Problems: Poorly managed fishing

Trawler operating in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
© WWF-Canon / Isaac VEGA

Our oceans are being plundered

Valuable fish stocks, as well as a whole host of other marine life, are severely threatened by overfishing, caused largely by poor fisheries management.

The value of fish

Forget diamonds, forget gold: in terms of importance and worth to over a billion people worldwide, fish are infinitely more valuable.

• Fish contribute to the food supply, economy, and health of many nations
  
• Fish and seafood products are among the most widely traded commodities, worth billions of dollars annually
  
• Fishing is a major source of employment: over 38 million people rely directly on fisheries for employment, most supporting families and communities
• A billion people rely on marine fish as an important source of protein

Fish decimation

According to a recent study of the North Atlantic Ocean - a region extending from Europe to the US and Canada - fish numbers are now just one-sixth of what they were 100 years ago.

More information:

• Sea Around Us Project
• FAO Fisheries Department

Landing a meagre catch, North Atlantic Ocean.
© WWF-Canon / Mike R. JACKSON

The cost of overfishing

Overfishing has economic impacts even before fish stocks collapse and people lose their jobs.

WWF calculated that the 2002 quota for cod in the Baltic Sea of 76,000 tonnes - much lower than the average annual catch of 235,000 tonnes between 1977 and 1997 - represents a loss of at least 160 million Euros compared to what could have been earned if a sustainable quota of 165,000 tonnes per year had been in force since 1977.

Two-thirds of Europe’s fish stocks are estimated to be overexploited, and 24% of the world's fisheries are overexploited. The total income lost from this overfishing must be enormous.

• 52% of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, and 24% are overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion²
• Seven of the top ten marine fisheries, accounting for about 30% of all capture fisheries production, are fully exploited or overexploited
• As many as 90% of all the ocean’s large fish have been fished out³
• Several important commercial fish populations have declined to the point where their survival is threatened
• Unless the current situation improves, stocks of all species currently fished for food are predicted to collapse by 2048⁴.
  
  Why is this happening?
  Many fishers are well aware of the need to safeguard fish populations and the marine environment. However, the greed and waste of some large commercial fleets combined with modern developments in fishing technology have had an enormous effect on fishing worldwide. Contributing factors to the current level of overfishing include:
  
• Technological advances that have made large-scale fishing easier
• Subsidies that keep too many boats on the water
• Unfair Fisheries Partnership Agreements that allow foreign fleets to overfish in the waters of developing countries
• Pirate fishers that don’t respect fishing laws or agreements
• Massive bycatch of juvenile fish and other marine species
  
• Destructive fishing practices
• A lack of sound fisheries conservation and management
  

From the coast to the deep sea
As coastal and pelagic (open ocean) fisheries around the world have collapsed, fishing effort has shifted to the deep sea and previously unexploited fish species. Here, overfishing can quickly deplete local fish populations - even within a single season.

Some newly fished populations, such as monkfish, Patagonian toothfish, blue ling, and orange roughy, have already collapsed in some areas. There is insufficient data on other populations to determine what level of fishing is sustainable.

At present most deep-water species are likely to be over-exploited - and as many as 40% of the world’s fishing grounds are now in waters deeper than 200m.

Painful impacts
The impacts of declining fish catches are being painfully felt by many coastal fishing communities around the world.

Newfoundland in Canada provides a sobering example of what happens to communities when fish populations are fished to commercial extinction. For centuries the cod stocks of the Grand Banks seemed inexhaustible. In the early 1990s, 110,000 people were employed in the fishing and fish processing industry.

But in 1992 the cod fishery was finally deemed to have collapsed - and some 40,000 people lost their jobs overnight, including 10,000 fishermen. More than 10 years later, the cod have still not recovered. And the latest science indicates that the ecosystem has now substantially changed, meaning that the cod may never make a comeback.

Similarly, in Senegal fishers no longer catch prized barracudas and red carp. Instead they must go after smaller and less appetizing kobos (a small coastal pelagic fish) because most of the time there is nothing else.

Other marine species are also being left with few fish to eat, including seals, sea otters, seabirds, whales, and dolphins. Humpback whales in Canada's Bay of Fundy, for example, appear to be suffering from lack of food due to competition with fishing fleets for herring.

Find out what WWF is doing!

¹ Porter, G. (1998). Estimating overcapacity in the global fishing fleet. WWF
² FAO (2004) State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) - SOFIA 2004. FAO Fisheries Department
³ Myers, R.A., and Worm, B. (2003) Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities. Nature, 423: 280-283
⁴ Worm, B. et al (2006) Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science, 314: 787