How Not to Save the Fish

By BRYAN WALSH Wednesday, Feb. 04, 2009

Enjoy the grilled salmon on your dinner plate — it may not be on the menu for long. As
the demand for seafood continues to rise, fueled in part by the now global appetite for
sushi, we're in danger of fishing out the oceans. Once-teeming fishing territory like the
Grand Banks off the eastern coast of Canada have gone fallow, and highly coveted species
like the Atlantic cod and the bluefin tuna are becoming increasingly rare. An influential
study published in 2006 in the journal Science predicted that if fishing around the world
continued at its present pace, fish stocks would begin to decline, resulting in the final
global collapse of wild fisheries, which could possibly happen as soon as mid-century.

Luckily, there's no secret to heading off a potential seafood apocalypse: Simply fish more
sustainably, allowing fish stocks time to recover between harvests, just as a forest might
be managed for logging. To that end, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) in 1995 created the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, a voluntary guide
to sustainable fishing — which means controlling illegal fishing, reducing excess fishing
capacity and minimizing destructive practices like ghost fishing, when gear is left in the
water after a ship departs, still killing sea life. If carried out, these guidelines could keep
the world's fisheries productive for decades.

That's a big if. Sustainable fishing remains far more theory than practice, according to an
article published in the current issue of Nature. The study by the Fisheries Centre at the
University of British Columbia (UBC), the Federal University of Rio Grande and the
World Wildlife Federation looked at fishing policies and practices from the 53 countries
that account for 96% of the world's fish catch, to see how well they followed the FAO's
code. The results were sobering for anyone who enjoys a tuna steak: 28 countries,
accounting for 40% of the world's fish catch, completely failed to follow the code. Only
six countries had compliance scores above 60% — top performers were Norway and the
U.S. — yet even these leaders failed to adhere to several aspects of the code. "We found it
really disappointing," says Tony Pitcher, a professor in the department of zoology at
UBC. "We didn't think it would be quite as bad as this, but this is what we found."

Unsurprisingly, rich nations — like Canada and the U.S. — tended to score highest in the
study, with African, Asian and Latin American nations generally failing across the board.

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Nations with a history of corruption, such as Thailand and Indonesia, also scored poorly,
which makes sense since proper fishing oversight requires not just regulations on the
books, but a government willing to enforce them. But even a relatively scrupulous
government offers no guarantee of fish-stock safety; Canada, Pitcher notes, has great
fishing laws but in recent years, under a conservative government, they haven't always
been executed. "It's not just intention that matters, but actual performance," Pitcher
says.

That's the sort of attitude that needs to be brought to bear on global fishery
management, lest wild fish disappear from our menu. The FAO code is valuable in
principle, an excellent guide to a more sustainable fishing industry, but it's voluntary and
lacks the teeth needed to save the world's fisheries. Of course, the very global nature of
fishing, which often takes place outside any single nation's territory, makes it a classic
tragedy of the commons. It's to the individual profit of any one fisherman, or any one
nation, to keep fishing as long as possible — but if everyone abandons the code and fishes
unsustainably, it will only hasten global fishery collapse.

There are other potential solutions — like putting a cap on fish catches, allocating shares
in the quota and allowing fishermen to trade or sell those shares — which research
suggests can lead to more sustainable fishing. But ultimately, Pitcher argues, we'll need a
new enforceable legal agreement to govern the oceans. "We are approaching a point of
no return for many of the world's fisheries," he says. "I know it's hard to get new
international agreements, but we can't give up." Not unless we want to live — perish the
thought — in a world without sashimi.

The original version of this article reported that the new study on sustainable fishing
appeared in the journal Science. It appeared in Nature.

Source : TIME