It Can't
Go On
Forever

It Can't Go On Forever
Greepeace International

CONTENTS

1. Fishing in Troubled Waters - The Global Fisheries Crisis
    1.1. A Vital Human Activity Threatened
    1.2. Core Problems
    1.3. Limiting the Fishing Business
2. Fishing is Breaching Nature's Limits
    2.1. Quotes: New Scientist, April 11, 1992
    2.2. Overfishing the Oceans
    2.3. The Politics of Overfishing
3. Fishing Down the Food Chain
    3.1. Quote: from John Steinbeck's "The Log from the Sea of Cortez"
    3.2. Overfishing Threatens Marine Biodiversity
    3.3. Fishing Down the Food Chain
    3.4. Environmental Impacts
4. Fishing Threatens Survival of Marine Wildine
    4.1. Fishing Effects Much More Than Fish
    4.2. Predators and their Prey
5. The Incidental Capture and Killing of Marine Wildlife
    5.1. Tuna and Dolphins
    5.2. Large-Scale Driftnets - Walls of Death
    5.3. Longline Death Toll on Albatross and Other Seabirds
    5.4. Other Victims - Sea Turtles
6. Bycatch and Discards of Unwanted Fish
    6.1. Deplorable Waste on a Colossal Scale
    6.2. Disturbing Examples
    6.3. Shrimp Trawling - The King of Wasteful Fishing
    6.4. The Impacts of Discarding
    6.5. Solving the Bycatch Problem
7. Too Many Big Boats Catching Too Many Fish
    7.1. A Plague of Fishing Boats
    7.2. Bankrupt Global Fishing Fleet Kept Afloat by Subsidies
    7.3. Too Many Ships and More on the Way
8. Fleeet Migration - Exporting The Overfishing Problem
    8.1. Seafood Companies React to a Supply Crisis
    8.2. Governments Subsidize Fleet Migration
    8.3. Local Fishers Fighting Back
9. Overfishing Threatens Food Security
    9.1. Fish: A Vital Source of Protein for Billions
    9.2. Indulging the Rich, Hurting the Poor
    9.3. Wasteful Fishing Practices Threaten Food Security
10. Fishing and Jobs
    10.1.Overfishing Threatens Sustainable Livelihoods
    10.2. Newfoundland's Economy Collapses
    10.3. Not Just Eastern Canada
    10.4. Society Pays the Long-term Costs of Overfishing
    10.5. Deciding How the Necessary Cutbacks Should Be Made

Fishing is an ancient human tradition -- one that satisfies vital food needs of hundreds of millions of people and is economically, socially and culturally important. Today, however, tradition has been transformed into a resource extraction industry spanning the globe. In its wake, fish populations are being dangerously depleted; nature's balance is being altered across vast areas of the world's oceanic ecosystems in ways that may be irreversible, and key species in the complex, diverse web of marine life are threatened.

1. Fishing in Troubled Waters - The Global Fisheries Crisis

1.1. A Vital Human Activity Threatened

Fishing is an ancient human tradition -- one that satisfies vital food needs of hundreds of millions of people and is economically, socially and culturally important. Today, however, tradition has been transformed into a resource extraction industry spanning the globe. In its wake, fish populations are being dangerously depleted; nature's balance is being altered across vast areas of the world's oceanic ecosystems in ways that may be irreversible, and key species in the complex, diverse web of marine life are threatened.

Several decades of overfishing in most of the world's major fisheries has pushed many commercially important fish populations into steep declines. Catches are falling, despite the fact that expanding fleets are fishing harder, spending more time, effort and money than ever before in trying to maintain them. Some commercially important stocks are in such a critical state that all fishing has been shut down. Hundreds of millions of people traditionally dependent on fishing for food and livelihoods face resource depletion, competition from industrial and distant water fleets, and loss of access to traditional marine food supplies.

1.2. Core Problems

The most glaring manifestations of the global fisheries crisis include:

Quite simply, nature's limits have been breached by too many fishing vessels catching too many fish, very often in wasteful and destructive ways. The full utilization of available fish stocks and profit maximization for industry have been the key goals of fisheries development, with protection for the environment taking a back seat. This has proven to be the formula for disaster, and the consequences for marine ecosystems and humanity are already plainly visible around the world.

1.3. Limiting the Fishing Business

There is a rapacious tendency to the global business of producing protein from the sea, driven by the twin business imperatives of profit maximization and continuous growth. We ignore at our peril the need to look beyond narrowly defined interests. The business of fishing must be redefined so that they might continue to provide nutritional and employment benefits to dependent communities in ways that do not risk the health and natural integrity of the ocean environment. In fact, there is no alternative.

2. Fishing is Breaching Nature's Limits

2.1. Quotes: New Scientist, April 11, 1992

"...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."

2.2. Overfishing the Oceans

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.

2.3. The Politics of Overfishing

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.

