Our oceans are the last global commons, and as such are about as effectively regulated as Dodge City when the West was at it's wildest. As recently as 40 years ago they were considered to be an inexhaustible resource. No amount of fishing could possibly make a dent, it seemed, in the teeming mass of ocean life which constantly replenished itself. It was a one-sided arms race, with increasingly advanced fishing techniques maximizing catches: GPS; sonar; trawl nets big enough to catch a jumbo jet; bottom trawling; fish aggregating devices and open-water 'ranching' are just some of the methods employed to extract maximum profit from the seas.
Many of these methods are so wasteful that as much as 80 per cent of what is caught in the nets gets thrown away. This 'bycatch' - a deliberately vague industry term designed (like the US military's famous euphemism 'collateral damage') to divert attention away from the fact that it involves carnage on an obscene scale - ranges from commercially-valuable fish that are too small or are the wrong species; to 'unwanted’ species like starfish, urchins and coral dragged up from the seabed; to large animals like sharks and turtles. What they all have in common is that as far as the fishermen are concerned, they have no economic value and as such are expendable.
And expended they have been. A new World Bank/UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report estimates that global fish stocks are now so low that only a drastic reformation of the way the world's fisheries are managed can prevent their collapse. Nearly one-third of the world's fisheries are severely depleted, and there have been several high-profile examples of complete collapse, such as the Grand Banks cod stocks off Canada's eastern coast.
This being a World Bank report, of course, the emphasis is less on criticising the insane greed and willful lack of regulation that have led us to this appalling situation, and more on how the international fishing industry can get back to profitability. According to the World Bank's Keiron Kelleher, "Sustainable fisheries require political will to replace incentives for overfishing with incentives for responsible stewardship". Indeed they do, but that's much easier said than done - it would be fair to say that 'responsible' is the last word you'd be likely to apply to the behaviour of most fishermen and the national governments charged with regulating them. The reality is that thanks to massive government subsidies (reckoned to be worth around $30 billion in 2006) the global fishing fleet is at least double the size it needs to be to catch the amount of fish available. Unless urgent action is taken to reduce over-capacity then the scenario of too many boats chasing too few fish will continue until our once fecund oceans are turned into a wasteland.
Fortunately the report has another potential solution up its sleeve. Apparently it has now come to their attention that establishing "no take zones" has been shown to improve fish stocks and biodiversity. A "no take zone" by any other name is, of course, a marine reserve - something that Greenpeace has been arguing for years is the only viable way to give depleted fish stocks a realistic chance of recovery.
The best scientific estimates at this point suggest that as much as 40 per cent of the oceans' surface area would need to become marine reserves, where no fishing or extractive industry (such as oil, gas and gravel removal) is permitted, while the remaining 60 per cent would have to be fished as sustainably as possible by a greatly reduced global fishing fleet. These not only allow areas and species to be protected, they also build in a resilience to the oceans, to withstand stresses and strains to come… To use a banking analogy, creating marine reserves is the way of investing in the future of our seas.
So there is hope, but it's going to require some pretty fundamental changes in the way we use our oceans. And that change needs to happen soon, so that there are some fish left for the marine reserves to protect!
