From China, The Future of Fish

Meet the Chinese tilapia, a bland food product that grows fast and sells cheap. Environmentalists hate it, but Americans keep ordering more

Jamie Chung

By Bruce Einhorn

(Fixes reference to U.S. food-service market in the 27th paragraph.)

At the end of a wooden pier, a squat red machine the size of a dishwasher hums along with the din of nearby cicadas. The fish-feeder is tossing grain pellets into one of Chen Haiping's nine fish ponds, each as long as a football field, in the town of Shuixi, in China's Guangdong province. It's breakfast time, and thousands of tilapia are thrashing their tails and sticking their mouths into the air to get some of the soy-and-corn mixture. Chen, a 32-year-old former duck farmer with a wispy mustache, has been running this farm for eight years.

Before the tilapia, these ponds were filled with shrimp, which the Chinese like. They aren't big fans of tilapia, a foreign fish; the name in Chinese, luofeiyu, refers to tilapia's origins in Africa. It doesn't have much flavor, and it doesn't grow big enough to put in the middle of the table at a family meal. Americans, however, can't get enough of Chinese-raised tilapia, so tilapia it is. The fish, Chen notes, are hardier and don't require as much work. "Shrimp can die much more easily," says Chen, who wears a wide-brimmed straw hat to protect himself from the 95-degree heat.

Despite environmental warnings about Chinese-raised tilapia from watchdog groups such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, which publishes an influential best choices/avoid list of seafood and rates Chinese-raised tilapia as "avoid," U.S. consumption keeps rising. In 2009 the U.S. imported 404 million pounds of tilapia, up from 298 million in 2005. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) imports nearly 200 shipping containers, or 8.8 million pounds, every month, although they will not say how much comes from China. (The company declined to comment.) Domestic fish farmers can't come close to meeting demand. Although there are tilapia farms in the U.S., the fish does better in tropical climates, so most of it comes from Asia or Latin America.

As overfishing threatens the world's wild fisheries, aquaculture advocates say fish farms will play a far greater role in feeding people around the world. "We are no more going to get our seafood from the wild than we get our beef, nuts, fruit from the wild," predicts Kevin Fitzsimmons, a professor at the University of Arizona and former president of the World Aquaculture Society. He is also on the board of HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries (HQS), an NYSE Amex-listed company that sells Chinese-raised tilapia. "It's all going to be farm-raised," he says. And there's no fish better suited to this new world than tilapia, says Fitzsimmons. It's a fast-growing species with mild-tasting flesh that producers can easily adapt to all kinds of uses. "Tilapia," says Fitzsimmons, "is going to be basically where chicken is with poultry."

That means that the creatures thrashing in Chen's ponds are the future of fish. The growing American appetite has led to a boom in Chinese aquaculture: With hundreds of breeding centers, fish farms, feed mills, and processing plants, China is the world's tilapia superpower. That's why I've traveled to the heart of the Chinese aquaculture industry, in southern Guangdong and the nearby island province of Hainan, to see how farmed-in-China fish make their way to the American table.

For a tilapia, Chen's farm is a pleasant enough place to grow up. The farm is about an hour and a half's drive on potholed roads from Zhanjiang, the closest big city in this part of Guangdong. The province—home to huge factories owned by companies like Taiwan's Foxconn that employ hundreds of thousands of workers and produce iPhones and other products for export—is one of the most polluted areas in one of the world's most polluted countries. Smog regularly fouls the air and chemicals poison the water in the boomtowns of the Pearl River Delta, near Guangdong's border with Hong Kong. Those factories, however, haven't yet made it to the southwest of Guangdong, an area 200 miles away that is still a green oasis of banana trees, rice paddies, and sugarcane farms.

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