for its sustainable development. Our results show the shared fishing ground has suffered from long-term overcapacity, which is expanding further with the intensification of fishing competition between the two countries, implying that the regime currently employed has inherent drawbacks because most naturally inhabiting fish species are transboundary and characterized by active ecological interactions. Our study proposes to set a Korea–China joint fisheries management regime.