The World's Most Prominent Fishing Nations
1. China 11. India
2. Peru 12. Iceland
3. Japan 13. Philippines
4. Chile 14. Korea, DPR
5. USA 15. Denmark
6. Russian Fed. 16. Spain
7. Thailand 17. Taiwan, Prov China
8. Indonesia 18. Canada
9. Korea, Rep. 19. Mexico
10. Norway 20. Vietnam

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.

3. Fishing Down the Food Chain

3.1. Quote: from John Steinbeck's "The Log from the Sea of Cortez"

"...Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. An the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it."

3.2. Overfishing Threatens Marine Biodiversity

In May 1993, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that "one-quarter of the planet's biodiversity is in danger of extinction in the next 30 years". FAO used strong words to describe the threats posed by commercial fisheries to the planet's valuable pool of marine biological diversity:

"...the over-intensive use of modern technology and search for short-term benefits, coupled with continuous government support for otherwise uneconomic production, has had a devastating impact on many important fish stocks. Commercial fleets have driven some species to commercial extinction and sometimes close to biological extinction, destroying rural ecosystems, such as coral reefs and seagrass beds."

FAO says that commercial fish catches in thirteen out of fifteen of the world's major marine fishing areas have suffered serious declines. Indeed, declines in catches of some commercially valuable fish species have been catastrophic. The annual catch of Atlantic cod, for instance, fell from a peak of around 4 million tons in the late 1960s to just a little over a million tons by 1993.

In another case from the north Atlantic, the size of the spawning stock of Atlanto-scandian herring collapsed from an estimated adult stock biomass of between seven to ten million tons in the 1950s -- when it was considered to be perhaps the single largest population of fish on the planet -- to a mere 100,000 tons by 1970 following massive over-exploitation when herring was fished out in the late 1960s. It wasn't until 1986 that herring was found again in the Norwegian Sea, but not at levels high enough to allow fishing to resume. It can take many years, even decades for a collapsed fish stock to recover, if it can at all.

3.3. Fishing Down the Food Chain

There is great difficulty nowadays in sustaining global fisheries production at around 82 million tons. In response to declines of commercially valuable stocks of bigger, slower growing species, commercial fishing fleets have turned to "fishing down the food chain", targeting increasingly large quantities of smaller species of fish with less commercial value. Such fish, called small-pelagic fish, are highly mobile shoaling fish that dwell near the ocean's surface, and they play a critical role in the marine foodweb.

This shift typifies the "boom-and-bust" cycle of fisheries exploitation of the world's heavily-exploited, commercially valuable fisheries -- that is, rapid increases in catches of a commercially desirable species, followed by massive declines as its stocks are depleted. As the costs and difficulties of maintaining catch levels increase, highly mobile fleets move to other species, sometimes in the same region, but often thousands of miles away in another part of the world.

3.4. Environmental Impacts

Since all components in marine ecosystems are interlinked, you can't change one thing without affecting everything else. If a particular species is heavily fished, it is not simply the targeted population that is affected, but the entire ecosystem in which it occupies a niche. Overfishing results in a form of ecological degradation or debasement, in which the naturally derived community of fish species changes.

In extreme cases, a competing species may take advantage of vacant space or food resources and prevent the over-exploited species from being restored to its former abundance. In the Eastern Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska, for instance, heavily fished pollock and Greenland turbot have declined significantly since 1979 (40% and 35% respectively), while flatfish and skates have increased notably (450% and 600%).

The scale of modern fishing also raises critical evolutionary questions. Intensely exploited fish populations can undergo critical changes. In many instances, exploitation shifts the age composition of fish populations resulting in faster growing fish that mature early, have a shorter life span, and smaller adult size. In heavily exploited North Sea fish stocks, such as plaice, haddock and cod, far more adult fish are killed by fishing than by natural causes and hence fishing becomes the dominant factor in the evolutionary process of natural selection. Fishing can also reduce genetic diversity within a species when a stock size is greatly reduced from natural levels.

Very little is understood about the long term consequences of these dynamics. Some scientists, though, have speculated on the potential of what might be called "evolutionary management": that is, managing fisheries in such a way that fish are harvested selectively at different stages of development so that a targeted stock evolves the properties most appealing to fish markets. This means the market forces are increasingly setting the criteria for evolution rather than nature.

4. Fishing Threatens Survival of Marine Wildine

4.1. Fishing Effects Much More Than Fish

The effects of removing too many fish can dramatically alter the populations of other predator species in the marine food web. Many species of marine wildlife are threatened by the competition with fishing operations -- sharks, seals, dolphins, whales, seabirds, turtles, and many more. In addition, millions of animals become the victims of entanglement, incidental capture and death in fishing gear.

