COMMERCIAL FISHING

WHY DO WE OVERFISH?

The sea is a common property resource and subsequently its fish and marine animal population is subject to misuse. One reason for this is because individual fishers reap the full benefit of their catch, while the costs (in terms of reduced fish populations) are spread over the entire fishing community. The fishers will continue to fish until the cost of doing so exceeds the benefit. Furthermore, they have no incentive to reduce their catches in order to increase their future revenues as they would if they were sole owners of the stock, because what one fisher does not catch today will be caught tomorrow by another.

 

Even when countries attempt to manage fisheries, fishers continually press for increased fish quotas, even on dangerously depleted stocks. The reason is always the same: economic need. Indeed, the higher the fishers’ costs, the harder they push; overcapitalized fisheries are the bane of open-access fishery management schemes. In a similar way, polluters and loggers can offer their products at lower prices by externalizing their costs, and press decision makers for exemption from regulation while the general public absorbs the environmental cost.

This is not how societies should work. But not all economic activities are in societies’ best interests. A major reason why societies are not simply collections of individuals but groups that submit to tribal or governmental authority is because they need to deal with the very human tendency to maximize benefits while passing on the costs to someone else. The laws that authorities enforce are ways to modify activities that do not create wealth in a socially acceptable way.

In many nations, however, there are large gaps in the system of legal protection, either because the laws are not in place, or because they are not enforced. Hence governments are not always effective guardians of biological resources and their sustainable use. Government protection of the public interest is often frustrated by two fundamental asymmetries. Firstly, people whose activities harm biological diversity commonly devote part of their profits to ensure that government decision makers look the other way. Secondly, those who benefit and those who are harmed are often representing different government ‘camps’ e.g. an agriculture minister might feel little obligation to heed complaints about pesticides in runoff from a fisheries ministers’ constituents, or a country that produces toxic chemicals might feel little obligation to compensate a neighboring country that suffers from this production.

Given the weaknesses inherent in a regime of common property resources, privatization may seem attractive because it eliminates a disincentive for exploiting the resource sustainably. However, there can be another disincentive for sustainable use: the conflict between present and future use of a resource.

This normal economic practice can be damaging for many types of renewable resources, whether privately or publicly owned. Consider what would happen if a private company owned blue whales. Blue whale populations are very slow-growing: females mature at seven years and produce, at most, one young every two years, not all of which survive. Biologists have estimated the growth potential of Antarctic blue whale populations at two to five percent per year, a rate lower than the interest rate that other investments could pay. As a result, it is economically rational for a private whale owner to kill all the whales and invest the profits where they would bring a higher rate of return. The remarkable dividends paid by whaling companies in the heyday of Antarctic whaling resulted from liquidating cetacean capital, not from living sustainably off the interest. There is less incentive to liquidate capital in species that offer a higher rate of return, but many of the marine species that people consider desirable are long lived, late maturing, and slow producing.

Few governments appear to recognize the basic consumption/investment dichotomy inherent in resource and environmental problems. Most decision makers consider it their duty to promote economic growth; liquidating capital is always appealing because it brings short term and vote winning returns. This is especially damaging because future generations cannot vote, sue or protest when decisions affecting their fate are made.

It is only recently that serious thought has been given to changes in economic policy that are necessary to prevent loss of biological diversity, changes affecting taxation, trade, food protection and international aid. Such changes will happen only when economics accounts for nonmarket goods and services and the interests of all future generations, thus transforming itself into ecological economics.

WHY SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

While the mass slaughter of wild land animals for food has virtually stopped, the demand for wild marine animals has increased. With little pressure from the public, governments have done almost nothing to protect the marine environment. The value of catches has also risen steadily, continuing to provide incentives for commercial fishing boats to put to sea as often as possible. In Japan an endangered bluefin tuna can now fetch a price close to the equivalent of its own weight in gold, while a simple meal like fish & chips, once seen as the poor man’s staple, is fast becoming a rare delicacy.

 

The global population explosion that followed World War 2 dramatically increased the demand for fish. To cater for this demand fish-catching technology has improved so that huge shoals, plus the inevitable bycatch, are routinely taken in a single sweep. The slow reproduction cycles of most fish mean that stocks have little or no chance to recover. At the same time, mass degradation of marine environments continues, and unless drastic action is taken the changes in the marine ecosystem will be irreversible.

According to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation 70% of commercially caught fish species are overexploited, caught to the limit, or recovering from exploitation; in the U.S. the figure is 80%. Over one million boats are now hunting down a shrinking population of fish. The irony is that the global public and private investment in the fishing fleet is $124 billion per year whereas the annual global catch is worth only $70 billion. As with farming it seems the taxpayer is subsidising a situation that would be unsustainable in a free market.

A tragic aspect of modern commercial fishing is the inevitable associated killing of marine animals such as dolphins, turtles, pelagic birds and non-commercial fish species.  This ‘bycatch’ accounts for an almost incredible 40% of the total. The consequences of this mass slaughter have yet to be fully realised.

