Fishing for US carp solutions(2)

Business obstacles

Still, Yang said there are many barriers to making the business sustainable and large scale.

These include the high cost of transportation, tariffs and the Asian Carp Prevention and Control Act, a US law that makes transporting live fish across US state boundaries illegal.

Jim Garvey, director of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, who was part of the visit, said he hopes that research and collaboration between the US and China will lead to greater demand for the fish and enhanced economic opportunity.

Garvey admitted that exporting the products to China and other countries has proved to be difficult because of the economics of shipping and lack of clear demand abroad.

For Sun Shihu, sales manager of the Qingdao Oceanfriends IMP and EXP in Shandong province, these barriers are actually making its Asian carp business unprofitable.

Sun's company started selling the frozen fish imported from the US in 2013 at a price of about 9,500 yuan ($1,560) a metric ton to 11,000 yuan a ton.

"The sales record is really bad because the price is higher than clients' expectation," Sun said.

Besides the higher price, Sun said, Chinese like to buy live fish for cooking, and the frozen ones are not well accepted in the market.

As US law does not allow live fish to be transported across state borders, only frozen fish or fish products can be exported.

The sales manager in Shanghai agreed and said it will take time for Chinese consumers to accept dishes made of frozen fish.

He admitted that the sale of the fish products is not satisfactory yet but he remained optimistic about the business.

For Jia, his company has a special way to "guarantee the best taste for frozen fish".

"After the fish is netted, it will be frozen alive immediately under-28 C. Within 24 hours, the fish will be cut into pieces, put in low-temperature containers and transported by ship," Jia said. The fish will arrive in Tianjin within three weeks, he said.

Besides selling frozen fish, Jia said a processing plant will also be built to produce fish balls, patties and canned food to meet the diversified demand.

"The fish meat tastes better than the fish in China because the water is cleaner in the US and the fish is 100 percent wild and organic," Jia said.

Sourcing solutions

Eating Asian carp is only one way to prevent its spread in US rivers. The US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the scourge, including the use of electric barriers, water guns and scent-based lures.

Garvey said the US government has spent nearly $100 million on research in the past four decades to determine ways to impede movement and reduce carp density in rivers.

He expressed worries that the Asian carp will eat freshwater mussels into extinction. The US has the highest diversity of freshwater mussels in the world.

In January, a plan to physically separate the waterway link between the Illinois River and the Great Lakes was unveiled. The move is expected to cost $18 billion and take decades to implement.

There is no guarantee that the permanent separation will become the key way to prevent any interchange between the water systems, Garvey said.

Scientists in the US and China are also strengthening cooperation to study the fish, including the impact of water temperature and flow on its breeding, to seek effective ways to control fish reproduction, Yang said.

In October or November, Chinese scientists will visit the US to further study the fish with US scientists, she said.

Garvey said the US has much to learn from the expertise of Chinese scientists, resource managers, businesspeople and fishermen, and he hopes that the exchange of knowledge on both sides will lead to discoveries that help the US control Asian carp and for China to help recover the species in the Yangtze River.

Yang agreed that the cooperation can help China protect the Yangtze River and recover the fish species.

Amid the increasing construction of hydropower dams of the past decades, overfishing and industrial and agricultural pollution, a report on the Yangtze River jointly conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture and World Wide Fund for Nature last year showed that the ecosystem of the upper river is on the verge of collapse.

Zhao Yimin, head of the Yangtze River Fishery Resources Committee under the Ministry of Agriculture, said in a previous interview that China's fishery resources will be drained soon if no immediate and effective action is taken.

For Jia, compared with the use of "expensive research and technology" to save the rivers in the US and China, delivering Asian carp to Chinese dinner tables is the "fast and cheap" way.