March 26, 2014 — We should follow the example of the developed countries that have managed their fisheries so that stocks can replenish themselves. With careful and determined steps, developing nations can ensure high, sustained catches — meeting not only their own needs but supplying world markets as well.
Some 120 years ago, fleets of trawlers, each with a crew of dozens, would steam into the open sea, having depleted the coastal fishing grounds around the British Isles. They caught several tons a day, mostly big fish — cod measuring one and half meters, huge flatfish of 3 meters, and many more. Today, vessels plying the North Atlantic catch a few kilograms of small fish — cod just 30 centimeters long and tiny flatfish.
Consumers, though, are hardly aware of these changes — because nowadays it is a smaller number of more powerful, modern vessels, with crews of two or three, that bring fish to local ports, though in smaller quantities than those that trawled the North Atlantic over a century ago. Meanwhile, larger, immensely more powerful vessels range farther afield in the richer fishing grounds off West Africa, South America and in the Pacific.
Most seafood served in Europe and North America comes from the waters of the global South, whose small-scale fishermen cannot compete with the industrial fleets seeking what they can no longer catch, or are not permitted to catch, in northern waters. Though Western governments, particularly the United States, are working to conserve and replenish their fishing grounds, the worldwide depletion of fish stocks continues apace.
We are trying slowly to repair the mess we’ve made of our Northern fisheries, but we are doing this by transferring the problem, trying to solve overfishing in one place while worsening the problem somewhere else.
Both the United States and the European Union import 70 percent of their seafood. Most of it comes from the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones of West and East African countries, and from island countries in the Central and South Pacific, where European fleets operate in competition with fleets from East Asia, notably China. Some of this fishing is illegal, but much is done under legal “partnership agreements” with local governments. These countries get a fraction of the value for the use of their offshore resources, while the scale of the catches puts their food security at risk.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the size of the annual world catch since the 1990s is either stagnating or slowly declining, at great cost to society and to marine ecosystems. This trend is undercutting recent progress. Fishing grounds off the United States are being replenished, owing to the passage in 1976 of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which took aim at the twin scourges of overcapacity fueled by government subsidies to the American fishing fleet, and the subsequent overfishing of depressed stocks. Meanwhile, the European Parliament, under pressure from consumers, environmental organizations and maritime scientists, adopted a series of measures last year that could, if implemented, have similar positive results.
Read the full opinion piece at the New York Times