Complete collapse of North Atlantic fishing predicted

New Scientist ^ | 10:30 18 February 02 | Kurt Kleiner, Boston

[semper_libertas]

Complete collapse of North Atlantic fishing predicted

The entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may completely collapse by 2010, reveals the first comprehensive survey of the entire ocean's fishery.

"We'll all be eating jellyfish sandwiches," says Reg Watson, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. Putting new ocean-wide management plans into place is the only way to reverse the trend, Watson and his colleagues say.

Concentrations of biomass of "table" fish have disappeared

North Atlantic catches have fallen by half since 1950, despite a tripling of the effort put into catching them. The total number of fish in the ocean has fallen even further, they say, with just one sixth as many high-quality "table fish" like cod and tuna as there were in 1900. Fish prices have risen six fold in real terms in 50 years.

The shortage of table fish has forced a switch to other species. "The jellyfish sandwich is not a metaphor - jellyfish is being exported from the US," says Daniel Pauly, also at the University of British Columbia. "In the Gulf of Maine people were catching cod a few decades ago. Now they're catching sea cucumber. By earlier standards, these things are repulsive," he says.

Off limits

The only hope for the fishery is to drastically limit fishing, for instance by declaring large portions of the ocean off-limits and at the same time reducing the number of fishing ships. Piecemeal efforts to protect certain fisheries have only caused the fishing fleet to overfish somewhere else, such as west Africa.

"It's like shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic," says Andrew Rosenberg, at the University of New Hampshire. He says the number of boats must be reduced: "Less is actually more with fisheries. If you fish less you get more fish."

Normally, falling catches would drive some fishers out of business. But government subsidies actually encourage overfishing, Watson says, with subsidies totalling about $2.5 billion a year in the North Atlantic.

However, Rosenberg was sceptical that any international fishing agreements currently on the table will turn the tide in a short enough timescale. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and the OECD have initiatives but these are voluntary, he says. A UN-backed monitoring and enforcement plan of action is being discussed but could take 10 years to come into force.

Pauly says only a public reaction like that against whaling in the 1970s would be enough to bring about sufficient change in the way the fish stocks are managed.

The new survey was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2002 annual meeting in Boston.

Kurt Kleiner, Boston

10:30 18 February 02

[bvw]

Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges."
The more corrupt the state is, the more numerous are the laws.
-- Tacitus , Annales

An early statement of Conservation of Entropy!

[Mamzelle]

European super-boats now hoover up our waters and regularly ram small Irish ))))

Wonder if this refers to the ever-courageous French?

[Dog Gone]

I don't think I'd believe anything that comes from the socialist University of British Columbia without confirmation from about a dozen other less biased sources.

[zog]

--relistically it's most likely both, both drop in fish stocks and a political agenda to accompany it. I commercial fished early 70's, then the very late 70's. dramatic drop in catch just between those two time frames. You can see it freshwater here in georgia in the streams as well. Without artificial stocking, these streams around here anyway would be pretty lean on the old creel count.

I remember my older relatives telling me about what it was like in the depression, after several years, the white tail deer almost disappeared completely, as soon as demand went up. Now that there are managed deer there is a pretty good abundance, but this wouldn't have happened with unregulated hunting, they would have continued top decline. Happened with wild ginseng as well throughout appalachia, harvested almost to extinction, even market pressure didn't help, because with the ginseng being one of the few ways to snag cash in a collapsed rural economy, the older patches kept getting found and wiped out. It's extremely hard to find legitimate quality "wild" ginseng anymore. I'm in the woods a lot, only seen a coupla decent wild patches in years and years of trompping sround, and from reports it used to be quite abundant.

Market hunting/fishing is just that, it's a foraging/scavenging effort it's not an agricultural effort. The worlds wild and healthy stocks are being seriously depleted in the oceans, and with populatiion pressure increasing the demand, it's going to get worse. An unregulated market will just keep driving up the price, as there are enough rich people who would kep demanding it, well past the point of the majority of the peoples ability to consider it as affordable food anymore. Look how close wild buffalo got, and then there's the passenger pigeon complete 100% reality, unregulated hunting and demand wiped out a species in a few years that numbered in the billions, now there really, really, really aren't *any*, no matter what the free marketers might say. The 'farmed' salt water stocks are not healthy, you can see it in the reports, they suffer a lot, the technology still isn't there yet, and probably won't be for a long time. It's an effort to be sure, but in no way would it replace what a humongous ocean sized wild count would be, and the cost would rise dramatically. It can be done, and I'm a proponent of more efforts there, but it's really down to apples and oranges then, it's not "fishing" in the classical sense of just harvesting-only. I mean, it's just numbers, x- billions of people eating fish, that demand just keeps goes up, x-more boats fishing because as demand goes up the price per pound goes up, will lead to "much less fish" and much more effort per fish to aquire remaining in the wild. Where a collapse point is, is about the only thing left to "debate' there, what would constitute a collapse.

