How the world's oceans are running out of fish
Pastor Dale Morgan
How the world's oceans are running out of fish*
The future of our seas has never been more precarious. Ninety years of
industrial-scale overfishing has brought us to the brink of an
ecological catastrophe and deprived millions of their livelihoods. As
scientific guidelines are ignored and catches become ever bigger, Alex
Renton tells why the international community has failed to act
* Alex Renton
* The Observer,
* Sunday May 11 2008
It is early morning in Barcelona's La Boqueria market and the fish
stallholders are setting out their wares. Mounds of pink and grey
glisten down the dim alleys - shoppers and tourists peering at the fins
and tentacles. It is not like any fish shop in Britain - some stalls
sell five different species of squid and cuttlefish, half a dozen types
of shrimp and prawn, 10 different cuts of salt cod. It is a fish eater's
haven in the heart of a city that eats and sells more fish than anywhere
else in Europe.
Anyone who cares about where their fish come from - and this should mean
anyone who wants to go on eating them - should take two tools when they
visit the fishmonger. One is the handy guidance provided by the Marine
Conservation Society, Fish to Avoid and Fish to Eat (the latter is still
the longer); the other is a ruler. My ruler is the type handed out to
commercial fishermen by the international advisory body, Incofish, and
has pictures of key species with marks indicating when they can be
considered mature (and, thus, OK to catch).
So I set about lining up my ruler against the La Boqueria fish, starting
with the mackerel (should be 34cm), the plaice (39cm) and the redfish
(45cm). All turn out to be mere babies. The mackerel is half the
designated length. A glance around the stalls shows 10 or more species
on the MCS's Avoid list, including hake, swordfish, monkfish, bluefin
tuna and, of course, cod.
I don't spend much time doing this because the Catalan fishmongers don't
like my ruler - or me. They don't want to talk about why they are
selling tiny hake (one of Europe's most endangered species) and why not
a single fish in the market has any 'sustainable' labelling.
One old lady asks me what I'm after. 'I want to know why the Spanish are
eating so many undersized fish from populations that are running out,' I
say. 'It's simple,' she says. 'We like fish and small fish taste better.'
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.
In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass
had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four
years' fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts,
for just $4m a year. In 2006, access for 43 giant EU factory fishing
vessels to Mauritania's long coastline was bought for £24.3m a year.
It's estimated that these deals have put 400,000 west African fishermen
out of work; some of them now take to the sea only as ferrymen for
desperate would-be migrants to the Canary Islands and Europe. And among
the millions of Africans who depend on fish as their main source of
protein, consumption has declined from 9kg per year to 7kg.
North Atlantic fish stocks have been in decline for well over a century.
Callum Roberts points out in his recent book The Unnatural History of
the Sea that it was obvious from the 1880s that fish stocks were in
decline. Fish catch records from the 1920s onwards show that, despite
the enormous improvements in boat design and trawling technology and
better refrigeration, catches of the great Atlantic species, such as
haddock, cod, hake and turbot, remained constant or slowly declined. As
they have ever since.
Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its
practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet
Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually
worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in
the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof
Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its
attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish?
'Quite simply,' Roberts says, 'agreements and deals brokered by
politicians will never be satisfactory. They always look for the
short-term fix.' He and his team at York University did a survey of the
last 20 years of EU ministerial decisions on fish catches and found
that, on average, they set quotas for fishing fleets 15 to 30 per cent
higher than those recommended as safe by scientists.
'What that figure doesn't tell you is that often, for less threatened
species like mackerel or whiting, they have set quotas 100 per cent
higher than the science recommended. So, in their efforts to pacify the
industry, they are bringing populations that could be sustainably fished
into the risk zone,' he said.
The fishing industry, Roberts feels, has exerted excessive influence on
politicians in Europe's Atlantic nations since the 18th century - when
it was necessary to keep the fleets well manned, as a source of seamen
for their navies when war broke out.
Europe is by far the worst criminal among the developed nations. It is
in the Far East, in Japan and Korea, that most fish are eaten, per head
- the Japanese eat 66kg each a year, as opposed to Spain's 44kg and
Britain's 20kg. But the Chinese (at 25kg) alone eat around a third of
the world's fish, and, as with meat, the fish proportion of their diet
is soaring as the population gets more wealthy. (The fact that much
Asian fish is farmed is little consolation - their feed may often be
derived from wild fish.)
According to Greenpeace, Chinese fishing fleets are among the most
rapacious when it comes to hoovering up the stocks of small nations in
the Pacific and Atlantic. But in no Asian country is the notion of
sustainable fishing much developed among consumers - and it is from
consumers that any demand for change must come. Because, as Roberts and
all the green lobby groups note, the structures and organisations set up
by politicians and industry to control fisheries, or even preserve the
most endangered species, have entirely failed.
The Observer went to see one of these bodies in action in Tokyo a few
weeks ago. ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of
Atlantic Tunas, is an obscure - if you're not in the tuna business -
Madrid-based organisation that spends some €2.3m (£1.8m) of EU
taxpayers' money a year collating and commissioning scientific research,
and holding meetings for the 45 nations with an interest in the
tuna-type species in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. These include the
US, Japan, China and the UK. If you work for ICCAT, it's a high air
miles life: Tokyo in March, Florianopolis, Brazil, next month. This is
all in the cause of conserving tuna, of course. Which ICCAT, all
observers agree, has utterly failed to do.
