Every single meal we eat has to come in one way or another from the environment. Pasta, noodles, even dim sum or a sandwich all comes from plants and animals. We begin this week to look at how the environment provides the food we need to keep us alive, and we turn to the seas! Dr. Allen To of the WWF's Footprint Programme joins us to tell us about his work on sustainable seafood. The sea does not have unlimited fish, and at the moment we're over exploiting our seas. To have fish and healthy marine ecosystems in the future, we need to carefully rethink our ways of getting food.

Hong Kong eats a lot of seafood: in Asia we're second only to the Maldives, which is an island nation! We eat more seafood per capita than South Korea or Japan! As a city, we're having an enormous global impact on the oceans. We've already poorly managed our own local seas and depleted our fish. Dr. To explains how our habits haven't changed, and since we have money, we have just moved on to a different regions to buy up fish from somewhere else. This situation poses a dangerous risk to the livelihood of people and ecosystems in developing countries, where fishery management is not yet able to ensure safe fishing practices. Inga explains to us how we're simply not planning for the future, and fishermen, especially in developing areas, simply have a mentality of "catch as much as you can", which is driven by the market value of fish. However, as Allen and Inga discuss, seafood generally has a good "energy to animal protein" conversion rate compared with chicken, beef, or pork, and in that sense it is a more sustainable, environmentally choice, but the way in which we get our seafood needs to have better oversight for future protection. It can all be very confusing!

A special thank you to Dr. Allen To of the WWF's Footprint Programme. 
Producer & Host: Kathryn Davies
Producer & Host: Inga Conti-Jerpe
Host: Fei Hung
Music: Kodomo (Concept 9 & Concept 13, Still Life Album)

What Lies Beyond the Dinner Table: Seafood - Ep 11 - Green Hong Kong

Kathryn Davies