4.2. Predators and their Prey

Food availability is a critical factor which limits the distribution and numbers of animal populations in the oceans. The relationship between predator and their prey (food) can be disturbed by intensive commercial fishing. This can affect marine biodiversity in ways that may be irreversible. Take, for instance, the ecological crisis in the Barents Sea ecosystem, off the coast of northern Norway, which was being acutely felt by Norwegian coastal fishing communities during the 1980s when catches in the coastal cod fishery dramatically declined. In response, Norway's Institute of Marine Research investigated. Marine scientist Johannes Hamre concluded that the problems stemmed from an unbalanced state of the relationships between certain key predators and their prey in the Barents Sea, which developed after the herring stock had been fished out as far back as late 1960s.

As Hamre describes the crisis:

"The two largest fish stocks in the North-Eastern Atlantic, the Norwegian spring spawning herring and the Barents Sea capelin, have been depleted in recent years. The herring collapsed in the late 1960s, and [the stock] has not yet been rebuilt, and the capelin was depleted in the middle of the 1980s. These are the main stocks of plankton feeders in the area, and represent the key-species in a context of predator/prey relationships. The dominating predator, the northeastern Arctic cod, has perished in recent years due to lack of food. Crowds of underfed seals have moreover invaded Norwegian coastal waters and thousands of dead seabirds have drifted ashore on the north Norwegian coast. These dramatic events demonstrate that the upper trophical levels of the ecosystem of the area are out of balance."

In the Barents Sea, and right through the entire north Atlantic ecosystem, fish such as herring, capelin are important food for the likes of seabirds, whales (such as the fin, minke and humpback), seals and other marine animals.

Population crashes in some seabird populations, for instance have been associated with changes in the abundance and availability of fish stocks. In the British Isles populations of several seabird species have experienced declines which follow those of fish stocks. Overfishing of herring, sprat and sand eels around Britain poses a survival challenge to seabird species dependent on these stocks, particularly in winter.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Canadian scientists' have issued warnings about overfishing when whales, seals and seabirds off Canada's east coast appeared to be dying of starvation because of large declines in fish stocks. Thousands of harp seals had been found far south of their usual range, while sea bird reproduction was down 75 per cent. In surveys of humpback whales, scientists found that the young whales appeared to be far smaller than normal off the Newfoundland coast, perhaps because they were unable to find the amount of fish they need.

Steller sea lions in the North Pacific provide a another example of how a marine mammal population can be affected by overfishing of forage food supplies. Stellers are listed as a "threatened" species under U.S. law, because their total population declined from as many as 300,000 in 1960 to less than 66,000 today. Three-quarters of the world's population of Stellers live in Alaskan waters where pollack, the Steller's major prey species is heavily fished.

5. The Incidental Capture and Killing of Marine Wildlife

The depletion of food supplies is not the only risk to marine wildlife populations from commercial fisheries. Millions of marine animals other than fish are severely injured or killed each year through deadly interactions with fishing operations. Many populations of marine wildlife species are threatened or have become endangered, to such an extent that some, like the albatross, are sliding toward extinction.

5.1. Tuna and Dolphins

One of the most notorious and long-standing problems in this regard has been in commercial tuna purse seine fisheries in the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) ocean off Mexico and Central America. For unknown reasons, yellowfin tuna in the ETP commonly swim beneath herds of dolphins and other species such as whales and whale sharks as they migrate through the open oceans. Using floating nets in excess of 2000 meters long, ETP tuna fishing fleets deliberately encircled dolphins, whales or sharks in order to catch the tuna below them.

Since 1959, when the U.S. tuna fleet introduced the practice, an estimated seven million dolphins in the ETP tuna fishery perished, of which about five million were from one species - the northern offshore spotted dolphin. Because the fishing fleets were not controlled, many dolphin populations had become severely reduced by the 1970s. Today, dolphin deaths in this fishery are declining because of an international agreement to bring the fleets under control, including a regulation that all tuna purse seine boats fishing in the ETP must carry professional observers.

Much less is known about the numbers of dolphins and other animals captured and killed in the other purse seine tuna fisheries in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This is because it is ONLY in the eastern Pacific where the scientific observers are required on ALL commercial tuna vessels. Many populations of dolphins, sharks, whales, even endangered sea turtles could be threatened by purse seine fishing operations, but little remedial action can be taken as long as the companies of the global tuna industry are successful in keeping their impact secret. gif jpg

5.2. Large-Scale Driftnets - Walls of Death

During the 1980s, when more than 50,000 kilometer's (32,000 miles) of driftnets were being set in the Pacific Ocean each night, many types of marine animals were dying. Official data pointed to annual death tolls of tens of thousands of dolphins, whales and seals. Up to 750,000 seabirds, as well as millions of fish and sharks were caught and killed.

In response to the danger the United Nations General Assembly moved swiftly to ban large-scale driftnets on the high seas where no regulations existed to control this indiscriminate and destructive fishing technique. Despite the ban, the "walls of death" are still being set in many areas, both on the high seas and in some national waters.

5.3. Longline Death Toll on Albatross and Other Seabirds

A timeless seafaring symbol, immortalized in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, albatrosses roam widely across vast expanses of the oceans of the world, rarely coming ashore except to breed on remote oceanic islands in or near the Southern Ocean. Unfortunately for the various species of albatross in this remote part of the world, fleets of hundreds of fishing vessels from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia hunt the prized southern bluefin tuna.