Hmm, was reading about the lobstering, it used to be you could go just offshore to get big lobsters, now they have to set pots in water so deep just to get small ones that it would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Try to even just start a lobstering business, it's not hardly possible now.

This isn't to say they are NO fish left, obviously there are, but the studies probably have some good validity to them. No easy solution either, best I can think of is no exceptions to the 200 mile economic exclusion zone. we have such a zone, it's not enforced much, and a lot of exceptions are allowed. That and protecting the estuaries where a lot of the food chain habitat is critical for a variety of species. It's tremendously important to keep what estuaries we still have healthy, because they are the initiators of a lot of the fish we consume, an incredibly important part of the whole ocean marine animal cycle.

[rohry]

I agree that the fact that the fish in the ocean are treated as a “commonly owned” commodity has benefited no one. People don ‘t realize that the reason a “luxury” fish like Salmon is cheaper (in the NE) than Cod and Haddock is because of the large number of fish farms off the Maine and Canadian coast.

Until recently, I lived in the Northeast and the fishing industry is in tough shape. The government regulations that are in effect already have not helped anyone, and more regulations is not a good solution.

My grandfather was involved in the fishing industry (in Boston) for over 40 years and was lamenting the decline in the early 70’s. At that point, in time the Russian factory ships were coming as close as 3 miles from the shore and sucking up all the fish and processing them all in one operation. Well, the government stepped in and declared that we have a 200-mile limit. Everything stabilized for a few years but eventually the fisherman upgraded and modernized their fleets. Every one was happy for a few years but eventually demand outstripped supply for the “preferred” fish (Haddock, Cod and Halibut).

Skip ahead a 25 years and what happens now is that there are plenty of certain types of fish, but not enough of the “preferred” fish. So what the government has done is limit the amount of the “preferred” fish that can be caught. Sounds good, right? Aha, not so fast. When a boat goes out to catch the species of fish that aren’t limited the nets also scoop up a certain number of the types that are regulated. By the time the net gets unloaded the fish are all dead. The Captain of the fishing boat has only two choices: bring the Haddock and Cod in for sale and risk getting fined by the government or just dump the dead fish back in the ocean.

I’m not an expert on this issue but watching the fishing industry in New England decline has been painful to watch. I’ve oversimplified the NE fishing industry here but I hope that this small amount of information contributes some understanding of the complexity of the problem.

[Snuffington]

Normally, falling catches would drive some fishers out of business. But government subsidies actually encourage overfishing...

I knew something didn't add up here. The economics of the article didn't make any sense until this line appeared.

Basically, it's saying subsidies have removed the free market's inherent protection of resources. Governments are keeping prices low when demand is high. Of course that's going to lead to overfishing.

This article's recommendations are basically just more socialism. That may be necessary due to Europe's increasing addiction to subsidies. But the most obvious and quick solution would be to remove the stupid subsidies.

[Harley - Mississippi]

This sounds like another "urban sprawl"-type alarum,

It is NO myth.

10's of thousands of Canadian Maritimers have had to leave their homes and head west because the entrire eastern seaboard of Canada was dependant on one and only one industry, fishing. The Federal Government of Canada under the Federal Liberal Party run by the current Prime Minister and his predecessors, totally mismanaged the fishery inspite of dire warnings from fishermen themselves for over 40 years. America and Canada have bandit fishing fleets from the Turd World totally wiping out entirt fishing stocks along the Atlantic Coast. The same problems are now being realized in the Pacific. Open boaders and unprotected shores lead to disaster.

That is no urban-sprawl type myth, its fact.

[BellStar]

The Gulf of Mexico has the same problem but
I think we have more folks who believe Click Here

[John H K]

Indeed. Had this argument before and it amazes me how people think that commercial fishing pressure will decline as prices rise and "demand falls."

People have no concept of economics. There's a steady level of demand. It's not possible for prices to rise and demand to fall. As the supply of fish declines, it is demand staying CONSTANT that causes the price to rise. Sure, fewer people are willing to pay the higher prices, but as long as there are more people willing to pay that price than the remaining supply of fish, it is in the economic best interest of the commercial fisherman to keep going out to wipe out the last remaining stocks of an overfished species, since he's getting so much $$$ per pound.

