Copyright © 2002 Earth Policy Institute
Fish Catch Leveling Off
The world fish catch in 2000, the last year for which global data are available, was reported at 94.8 million tons. After decades of steady growth, the oceanic fish catch has plateaued and since the late 1980s has fluctuated between 85 million and 95 million tons. Some three fourths of oceanic fisheries are fished at or beyond their sustainable yields. In one third of these, stocks are declining.
Some scientists, when correcting for suspected overreporting
by China, the world's leading fishing nation, believe that global catch
has actually declined by 360,000 tons each year since 1988. When catch
of the highly variable stocks of Peruvian anchovetas, a species substantially
affected by El Niņo/Southern Oscillation events, is excluded, the world
fish catch appears to have declined by 660,000 tons a year during that
time.
Recent evidence points to a rapid decline in production of the North Atlantic
Ocean, where catches of many popular fish species, including cod, tuna,
haddock, flounder, and hake, have dropped by half within the past 50 years,
even though fishing efforts tripled. Previous infamous collapses, like
that of the Newfoundland cod fishery, were local in scale, but this decline
is ocean-wide.
At least $2.5 billion of government money goes to subsidize fishing in
the North Atlantic each year, supporting incomes and paying portions of
boat fuel and equipment bills. Worldwide, fishing subsidies total at least
$15 billion, but may be substantially higher. In 1993, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization reported that the operating costs of fisheries
around the world exceeded commercial revenues by over $50 billion each
year. Without subsidies, the world's fishing industry would be bankrupt.
About 950 million people worldwide rely on fish as their primary source
of protein. In addition, ocean fisheries and fish-related industries sustain
the livelihoods of some 200 million people. These are high numbers to
sustain on a bankrupt industry.
Subsidies hide the fact that current fishing practices are unsustainable,
both economically and ecologically. Subsidy money has helped to build
a technologically advanced global fishing fleet of over 23,000 ships weighing
more than 100 tons each. Massive ships, such as trawlers, drag big nets--quickly
catching large quantities of fish and bycatch. Some vessels have onboard
processing facilities. Large ships consume a great deal of energy: it
takes twice as much fuel to capture a ton of fish today as it did 20 years
ago. Overall, the world's fishing fleet has the capacity to catch fish
at more than twice the fisheries' sustainable yields.
As fish harvests from the ocean are steady or declining, production of
fish from farms (aquaculture) is booming. Since 1990, aquaculture production
has grown by almost 10 percent each year, more than twice the rate for
poultry, the second fastest-growing sector of the animal protein economy.
Total fish-farm production in 2000 was almost 36 million tons. In 1950,
aquaculture provided less than 1 percent of the fish supply; now it accounts
for a full 27 percent of the world fish market.
Growing fish in pens and ponds could reduce pressure on oceanic fisheries,
but only if it is done wisely. A number of popular farmed fish, like salmon
and shrimp, are carnivorous, requiring fish from the oceans to be harvested
to provide fish meal and fish oil for their food. Some species require
up to 5 kilograms of wild fish for each kilogram of fish produced. Harvesting
fish for feed can empty oceans of smaller fish, depriving larger wild
fish of their food supply.
China, which provides 23 million tons of the world aquaculture output,
has farmed fish for thousands of years. It now devotes some 5 million
hectares of land to farming primarily herbivorous fish. An additional
1.7 million hectares of rice paddies double as fish ponds. China has developed
an innovative carp polyculture, in which several carp species with complementary
feeding habits are grown together as they would in natural ecosystems.
China's onshore, integrated aquaculture and agriculture production system
can serve as a model for aquaculturalists. Onshore production can minimize
problems that plague marine aquaculture operations, such as coastal habitat
destruction and excessive nutrient pollution, which can cause algal blooms.
It also reduces the risk of introducing nonnative species through escapes
and spreading diseases that fish in high-density confinement are prone
to.
For a number of oceanic fisheries, a deliberate reduction of fishing,
along with the development of "no-take" protected areas, is the only way
for stocks to rebuild. Marine reserves have been shown to increase fish
populations and diversity and to produce larger fish both within their
boundaries as well as in commercially accessible waters. In a matter of
a few years, a nearby off-limits area can revive a foundering fishery.
To protect wild stocks, consumers can reduce their overall fish consumption,
or at least purchase responsibly produced herbivorous fish or those caught
from well-managed fisheries. The Marine Stewardship Council, an independently
operated international accreditation organization, has certified six fisheries
as sustainable. Careful management of fisheries can be likened to prudent
use of an endowment: if the principal, or the stock, is conserved, people
can live off the interest indefinitely.
Copyright © 2002 Earth Policy Institute
OTHER INFORMATION FROM THE EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE
Fish Farming May Soon Overtake Cattle Ranching As a Food Source
Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, and Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts, The Earth Policy Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Lester R. Brown, Chapter 3: "Signs of Stress: The Biological
Base" and Chapter 7: "Feeding Everyone Well," in Eco-Economy:
Building an Economy for the Earth (W.W. Norton & Company,
2001).
LINKS
FishBase
http://www.fishbase.org
The Marine Fish Conservation Network
http://www.conservefish.org
The Marine Stewardship Council
http://www.msc.org
OneFish Fisheries Research Portal
http://www.onefish.org
SeaWeb
http://www.seaweb.org
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Fisheries Department
http://www.fao.org/fi
WWF's Petition to the European Union Fisheries Ministers
to Stop Overfishing
http://www.panda.org/stopoverfishing/petition