Albatross and other seabird species are caught and dragged underwater to their deaths on these deadly, baited hooks as they are launched from the ships. As many as 100 million hooks a year have been set by the Japanese fleet in the southern bluefin tuna fishery, for instance, so it is not surprising that tens of thousands of birds are being killed annually. One conservative calculation for albatross killed on Japanese longliners is 44,000 per year. The actual figure could be double that, according to researchers, but data on albatross kills by other nations' fishing vessels are not available. Twelve of the world's 14 albatross species are believed to be dying in their tens of thousands each year in this way. Because of the large number of birds affected, commercial fishing has been identified as the most serious threat to the survival of most albatross species.

5.4. Other Victims - Sea Turtles

Species of sea turtles are other hapless victims of incidental capture in fishing gear. Twenty thousand loggerhead turtles are captured every year by the Spanish longline fishery in the Mediterranean Sea, and four thousand of them are believed to die because they are returned to the sea with the hook still embedded in the throat.

In shrimp trawl fisheries off the southern United States the issue of marine turtle bycatch came to wide public attention relatively recently, largely because of the estimated 48,000 sea turtles caught annually by shrimp fishermen. The US National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that more than 11,000 of these were dying annually. Only after intense pressure from environmental groups was remedial action taken to modify trawl nets to exclude turtles from the catch. It remains to be seen just how effective these efforts will be.

If the current levels of fishing effort are not reduced, the impacts on marine animals such as dolphins, seabirds and sea turtles will increase unless governments act swiftly. First, by dramatically reducing the level of fishing effort so that there are far fewer vessels with the capacity to take too many fish. Second, by ensuring that fishing gear and practices responsible for this unnecessary carnage are either made safe or abandoned in favour of methods that avoid deadly interactions and thus spare threatened species of marine wildlife from extinction.

6. Bycatch and Discards of Unwanted Fish

6.1. Deplorable Waste on a Colossal Scale

One-quarter (25%) of all the fish pulled from the sea never make it to market. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that, on average, 27 million tons of unwanted fish catch are thrown back each year. Most do not survive (FAO's estimated range of bycatch/discards is 17-39 million tons/yr, but does not include marine mammals, sea birds and some invertebrates killed in fishing operations). Twenty seven million tons represent more than half of all fish produced annually from marine capture fisheries for direct human consumption.

Bycatch is the marine life caught during fishing even though it is not being targeted. Most bycatch include non-target or low-value species, but vast tonnage of undersized fish of valuable commercial species are also involved. Sometimes bycatch fish are kept for market, but most often they are thrown back dead, because they may be the wrong species, the wrong size (usually too small but sometimes too big), of inferior quality, or surplus to the fishing operation's quotas.

6.2. Disturbing Examples

Recent research from Alaska, for instance, suggests that Bering Sea red king crab discards amounted to about 16 million animals in 1990, more than five times the number actually landed for market. It is not known how many of these discarded crab (many of them immature crabs) survive after they have been thrown back into the sea.

Almost 350 million kilograms/350,000 tons) of fish were caught and then thrown back by Alaskan fishing boats in 1993 because they weren't the kind of fish or the size that the boats were trying to catch. In the Gulf of Alaska's pollock fishery discards nearly equal the actual catch in some areas.

In the North Sea, about half of the haddock and whiting caught for human consumption is discarded every year. Eighty million cod may have been discarded in the cod fishery off the northern coast of Norway in the 1986-1987 season because they were too small to market.

6.3. Shrimp Trawling - The King of Wasteful Fishing

It is the massive waste of commercial trawling for shrimp and prawns -- particularly those operating in tropical waters -- that tops the list of waste and destruction. An estimated 11 million tons of finfish are discarded each year in shrimp trawl fisheries. It is common for 90 per cent of a shrimp trawl to be made up of bycatch finfish, with only ten percent shrimp. In some shrimp trawl fisheries, for example the Trinidad shrimp fishery, almost 15 tons of fish are discarded for every ton of shrimp landed. The fish are either dead, dying, or likely to be consumed in its weakened state by predators.

Shrimp trawlers in the Australian northern prawn fishery discard some one-and-a-half tons or 70,000 individual animals each night. More than 240 species, including 75 families of fish, 11 of shark, and several of crustaceans and molluscs have been identified in the dumping of some 30,000 tons of marine life.

In the U.S. Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawl fishery 115 different species of finfish are taken along with shrimp -- many of them the immature, juvenile fish of other commercially valuable species. In 1986 and 1987 an estimated two billion kilograms of Gulf of Mexico finfish were dumped overboard. Studies on the impacts of shrimp fishery discards on finfish species and turtles in the Gulf reveal declines in the population levels.

