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Copyright © 2002 Earth Policy Institute
Fish Catch Leveling Off
Janet Larsen
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
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OTHER INFORMATION FROM THE EARTH POLICY
INSTITUTE
ECO-ECONOMY
UPDATES
Fish Farming May
Soon Overtake Cattle Ranching As a Food Source
BOOKS
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
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