Word: yapping
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Anyone wondering how Southeast Asia will cope as it embraces a sweeping new free-trade agreement with China, creating one of the world's biggest free-trade zones, may learn from the behavior of the shimmering dragonfish that Kenny Yap breeds on his jungle-fringed farm in northern Singapore...
...With their dazzling orange and gold skins and fat bellies, the individual dragonfish are soothing enough to watch swim around Yap's tanks. Until, that is, they are paired with another dragonfish, after which they present a more gruesome spectacle. "They either try to eat each other or fight each other to the death," explains one of Yap's employees, who pairs each dragonfish with a stingray, which hovers over the tank's bottom and stays out of his aggressive neighbor's way. (See pictures of new species found in the Mekong Delta...
...businesses like Yap's ornamental-fish-breeding company - a nimble, small-to-medium-size specialized enterprise that trades with China but does not directly compete with Chinese companies - that stand to benefit the most from unfettered access to China's one billion customers. Sixty percent of the world's supply of ornamental fish comes from Southeast Asia, whose warmer waters and diverse aquatic eco-system has given it a competitive advantage that China cannot easily wrest away. A fully grown dragonfish, which Yap says aspiring Chinese businessmen gravitate to, can fetch up to $20,000 - each. Producing the fish...
...Before the free-trade agreement kicked in this month, Yap was paying customs duty in China on his fish that amounted to roughly 6% of their cost, he says. As a result, China only made up slightly less than 10% of Qian Hu's $67 million in 2009 revenue, a share that Yap aims to triple over the next five to 10 years now that the tariff is gone...
...Fish and water are very auspicious words in Chinese," says Yap, smiling. "Water means wealth and fish means surplus. Keeping fish is a very good omen for those Chinese who want to get wealthy." Yap is bound to keep growing wealthy from his fish too, as long as he swims alone and steers clear of fearsome Chinese predators...