It isn’t easy to find accurate information on what is happening fishery by fishery. Thus, while I don’t consider CNN a “reliable source” but this short summary on global fisheries seems to be accurate. Excerpt:
(…) UNEP’s report, “In Dead Water” released in January, says as much as 80 percent of the world’s main fish catch species have now been “exploited beyond or close to their harvest capacity”. We are now being told that if we carry on fishing at the rate we do, by 2048 all of the species that we currently fish for food will have disappeared.
In words not to be taken lightly, UNEP is now warning that unless governments around the world enforce some radical changes right now, we could be in the process of witnessing “a collapsing ecosystem”.
Should that happen, it would mean nothing short of a catastrophe, with far reaching consequences for marine life — and human life. One billion people around the world rely on fish as their main source of protein, while 2.6 billion of us get at least 20 percent of our animal protein intake from it.
Too many boats, not enough fish
There are several problems with how we catch fish.
For starters, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says the global fishing fleet is 2.5 times bigger than “what the oceans can sustainably support” – i.e. there are too many boats catching too many fish, and not giving fish stocks enough time to replenish them.
One living example of this can be found off the coast of Canada. In the early 1990′s, cod stocks in the rich fisheries of the Newfoundland Grand Banks collapsed — some to as little as 1 percent of their historical levels — because of over fishing. A decade on, they have yet to recover.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) puts the number of fishing vessels at around 4 million with a staggering 86 percent of them operating in Asian waters.
But, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN) just 1 percent of these vessels are big enough to substantially threaten global fisheries, with the “capacity to take around 60 percent of all the fish caught globally”.
These large vessels have been largely kept in business by governmental subsidies, say non-governmental organizations like the WWF which has been urging the World Trade Organization (WTO) to do something about them.
The worldwide fishing industry employs around 200 million people, generating $80 billion a year. But a hefty chunk of the industry’s revenues come from subsidies, which are currently estimated at around $34 billion a year. Those most responsible for subsidizing the fishing industry are Japan (spending $5.3 billion a year), the European Union ($3.3 billion) and China ($3.1 billion), according to activist group Oceana.
The increase in illegal fishing hasn’t helped matters either, representing a fifth of all catches worldwide, a figure that came out of a recent meeting between the World Bank and the IUCN earlier this year. The business for pirate ships “flying flags of convenience from landlocked nations has boomed”, says the New Scientist.
And it’s not surprising why. As much as 64 percent of the world’s oceans have no national jurisdiction. That means anyone can fish there, as they are deemed to be international waters. They are known as the “high seas” and they cover 50 percent of the Earth’s surface.
In 2004, the most recent year statistics are available, the industry caught a record 106 million tons of fish.
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