6.4. The Impacts of Discarding

Bycatch removes fish that would be better left in the sea alive as part of the intricate food web. In many cases bycatch consists of the young, immature fish of commercially valuable species. They could otherwise replenish the stocks if allowed to mature. Much of discarded bycatch consists of non-commercial species of fish which are an important food (prey) for other commercially targeted fish, endangered species of fish, or other marine wildlife such as seabirds.

There are potential knock-on effects of bycatch, not just for commercial fish stocks, but the entire assemblage of species in marine ecosystems generally. For example, discard mortalities are known to have contributed to changes in the abundance and relationships of species in the Gulf of Alaska. These effects are so complex and the data often so inadequate that scientists can do little more than highlight how enormous the problem is.

Added to the massive fish discard figures and the bycatch of other marine animals are unknown quantities of marine life killed or harmed in fishing operations without ever being brought on board. They include loss of species from gear while fishing. Species which may escape fishing gear while still in the water do not escape unharmed, weakening their chances of survival after escape.

6.5. Solving the Bycatch Problem

The waste and damage caused through the use of unselective fishing gear and indiscriminate practices must be eliminated. In 1995, the UN's FAO fisheries department estimated that a 60 percent reduction in discards by the year 2000 could be achieved. Unfortunately, most governments have been reluctant to impose strict regulations to reduce discards.

Beyond requiring the development and use of selective gear, the most important step governments can take is to reduce the total fishing effort as low as possible. Excessive fishing effort only results in an increased risk of irreversible harm, and not in a long-term increase in catch, regardless of how selective the fishing gear itself may be. Developing selective technologies, better regulations and stronger enforcement can help, but wasteful discards are tied in large part to the problem of too many boats doing too much fishing.

7. Too Many Big Boats Catching Too Many Fish

7.1. A Plague of Fishing Boats

A basic problem in the world of fisheries today is that there are simply too many industrial-scale fishing boats catching too many fish from seriously depleted stocks. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, the total number of fishing vessels by 1992 numbered some 3.5 million, an increase of 136,000 boats since 1989. This included about 1.2 million "decked vessels", and about 2.3 million "undecked", small-scale craft used by more traditional, subsistence fishers around the world.

The 1.2 million decked fishing vessels form the industrial and semi-industrial fishing fleets, and are divided into two basic categories for statistical purposes according to length and gross registered tonnage (GRT). The dividing point is 24 meters in length and 100 GRT. There are more than 38,000 fishing vessels that make up the industrial fishing fleet greater than 24 meters/100GRT, according to FAO's Bulletin of Fishery Fleet Statistics. Altogether, their combined registered tonnage is about 16.6 million tons.

A further 9.4 million tons GRT fall into the semi-industrial category under 24 meters/100grt. There are about 1.14 million of these medium- to smaller-scale, decked, motorized fishing vessels in the semi-industrial sector.

The truly small-scale boats, numbering about 2.3 million, belong to the undecked category of fishing vessels, the sector that some refer to as "artisanal" fisheries. The vast majority of these average only a few crew members and are usually not motorized (FAO says only 32% have some kind of motor, usually an outboard).

While all three categories of fisheries -- industrial, semi-industrial and small-scale/artisanal -- contribute to greater of lesser degrees to overfishing and environmental damage, it is the industrial and semi-industrial decked vessels, and especially in the larger, "offshore" sector over 24 meters in length/100 GRT, where the greatest potential for overfishing and negative impacts on the marine environment exists. This is partly tied to their vastly greater mobility, fishing power and effectiveness, but also because these types of industrial vessels must catch vastly larger amounts of fish to pay for their investment, maintenance and operating costs.

For example, the industrial fishing fleet of 38,000 vessels (over 24 meters/100 GRT), which number only one-percent of the total of 3.5 million fishing vessels in the world, actually represents almost three-quarters (72%) of all capital invested in the entire global marine fishing fleet! That kind of investment (229 billion dollars!) requires colossal tonnage of fish to be hauled from the oceans on an around-the-clock basis in order to show any profitable return. That is what drives their owners to fish as if there were no tomorrow. Another revealing statistic is that these 38,000 industrial fishing vessels (the one-percenters) consume over 20 million tons of fuel per year -- almost half (44%) of all the fuel consumed by all fishing vessels worldwide.

The massive over-investment in industrial and semi-industrial type fishing ships and catching technology is reinforced by onshore developments in processing and marketing. Investment in gigantic factory catching and processing ships, and in on-shore processing plants, for example, create a demand for the continuous throughput of massive quantities of fish to ensure regular operations and to service loan repayments. All of this is supported by powerful economic and political interests.

7.2. Bankrupt Global Fishing Fleet Kept Afloat by Subsidies

Despite the mountains of fish they are vacuuming out of the seas, much of the industrial and semi-industrial fleet, is essentially bankrupt. FAO estimates the annual economic losses of these sectors collectively amount to more than US $50 billion!. Forty-six percent (46%) of the landed value of all world marine catches were required just to provide a return on capital invested in this excessive global fleet, which FAO says is disproportionately high.