The original article is a bit confusing regarding tuna. When they talk about overfished they mean bluefin tuna....good luck finding that in your local seafood market, most of it is going to Japan for a zillion dollars a pound. Yellowfin (chunk light) and Albacore (white meat) tuna aren't particularly overfished and can be bought relatively cheaply everywhere.

[StriperSniper]

I would check it after about 20 minutes. I cook many kinds of fish that way and it has never taken more than about 30 minutes.

[rohry]

As I said in a previous post, I am not an expert but I have lived in New England for most of my life. The Lobster catch is a differnt story than commercial fish (Cod, haddock etc). Depite warnings from "scientists" about declining Lobster stocks the number of pounds caught has been increasing for the last five years. I don't know about where you are from but in New England the depth at which Lobsters are caught vary with the seasons. If people are dropping the traps in deeper water it is only because the shallow areas are taken by someone else's pots.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Government subsidies, there is the problem.

[Snuffington]

Capitalism can indeed overcome this, but the fish need owners first.

That's one problem I haven't been able to figure out. Property rights are the bedrock of a capitalist free market. However in this case, not only are the fish not owned until they're caught, the oceans themselves are not owned by anyone.

Perhaps some sort of fish "ranches" established in the ocean would help in the long run. But I don't know enough about the relevant technology or ecology to know how realistic that might be.

You make a good point about schooling behavior assisting overfishing even amid scarcity. But do all the "table fish" (first time I've heard that term incidentally) exhibit this behavior? Or only some species?

In any case, the demand side incentive to raise prices would still be largely intact. Just delayed.

[Rippin]

RE: The idea that supply and demand will manage this, I'm not so sure.

1. You don't have private ownership of the stock. Therefore there is no applicability of of ideas relative to enlightened use of the resources from an owners POV.

2. Your idea that it will self regulate assumes (though I don't think you are aware of it) a random distribution of the resource throughout the sea. But that is not the case. There are a few spots, that can be found where the fishing is still very good, those spots are fewer and fewer, but those who find them can still fish them to death.

3. I doubt COd or Haddock will become totally extinct, but without some sort of private ownership of the entire habitat or regulated management of it, they will be useless. NOte most regulation doesn't work. Depending on the type of fish, you need to be very smart and apply different forms of regulation. For some fish, those that live real deep, a size limit is meaningless, because once you bring them up from that deep, if they are too small and you let them go, they just die. For those situations you need totally ban on fishing for a season. I'm sure you are familiar with the situation with striped bass. They are back, for real, and they really were gone. And it would seem difficult to make a case that that isn't a good thing, or that the government didn't do it.

4. Fish farming is the what the market is proposing to solve this problem. More fish cheaper. As the techniques improve and the ocean stock is reduced, certain varieties will become more prevalent as a farmed fish. As long as we are O.K. with getting our fish from a controlled genetic pool and having no sport fishing to speak of this might work. The market is brutal, it will solve particular problems. But if one of those problems is the idea that the sea should be full of fish that sport fishers can catch cheap, that could become prohibitively expensive to solve. But the consumers of that 'good' have experienced it their whole lives and don't see why it can't continue to be so. The market doesn't gurrantee any problem will be solved at the price we'd all like it to be solved at.

Be careful about applying "free market" assumptions when there is no private ownership.

Rippin

[bwteim]

PING

[hubel458]

Didn't you know its the farmers in Greenlands fault-- you know like Klamath.LOL.. Ed Hubel

[bloodmeridian]

No fish ever had an original thought. That's the problem: They're too dumb to go where the fishing boats don't go.

[metesky]

In 1978, Gerry Studds, the homosexual former congressman from Cape Cod, was in charge of the Fisheries Committee. He passed some massive subsidies to get more boats on the water.

In 1996, just before he retired because "it wasn't fun anymore" (The Pubbies had gained control of the House in '94 and he was no longer committee chair), he managed to ram through subsidies to buy boats back and retrain fishermen.

Socialists always screw the pooch.

[elfman2]

Thanks!

[StriperSniper]

the situation with striped bass. They are back, for real,

Very much so! The only problem now is the relative lack of larger bass, but that is starting to get better.

What a lot of people don't realize is the greatest threat now is the overfishing of forage. The menhadden reduction boats have decimated one of the main sources of food for many of the sport/food fish in the northeast. Bluefin tuna have just about abandoned the NY Bight since the commercials just about eliminated the white hake (whitting) in the region. The hake were the main source of food for the bluefins in the 'Mudhole' right off the coast of NJ. Now if a couple dozen giants are caught each season that is a lot.