The figures are startling -

• Over 300,000 small whales, dolphins, and porpoises die from entanglement in fishing nets each year, making bycatch the single largest cause of mortality for small cetaceans and pushing several species to the verge of extinction.
• Over 250,000 endangered loggerhead turtles and critically endangered leatherback turtles are caught annually on longlines set for tuna, swordfish, and other fish, with thousands more killed in shrimp trawls.
• 26 species of seabird, including 17 albatross species, are threatened with extinction because of longlining, which kills more than 300,000 seabirds each year.
• 89 per cent of hammerhead sharks and 80 per cent of thresher and white sharks have disappeared from the Northeast Atlantic Ocean in the last 18 years, largely due to bycatch.
• Shrimp trawlers catch as many as 35 million juvenile red snappers each year in the Gulf of Mexico, enough to have an impact on the population.
• Billions of corals, sponges, starfish, and other invertebrates are caught as bycatch every year.

Contrary to popular belief recreational sea anglers also take very significant numbers of fish, mostly uncounted in global estimates of catch totals but an important contributor to the overfishing many species suffer. Between 1979 and 1991, it is estimated that along the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines of the USA recreational anglers caught between 8,000 and 14,000 metric tons of fish per year. In 1994 alone, recreational sea anglers in the USA caught an estimated 362 million fish, during 66 million fishing trips.

Drift-nets, nicknamed, “walls of death”, used by large fishing boats, trap birds such as shearwaters, despite a 1992 UN moratorium on the use of nets more than 2.5km long. Long-line fishing also takes a huge toll of seabirds. Lines can be up to 100km long, with more than 20,000 hooks. The bait on the hooks presents a ready meal for seabirds – and also the risk of being caught and drowned. Conservation organizations are working with the fishing industry to promote responsible fishing techniques, such as an effective bird-scarer over the fishing line, and the weighting of the line to ensure that the line sinks rapidly.

 THE LAST CENTURY OF WILD SEAFOOD?

There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue. Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating. An international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity, but a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks. "The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one," said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada. "What we're highlighting is there is a finite number of stocks; we have gone through one-third, and we are going to get through the rest."

 

Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project, added: "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood."

This is a vast piece of research, incorporating scientists from many institutions in Europe and the Americas, and drawing on four distinctly different kinds of data. Catch records from the open sea give a picture of declining fish stocks. In 2003, 29% of open sea fisheries were in a state of collapse, defined as a decline to less than 10% of their original yield. Bigger vessels, better nets, and new technology for spotting fish are not bringing the world's fleets bigger returns - in fact, the global catch fell by 13% between 1994 and 2003.

Historical records from coastal zones in North America, Europe and Australia also show declining yields, in step with declining species diversity; these are yields not just of fish, but of other kinds of seafood too. Zones of biodiversity loss also tended to see more beach closures, more blooms of potentially harmful algae, and more coastal flooding. Experiments performed in small, relatively contained ecosystems show that reductions in diversity tend to bring reductions in the size and robustness of local fish stocks. This implies that loss of biodiversity is driving the declines in fish stocks seen in the large-scale studies.

The final part of the jigsaw is data from areas where fishing has been banned or heavily restricted. These show that protection brings back biodiversity within the zone, and restores populations of fish just outside. "The image I use to explain why biodiversity is so important is that marine life is a bit like a house of cards," said Dr Worm. "All parts of it are integral to the structure; if you remove parts, particularly at the bottom, it's detrimental to everything on top and threatens the whole structure. "And we're learning that in the oceans, species are very strongly linked to each other - probably more so than on land."

What the study does not do is attribute damage to individual activities such as over-fishing, pollution or habitat loss; instead it paints a picture of the cumulative harm done across the board. Even so, a key implication of the research is that more of the oceans should be protected. But the extent of protection is not the only issue, according to Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the global marine programme at IUCN, the World Conservation Union. "The benefits of marine-protected areas are quite clear in a few cases; there's no doubt that protecting areas leads to a lot more fish and larger fish, and less vulnerability," he said. "But you also have to have good management of marine parks and good management of fisheries. Clearly, fishing should not wreck the ecosystem, bottom trawling being a good example of something which does wreck the ecosystem." But, he said, the concept of protecting fish stocks by protecting biodiversity does make sense. "This is a good compelling case; we should protect biodiversity, and it does pay off even in simple monetary terms through fisheries yield."

Protecting stocks demands the political will to act on scientific advice - something which Boris Worm finds lacking in Europe, where politicians have ignored recommendations to halt the iconic North Sea cod fishery year after year. Without a ban, scientists fear the North Sea stocks could follow the Grand Banks cod of eastern Canada into apparently terminal decline. "I'm just amazed, it's very irrational," he said. "You have scientific consensus and nothing moves. It's a sad example; and what happened in Canada should be such a warning, because now it's collapsed it's not coming back."