This bankrupt state of affairs continues because governments are bankrolling the 50-billion dollar annual losses by subsidizing the owners of their national fishing industries with taxpayer funded handouts. These include investment grants and low interest concessions to build new factory ships or modernize older ones, fuel rebates, scrapping premiums, price support and many others.

In Japan, for example, the fishing industry has enjoyed a credit balance, from government and the commercial sector combined, of some $19 billion. In Europe, between 1983 and 1990, European Union support for fisheries rose from $80 million a year to $580 million, much of it for the construction of new vessels, modernization of old ones and for "exit grants" encouraging the export of redundant vessels to distant countries' waters.

Fuel subsidies are an important and widespread source of 'free' support for national fishing fleets. Before its collapse, the Soviet Union spent billions of dollars subsidizing its long-distance fleet that would roam as far as the Southern Ocean off Antarctica to catch fish. U.S. fishermen are exempted from paying diesel fuel taxes estimated at about $250 million a year. Again, it is the owners of the gigantic fishing vessels over 100 gross registered tons that consume nearly half of the fuel burned by all fishing boats who are doing very well in the fuel subsidies stakes.

7.3. Too Many Ships and More on the Way

Despite the blatant warning signs, new industrial-scale fishing vessels are rolling out of shipyards equipped with more efficient ways to find, catch and process fish, and adding to the colossal armada of big boats that are still fishing. This is folly when, in fact, it is fleet reductions that are urgently needed. Inevitably the vast amount of fishing effort in the world's oceans must be reduced -- dramatically -- if depleted fish populations are to have the chance to recover and then operate on an ecologically sustainable basis in the future.

8. Fleeet Migration - Exporting The Overfishing Problem

8.1. Seafood Companies React to a Supply Crisis

With too much fishing in home waters, heavy competition for declining stocks is a powerful incentive to fleet owners to move to more productive fishing ground, either on the unregulated high seas, or in other countries waters. Government's encourage this transfer of over-capacity, often by subsidizing fleet owners to send them to other parts of the world.

Typically, the shift is from the overfished waters of the industrialized North to the waters of so-called developing countries (and also onto the high seas) where it's hoped there may be more fish and fewer, if any, regulations.

This export of fishing over-capacity carries with it the same wasteful and destructive habits that have led to the declines and collapses of fish stocks back home. There is little regard for the economic or nutritional needs of the country where these fleets end up, or what the environmental and social effects may be. No government holds its companies accountable in a comprehensive manner for ecological or social damage done by their fishing fleets in other countries' waters.

A good example are the fisheries of Senegal which are marked by the importance of artisanal and traditional fishing, a low-technology approach, low initial investment and a large workforce. The artisanal sector is as, or even more, essential for nutritional reasons as for economic ones. Senegal has 47,000 artisanal fishermen. They comprise over seven per cent of the active population and bring in more than 70 per cent of the total volume of fish caught. As European waters have become progressively overfished, the European Union (EU) has looked further afield, to countries like Senegal, for new fishing grounds. This has been done as the EU strives to secure access to resources abroad, not only to supply its huge market, but also keep its industrialised fishing fleets active and thereby avoid social unrest. Over 15 years, in the absence of an appropriate management regime and effective enforcement, EU fishing operations have affected the resource, the marine environment and the Senegalese fishing communities dependent on it. As fish become scarcer, artisanal fishermen had to travel further out at sea to meet their catch. Some fishermen, unable to pay for equipment and fuel, resort to fishing to supply European or Asian boats who use local fishermen and their pirogues to get access to coastal areas and resources.

8.2. Governments Subsidize Fleet Migration

Government subsidies have encouraged the world's excess fishing capacity to migrate, often as a form of regional aid in response to falling local catches. That is the case, for example, with the European Union's desperate need to dump 40 percent of its excess fishing capacity -- much of it owned by Spanish fishing companies. The European Union (EU) pays handsome subsidies called "exit grants" to vessel owners to send their ships to fish in other countries' waters.

Multinational fishing companies, like Spain's Pescanova or Japan's Mitsubishi, are well placed to take advantage of such subsidies. Like many other corporations with worldwide fishing and seafood marketing operations, they maintain extensive worldwide operations concentrated around Africa, Asia and Latin America, even in such far flung places as New Zealand and the waters off Antarctica. Geographical diversification enables transnational fishing companies to offset the impact of declining catches in one region by substituting supplies from another.

8.3. Local Fishers Fighting Back

Anxious to earn hard currency to service their national debt, the governments of developing, Southern coastal nations have been selling the right to fish in their waters to hi-tech, foreign industrial fleets. During the same period, many of these Southern countries acquired their own 'modernized' fleets. With this enormous increase in fishing capacity it was only a matter of time before over-fishing began to chip away at fish stocks in Southern seas.

