ENVIRONMENT: Plenty of Blame for Collapsing Fish Stocks

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

SAN DIEGO, California, Feb 4 2009 (IPS) - Climate change, pollution and overfishing have left the oceans in crisis, experts agree. Now a new study reveals that every national government with a fishing fleet has dramatically failed to manage fisheries in a responsible manner.

A detailed survey of the 53 countries that land 96 percent of the world's marine catch shows that all have failed to comply with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation's Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Developed in 1995, the 53 fishing nations all agreed to comply with the code as a potential rescue measure for the world's fisheries.

And while countries claimed to comply, in fact not one is in full compliance, according the detailed analysis reported in the science journal Nature Wednesday.

"I'm confident we would have turned the corner on the collapsing fish stocks had countries complied with the code," said Tony Pitcher of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, one of the study co-authors.

"The code effectively dealt with 98 percent of the major problems of fisheries," Pitcher said in an interview.

Even the more responsible nations such as Norway, the United States, Canada, Australia and Iceland only qualified for a rating of "good" with an estimated 55 to 60 percent compliance based on the four-year survey and analysis. Twenty-eight countries, mainly in the developing world and representing 40 percent of the world's marine fish catch, are failing badly, the report found.

"The European compliance was very disappointing," he said.

The analysis shows that the EU Common Fisheries Policy has failed, he said. European fishing nations don't control their fishing vessels, don't respect fish quotas recommended by scientists, are not policing illegal fishing and have very limited protected areas.

"I hope this analysis will push the EU to clean up its act," Pitcher stressed.

Although the voluntary nature of the code was crucial to getting a unanimous agreement in 1995, Pitcher and his co-authors say "the time has come for an integrated international legal instrument covering all aspects of fisheries management".

"With climate change altering the oceans, it is highly urgent to take action on fisheries," they said.

The crisis in the oceans will put the seafood industry out of business, Jeremy Jackson, director of the Centre for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, told attendees of the Seafood Summit in San Diego.

The summit is a conference where fishers, fish farmers, multinational seafood corporations and seafood buyers mix with conservationists and scientists to debate and find common ground on how to create a sustainable seafood industry and protect the oceans.

Jackson pointed out the reality in today's oceans: overfishing is decimating many species and killing coral reefs, bottom trawling is destroying fish habitat, and the number of ocean dead zones is increasing as are the number of toxic red tides. Climate change is warming the oceans and "sending species galloping towards the poles" and human emissions of carbon is turning the oceans acidic, dooming many shell-forming organisms and affecting many other species.

"The oceans are undergoing extreme habitat change," warned Jackson.

Stopping this means that in the next 20 to 30 years humanity will have to halt carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, stop fertiliser run-off into the oceans and halt overfishing, he said. And one-third of the oceans need to be zoned as no-take areas.

"The very first step should be to enforce fisheries laws we have and put in stronger protection measures," he said.

However, when it comes to the longer term, Jackson said he hasn't seen any data showing that wild fisheries could be sustained into the future except for a few species like sardines and anchovies. Future seafood will have to come from aquaculture but only if it is done correctly. "Farmed salmon is a catastrophe," he said.

Aquaculture could be done sustainably using native species in the open ocean, but it will take major investments into research to get there, he said.

The summit profiled a few new open ocean aquaculture operations that raise local species in deep waters and where currents reduce pollution and disease risks. More promising still is a new polyculture approach to aquaculture where several different species – salmon, shellfish and seaweed – are grown together so that waste from one species is food for another.

"Oceans are in crisis, but this also a time of enormous opportunity," concluded Jackson.