In fact, the commission is a joke: known in the business as the
International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas. Sergi Tudela, the World
Wildlife Fund's head of fisheries for the Mediterranean, doesn't find it
funny. 'ICCAT is a treaty, and some of its contracting parties pervert
the spirit of it to ensure their overfishing of tuna continues,' he
says. Roberts agrees. 'ICCAT doesn't do what it says it does - it
doesn't conserve. Instead it presides over the decline and collapse of
tuna stocks.'
After the first day's talks the Japanese government threw an ICCAT
party. Delegates - fishermen, industry moguls, scientists, lobbyists and
fisheries ministry reps - stood around chatting politely, sipping their
drinks, in a grand carpeted conference room. Some very senior EU
fisheries people were there, but not Mitsubishi, the enormous Japanese
company that buys most European tuna. It pulled out at the last moment.
Silver plates in hand, the delegates tackled the buffet. Among the
crabmeat pilaf and stewed chicken, there were several platters of sushi.
There were nigiri rolls with slivers of raw-red belly meat on top -
probably bluefin tuna, the most endangered commercially exploited fish
in the world and most likely brought to Japan by Mitsubishi. Bluefin is
also the world's most expensive fish - a tuna that was sold in Tokyo's
Tsukiji market this year went to a Hong Kong-based trader for the price
of a top-of-the-range Mercedes.
Tudela, who'd been hopeful of this meeting, seemed depressed when we
caught up with him in Tokyo. The Japanese had talked of reining back
their Mediterranean operations. It is they who buy much of the bluefin
tuna which is caught in the eastern Atlantic, often outside quotas; or
caught young and fattened in cages in the Mediterranean. 'The Atlantic
bluefin fishery is unsustainable in every way - economically, socially
and ecologically,' said Tudela. 'But the fishing fleet keeps getting
bigger. There are six new reefers [large tuna-catching boats] linked to
the Japanese in the region. I think the fishing industry is starting to
feel really hijacked by the Japanese.'
ICCAT may be the most ineffective international organisation of all
time. In the course of its 42-year life, several tuna species in the
Mediterranean and Atlantic have come near disappearing, and nearly all
are in grave danger. Despite the endless conferences and scientific
studies sponsored by ICCAT and member nations, WWF's analysis shows that
catches of bluefin tuna, a 'critically endangered species', according to
the standards of the respected World Conservation Union, are
'dramatically higher' than the quotas set. And that catches are
consistently under-reported, or not reported at all.
While EU ministers promise action on illegal fishing of tuna, they also
continue to underwrite the tuna fishing industry through massive
subsidies: €16m (£13.1m) has been spent in recent years on the European
purse seining fleet alone, according to the international lobbying group
Oceana.
Xavier Pastor, its director in Europe, says bluntly: 'The
over-exploitation of the bluefin tuna has been promoted and financed by
European taxpayers and continues through the subsidising of operating
costs, such as fuel.'
The problem for many observers is not just that ICCAT is ineffectual,
but that it may be doing more harm than good. 'If you announce, as ICCAT
did two years ago, an "emergency fisheries recovery" plan, then you are
telling the concerned public that something is being done about the
problem. But it isn't - the fisheries recovery plan is a misnomer,' says
Roberts.
ICCAT refused requests for an interview, telling us to go and look at
its website instead.
Is there any hope for fish? If we cannot sort out the problem of bluefin
tuna - a highly prized fish, whose life cycle is well understood, and
whose fishing is closely monitored - what hope is there for the other
stocks? Will our children eat wild fish or only farmed? Tudela sees some
encouraging movement in Europe - the French, major tuna fishers, have
for the first time prosecuted some quota-busting fishermen. At European
Commission level, he thinks the problems are being taken a little more
seriously.
Roberts has one solution: marine reserves. Protecting up to 40 per cent
of the world's oceans in permanent refuges would enable the recovery of
fish stocks and help replenish surrounding fisheries. 'The cost,
according to a 2004 survey, would be between £7bn and £8.2bn a year,
after set-up. But put that against the £17.6bn a year we currently spend
on harmful subsidies that encourage overfishing.'
Reserves must not be ruled by politicians, says Roberts. 'The model of
industry-political control for regulatory bodies just doesn't work. It's
like central banks - put them under politicians' control and they make
dangerous, short-term decisions that result in economic instability. Put
them under independent control, and they make better-judged, more
strategic decisions.'
The Newfoundland cod fishery, for 500 years the world's greatest, was
exhausted and closed in 1992, and there's still no evidence of any
return of the fish. Once stocks dip below a certain critical level, the
scientists believe, they can never recover because the entire eco-system
has changed. The question is whether, after 50 years of vacillation and
denial, there's any prospect of the politicians acting decisively now.
'It is awful and we are on the road to disaster,' says Tudela. 'But the
collapse - in some, not all the situations - is still reversible. And
it's worth trying.'