In response, local fishing people are fighting back. Recently, the Indian government was forced to backtrack on its deepsea fishing policy designed to open up India's fisheries to foreign industrial fishing fleets. The policy was met with fierce resistance from more than a million local fishers and fishworkers who staged national strikes. They have been joined by a significant section of India's 300 million fish eaters who consciously chose a fish-free diet in protest against giving international joint ventures free access to fish in the country's waters. Without such concerted action, India's deepsea fishing policy would have allowed more than 2000 large-scale foreign fishing vessels into Indian waters to fish almost entirely for export markets. Protestors feared that the livelihoods of India's 8 million fishermen would ultimately be ruined if that had happened, and supplies of fish for millions of local consumers would have dried up because of the export-oriented policy.

Much of this fisheries 'development' in the South is the result of aid programs by rich Northern nations, and their multi-lateral financial institutions which make low-interest loans. Fishing infrastructure (new wharves, freezer plants and processing ports for example) has been promoted and financed by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and others. The European Community, Norway, the U.S. and Canada, Japan, Taiwan and other industrialised fishing nations are also in on the act with bilateral aid programs that often fail to achieve their stated objectives of helping local people improve their lives.

The rationale for these "development" programs is that increased fish production will help local economies by providing more jobs, more money, and more food. In fact, this super-efficient factory fishing does nothing of the kind. Instead it worsens the drain of resources from South to North. More fish from Third World waters winds up on the dinner tables and in the livestock feedlots of the rich developed countries, not on the plates of hungry people in the countries where the need is most acute.

9. Overfishing Threatens Food Security

9.1. Fish: A Vital Source of Protein for Billions

Fish provide roughly 40 per cent of the protein consumed by nearly two-thirds of the world's population. For example, over a billion people throughout Asia depend on fish and seafood as their major source of animal protein. But, fish have moved into the luxury-style, high-priced food class. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warns that fish, long regarded as the "poor man's protein", is diminishing globally as a result of increasing market demand and overfishing. Declaring that "the golden age" of fishing had ended, UNESCO, along with the Food and Agriculture Organization, has warned that there will be a global shortfall of fish for human diets of 20 to 30 million tons by the year 2000.

The developed nations are winning in the consumption stakes. While their citizens have average annual supplies of about 26 kilograms of seafood per person each year, people in the developing countries have only nine kilograms of fish per person each year. During the period 1988-1990, the developed nations imported 76% by weight of all fish for direct human consumption that went into international trade.

For people with abundant food alternatives, the risk of having less fish or lower quality fish may be little more than an annoyance. But for people who are highly dependent on fish in their diets, uncertain fish food supplies may mean they are exposed to the possibility of real harm. Like other foods, fisheries products go to those who can pay for them. In the case of developing countries, for instance, the benefits of increased fish production are often directed toward the wealthier inhabitants in the big cities, or siphoned off to even richer export markets in the northern industrialized countries. When people whose household budgets are largely devoted to food face a large increase in the cost of one of their major foods they become worse off economically as well as in nutritive terms. Poorer consumers are forced to shift to inferior foods, putting them at risk of missing important nutrients.

9.2. Indulging the Rich, Hurting the Poor

In many countries where coastal communities substantially depend on local fisheries people watch helplessly as their fish stocks are whittled away by export-oriented production policies favored by their governments and local entrepreneurs.

Maritime anthropologist, James McGoodwin, reports that in one rural shrimp fishing community of Pacific Mexico, that he has studied for many years, late summer often finds many local inhabitants close to starvation. There are no agricultural harvests available, and the government closes the most important fishing grounds to local fishers seeking food nearer to shore to allow juvenile shrimp to get bigger and move into deeper waters where they can be caught later by fishing companies who are exporters. Local fishers are excluded from participating in the export industry because their "artisanal" mode of production is considered by the government to be too unproductive, inefficient and extensive. Consequently, McGoodwin reports, as summer wears on hungry village children are forced to "eat dirt or sand to ally the gnawing hunger in their bellies."

This exemplifies a growing trend that in many of the world's fish producing countries sees impoverished coastal peoples being denied access to an important local food resource so that it may become a discretionary, luxury food item for other people far away, who already have surplus food supplies.

Often such export-oriented fisheries development policies are assisted or fostered by powerful international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who insist that these countries export even more of their natural resources just to pay the interest on burdensome development debt. As a consequence, the problems faced by small-scale, artisanal fishing people are being compounded.

Export-oriented fisheries development policies have become an invitation to global corporate seafood predators seeking quick profits. Even if their industrial scale fleets remain within deep sea areas and do not venture inshore, they still affect fisheries close to shore where fishers from coastal communities get their catches. Many of the species these coastal communities catch are mobile populations of fish that move back and forth between deep and coastal waters where they can be caught as food fish for local needs.

Even worse, the foreign fleets often do not stay offshore where they've been licensed to fish, but move in to compete with local, coastal fishers. Such encroachment has increased pressure on biologically renewable fishery resources nearer to shore to such an extent as to cause total landings of small-scale, local fishermen to decline in both weight and value. This threat to a vulnerable resource has serious implications for domestic consumers in regions where fish are the only affordable source of protein.

