Ocean Fisheries Maxed
Out

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By Stephen Leahy,
Inter Press Service, March 7, 2007. “

Two-thirds of
fish stocks in the world’s high seas are overfished, while most of those closer
to shore are failing or fished to the maximum, a new U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization (FOA) report said Monday. More and stronger regional fisheries
management organisations are needed to rebuild depleted stocks and prevent the
collapse of other stocks, warned the FAO’s latest ‘State of World Fisheries and
Aquaculture’ (SOFIA) report. Ocean fisheries have ‘most likely’ reached their
zenith, said FAO Assistant Director-General for Fisheries Ichiro Nomura. In
fact, that peak may have been reached some time ago. The annual world fish catch
since the late 1980s has been stalled at between 85 million and 95 million
tonnes. The SOFIA 2006 report records marine fisheries catch at 85.8 millions
tonnes and notes that 25 percent of marine stocks are overexploited or depleted
while 52 percent are ‘fully exploited’. In the open ocean, where the deep-sea
trawlers roam unrestricted, stocks of hakes, Atlantic cod, halibut, orange
roughy, bluefin tuna and sharks are all in deep trouble. ‘They (open ocean
species) are key indicators of the state of a massive piece of the ocean
ecosystem,’ said Nomura in a statement. In recent years, numerous scientific
studies of the oceans have clearly indicated they are in trouble. A major study
published last fall in Science magazine projected that every commercial fishery
in the world will be wiped out before 2050 and that the oceans may never recover
without significant reform of the fisheries industry. A month later, U.N. talks
failed to establish a moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawling, widely
acknowledged as wasteful and damaging to ocean bottom ecosystems. In February,
researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada calculated that
these trawlers receive 152 million dollars a year in fuel and other subsidies.
Without these subsidies, the few hundred ships that make up the global deep-sea
trawler fleet would actually lose millions of dollars a year, said Rashid
Sumaila, a researcher at the University of British Columbia.”

Link to FAO’s SOFIA full report and
summary

;

FAO information on global fish stocks (PDF 6
pages).