"...virtually every fishery in the world has been criminally overfished for years. We know this because, for years, fisheries scientists have politely recommended to their governments that they should not let their fishing fleets catch quite so many fish next year.
"None of this is surprising. Fish is a finite resource. You can run out of them. The world is doing just that. And this will be serious for the large number of people who rely heavily on fish for protein." (New Scientist, April 11, 1992)
The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that seven out of ten (69%) of the oceans commercially targeted marine fish stocks are either fully or heavily exploited (44 percent), overexploited (16 percent), depleted (6 percent), or very slowly recovering from previous overfishing (3 percent).
This is the culmination of a more than fourfold expansion in marine fisheries production -- from around 18 million tons caught in 1950 to 86 million tons in 1989. But, marine fisheries production peaked in 1989 and has been declining ever since. By 1992 it had dropped to about 82.5 million tons, where it more or less stands today. Catches are falling, despite the fact that expanding fleets are fishing harder, spending more time, effort and money than ever before, and using state of the art fish finding and capture technologies in a desperate competitive struggle to find and capture more fish.
Gigantic floating factories work night and day in the last of the planet's great wilderness sanctuaries, vacuuming up mountains of fish, leaving ecological as well as economic devastation in their wakes, with the blessing, encouragement, and even the financial backing of their governments.
The desire for ever-increasing short-term profits is fueled by spiraling consumer demand for fish products which drives a self-destructive cycle of overfishing and runaway exploitation worldwide. The unrestrained, competition for fish is augmented by irrational investments in the construction of bigger, more powerful and highly mobile factory fleets equipped with vastly improved, automated fish location, capture and processing technologies.
Yet, fisheries research and management institutions have fallen far behind the fishing industry's advancing technical capabilities, making over-exploitation the rule rather than the exception. It is now alarmingly apparent that the rate at which marine life forms naturally regenerate cannot keep pace with the voracious expectations held by financial investors for ever-increasing rates of return on capital invested in fishing and seafood marketing.
Today, there isn't a fishing region in the world that does not suffer from fisheries management decisions designed to satisfy short-term economic or political objectives (or both) rather than and protecting the marine environment and conserving fish populations. The bulk of the problems stem from twenty fishing countries whose fleets land 80 percent of the total marine catch worldwide.
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Commercial fishing in most of these countries has been very poorly managed and, in some instances, not at all. Even in a few countries where relatively advanced fisheries management systems have been in place for many years they have, almost without exception, failed to control the conditions and stem the abuses that lead to overfishing and destructive environmental impacts.
The chronic failures of fisheries management in European waters of the northeast Atlantic and North Sea are particularly noteworthy since this area has probably the longest standing and greatest single concentration of fisheries research and management institutions in world. Yet, Europe's fish stocks are plagued by overfishing, and massive excess fishing capacity.
The member countries of the European Union regularly ignore scientific advice when setting their annual catch quotas: when scientists from the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas recommended a 40 percent cut in the 1995 hake catch to protect the stocks, EU fisheries ministers agreed to a mere five percent cut. In the EU, as elsewhere, it seems that a fishery must be proven to be on its death bed before any remedial action is taken.
In the United States a similar picture of failed fisheries management prevails. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the federal agency overseeing U.S. fisheries, 80 percent of the known commercially valuable fish populations (122 aquatic species) are currently either fully or overexploited. Another 79 species continue to be exploited while the status of their populations is unknown. Little wonder why this is so.
There are eight regional fisheries management councils in the U.S. responsible for regional Fishery Management Plans (FMPs), regulations and catch limits. These fishery councils are primarily composed of those interests who benefit directly from increased catches: commercial fishers and other industry user groups. Notably deficient is non-industry representation. Under-representation of non-industry interests means the general public is, in effect, restricted in its role of providing a balancing influence in the fisheries management process.