Fisheries Management

You are here: Home > Marine Conservation > Fisheries Management

Our fisheries were once thought to be inexhaustible. But during the last 150 years the original sail boat has been superseded by increasingly high tech fishing practices which allow us to fish more efficiently, in deeper and previously inaccessible waters, for longer periods of time and increasingly farther afield.

The result? The European Commission now considers that 88% of EU stocks are overfished compared with only 25% on average globally. Fish landings have declined and the size of the individual fish has reduced dramatically as well. The loss of the big fish is bad news: big fish produce many times more offspring than small ones so they are vital to sustaining healthy populations in the sea.

The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is the fisheries policy of the European Union (EU). It sets quotas for which member states are allowed to catch what amounts of each type of fish, as well as encouraging the fishing industry by various market interventions.

Some types of fishing can be especially harmful, such as pair trawling. It is well known that trawls can destroy seafloor wildlife such as corals, bryozoans and sea urchins, but trawls are also unselective in what they catch. In the sea, fish frequently live as a mixed community and a single trawl can catch many different species. While some of the catch is the target species, much of the remainder may be worthless and is discarded, usually in a dead or dying condition.

Despite the dwindling wild stocks our demand for fish continues to grow and one solution to this mismatch of supply and demand is to farm fish in a process know as aquaculture.

Surprising though it may seem, farming fish relies on healthy, diverse and productive seas to be successful. All carnivorous fish such as salmon, and farmed crustaceans such as warm water prawn rely on wild fish to make their feed. At the moment it can take on average 3kg of wild fish to produce 1kg of farmed salmon — a net loss in ocean biomass.

Fish is an important human food source and accounts for one-fifth of all animal protein consumed by humans. An estimated 1 billion people depend on fish as their primary source of protein. Nearly 50% of Japan’s food consumption comes from the sea; the rest of the world’s average is about 15%. The demand for fish rises with the ever increasing world population. The rising population intensifies the pressure on fish stocks and destabilises the fishing industry.

The perception-changing moment for the oceans has arrived. It comes from the realisation that in a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans greater than any yet caused by pollution. That crisis compares with the destruction of mammoths, bison and whales, the rape of rainforests and the pursuit of bush meat. It is caused by overfishing.

Bycatch: Most fisheries are unselective to some degree in that they incidentally catch other species along with their target catch during the process of fishing. This non-target catch is known as "bycatch".