Global Fishing Crisis Beyond

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.228.3489; http://www.seaaroundus.org/researcher/dpauly/PDF/2011/Other%20Items/BeyondDuplicityandIgnoranceinGlobalFisheries.pdf

duplicity and ignorance in global fisheries Ever increasing industrial fishing efforts have caused a global fisheries crisis with repeated collapses of fish stocks worldwide, reports DANIEL PAULY. If this continues it will lead to further depletion of biodiversity and fish resources and the transformation of marine ecosystems into dead zones. Fisheries can be sustained into the future only if fish resources are allowed to recover and rebuild and fishing efforts are reduced. Fisheries management and fisheries science must be transformed into life-affirming disciplines. Freshwater and coastal fisheries of ancient times had the capacity to induce severe decline and even to obliterate vulnerable species of marine mammals, fish and invertebrates. 1 But it’s only since the onset of industrial fishing in the 1880s, with use of fossil-fuel powered vessels and the first steam-powered trawlers, that successive depletion of inshore stocks became routine followed by depletion of more offshore stocks. The three decades after World War II were a period of rapidly increasing fishing effort and landings, but also of spectacular collapses, particularly in small pelagic (open sea) fish stocks. Operations became increasingly industrialised from the 1950s with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later, GPS. In this period a toxic triad of catch underreporting, ignoring scientific advice and blaming the environment emerged as standard responses to ongoing fisheries collapses, which became increasingly more frequent, finally engulfing major North Atlantic fisheries where it took only a few years for accumulated coastal stocks of flatfish and other groups to be depleted, forcing the trawlers to move on to the central North Sea, then further away, all the way to Iceland. 2 The response to depletion of traditional fishing grounds was an expansion of North Atlantic and northern hemisphere fisheries in three dimensions. Geographic expansion: A southward expansion began towards the tropics 3 and in developing industrial ...