9.3. Wasteful Fishing Practices Threaten Food Security

Many export-oriented fisheries in developing countries, particularly shrimp trawl fisheries in tropical waters, produce enormous bycatch -- called "trash-fish" -- which are usually discarded back to the sea -- either dead or dying. Recently, though, "trash-fish" is being retained and ground into fishmeal for export shrimp production in marine farms. This has meant the loss of many tons of valuable food fish that might otherwise have satisfied vital local requirements for protein. In the waters off Bangladesh -- a country where malnourishment and starvation are chronic -- the trash-fish catch wasted in the export-oriented shrimp trawl fisheries is estimated around 400,000 tons annually!

Their removal from the ecosystem in such massive quantities is harming local fisheries and undermining the ability of local people who have very little in the first place to feed themselves -- and all for sake of supplying a luxury food item, the likes of shrimp, for richer people far away, who already have more than enough food on their plates as it is.

Aquaculture Threat to Food Security

Fishing for Farm Feeds and Fertilizers

10. Fishing and Jobs

10.1.Overfishing Threatens Sustainable Livelihoods

Worldwide, about 13 million people make all or a major part of their living from fishing. Together with their immediate families they comprise some 50 million people directly dependent on fishing for their livelihoods. They all depend upon healthy oceans and abundant fish populations.

10.2. Newfoundland's Economy Collapses

The northwest Atlantic cod stocks off eastern Canada once sustained one of the world's largest fisheries, and supported livelihoods for many generations of Newfoundlanders. The cod are now considered "commercially extinct", so the cod fishery was closed down in 1992 when the Canadian Government moved to protect what remained of overfished stocks. The devastating result -- 20,000 people involved in fishing and shore-based activities lost their jobs virtually overnight.

Despite the '92 ban on cod fishing, The stocks have continued a precipitous decline. By 1995, the Canadian Federal Department of Fisheries declared that the largest stock had declined from 400,000 tons in 1990 to only 2,700 tons at the end of 1994. Even more disheartening for Newfoundlanders was prediction that, even in the unlikely event that the population of northern cod started an immediate recovery, it would take at least 15 years before it may be healthy enough to withstand significant levels of fishing. Even worse, following the 1992 closure of Canada's east coast cod fishery, an additional 20,000 people were thrown out of work when the Federal Government closed several other fisheries due to the collapse of stocks of other species off Canada's east coast.

10.3. Not Just Eastern Canada

Off the coast of New England in the United States, the depletion of the groundfish stocks around the once fertile fishing grounds of Georges Bank has taken a heavy toll on the economy. By 1992, the reduction in annual fisheries landings by 55 thousand tons had cost $350 million US dollars and 14,000 jobs, according to a 1990 report from the Massachusetts Offshore Groundfish Task Force. But, by 1994 the New England Fisheries Management Council agreed that the stopgap measures imposed earlier to preserve fish numbers in the Georges Bank area weren't working. According to one regional fisheries manager: "We are catching the fish far faster than they can reproduce."

10.4. Society Pays the Long-term Costs of Overfishing

These are not isolated examples, but they illustrate how government support for the expansionist motivations of private investors in fisheries, who are compelled by short-term profits, often results in society at large ending up the long-term losers.

The profits from capital intensive, hi-tech, large-scale fisheries are privatized by investors during the boom years, while the costs of such irrational economic behaviour are socialized for years after the crash -- the taxpayer picks up the long-term bills. In Canada's case the social welfare bill in excess of a billion dollars for benefits to tens of thousands of displaced Newfoundland fishers and shore-based fishworkers may be only a portion of the total longer term costs to the Canadian public.

10.5. Deciding How the Necessary Cutbacks Should Be Made

In many fisheries, reductions in fishing operations will need to be substantial if the area's fish populations are to rebuild to naturally abundant levels. In some cases, it may be necessary for fishing to cease entirely, perhaps even for a long time, as with Canada's cod fishery. In striving for recovery and the establishment of ecologically responsible fishing, countries will have to choose where the cuts in fishing effort are to be made: the medium- to large-scale, industrial-type, or small-scale, community-based fisheries.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization and other observers have produced revealing data in this regard: reducing the large- and medium-scale fishing industry by half might eliminate several hundreds of thousands of jobs on fishing boats. Reducing the small-scale, artisanal fishing sector by half would eliminate several million jobs.

In comparing the world's two marine fishing industries -- large-scale vs. small-scale -- several important points can be made that also have bearing on cutbacks. Comparisons have shown that the small-scale, community-based fisheries actually provide about the same amount of marine fish for human consumption as the large-scale, company-owned fleets on a global basis (24 million vs. 27 million tons respectively). In producing its half-share of fish for human consumption, however:

In the final analysis, overfishing is the principal threat to long-term employment in fisheries. Saving jobs means ensuring that fish populations remain abundant, and the oceans' health and productive processes are continuously protected.