How the world's oceans are running out of fish

[muriel_volestrangler]

...

Is anyone not aware that wild fish are in deep trouble? That three-quarters of commercially caught species are over-exploited or exploited to their maximum? Do they not know that industrial fishing is so inefficient that a third of the catch, some 32 million tonnes a year, is thrown away? For every ocean prawn you eat, fish weighing 10-20 times as much have been thrown overboard. These figures all come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which also claims that, of all the world's natural resources, fish are being depleted the fastest. With even the most abundant commercial species, we eat smaller and smaller fish every year - we eat the babies before they can breed.

Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at York University, predicts that by 2050 we will only be able to meet the fish protein needs of half the world population: all that will be left for the unlucky half may be, as he puts it, 'jellyfish and slime'. Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has, he and most scientists agree, led to 'ecological meltdown'. Whole biological food chains have been destroyed.

Many of those fish you can see in such glorious abundance in Spanish markets - and on our own supermarket shelves - come not from European seas but from the coasts of the continents of the poor: Africa, South America and parts of Asia. Fishermen have always roamed far afield - the Basques began fishing the great cod populations off Newfoundland at least 500 years ago. And when serious shortages in traditional stocks around Europe began to be commercially apparent 30 years ago, the trawler fleets began to move south.

Strangely one of the first international attempts to conserve fish stocks, especially for the more easily exploited nations, also became part of the disaster. The United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, signed in 1979, extended national rights over fisheries to 200 miles from a country's coasts. But it included a provision that, if fish stocks in that zone were surplus to national needs, the country could sell its rights to outsiders. That convention allowed cash-strapped and sometimes corrupt countries in west Africa to raise funds by letting the industrial trawler fleets in. Since 1979 the EU has negotiated deals on fishing rights with a string of impoverished African countries. Despite the EU's own studies indicating massive and quite possibly irreversible damage to fish stocks off west Africa, these deals continue to be struck.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/11/fishing.food

[RC]

1. Yet another reason we need to get our population down to an earth sustainable level.

When the oil finally does run out population reduction will be done for us. We are destroying the only nest we can survive in. There is no where else. Most likely ever. If we do manage to go elsewhere where there is no other life, there is a reason. If there is life there and we go there, neither we nor it will have any defenses against each other.

[tom_paine]

2. Not to worry. Mother Earth will take care of that for us.

She's already putting the wheels in motion, much as our own bodies mobilize macrophages and antibodies prior to crushing a nasty bout of the flu virus.

Plus, it is quite clear from our sociopolitical stagnation for the past 150 years (our most significant social achievement as a species has been the ending of slavery...although we all know slavery has not ended, only diminished, and that it is alive and well in parts of the world and the global sex trade, so humans haven';t even really eliminated slavery) and the ehadlong rush to the New Dark Ages, with Amerika carrying Germany's banner from the 1930s, that we as a species are likely a failure, and evolutionary dead end.

So just let Mamma Earth do her immunological thing. Probably nothing we can do about it at this late date anyway, with methane pouring into the atmosphere, the oceans acidifying as well as losing their buffering capacity, and billions of tons of plastics infesting our oceans and their food chains, to name just a few of our "viral impacts" on the body of the Earth.

Don't hate the messenger because reality sucks.