Imagine a World Without Seafood for Supper -- It's Nearer Than You Think

By Andrew Purvis, The Observer UK. Posted April 29, 2009.

Worse still, after stripping our own seas bare, we have "exported fishing capacity to the waters of developing countries", Professor Roberts warns. Off Mauritania, Senegal and other West African countries, fleets from the rich industrial north are "fishing in a totally unsustainable way with minimal oversight by European countries". In return for plundering the oceans, which deprives local people of food, and artisanal fishermen of their livelihood, these vessels pay minimal fees that impoverished countries are happy to accept. "It is a mining operation," Professor Roberts says, "a rerun of the exploitation of terrestrial wealth that happened in colonial days. This is colonialism in a new guise, albeit with a respectable cloak in the form of access agreements."

Such is the human feeding frenzy, there may come a time when there are no fish left to catch. In 2006, a study in the US journal Science warned that every single species we exploit would have collapsed by 2048 if populations continued to decline as they had since the 1950s. By 2003, nearly a third of all species had collapsed, the study found - meaning their numbers were down 90% or more on historic maximum catch levels. Extrapolate that on a graph, and the downward curve reaches 100% just before 2050.

That prognosis - now disputed - was based on a four-year study of fish populations, catch records and ocean ecosystems. "We really see the end of the line now," said the author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the time. "It will be in our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood, if we do not change things." Many imagined a world where there would be no fish protein left to eat apart from jellyfish and marine algae.

What the study did not make sufficiently clear was that some fish populations had bounced back as a result of drastic measures by the authorities. In countries such as Iceland, Norway, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, fisheries management has been strengthened by controls that limit fishing effort (the number of boats out there, the time they spend at sea and the areas where they are allowed to fish). Another management approach, especially in Europe, is to control output (the amount of fish landed) using Total Allowable Catch quotas, or TACs. These are designed to maintain a stock's biomass - the estimated weight of fish left in the sea after fishing and natural deaths are taken into account. It should never be allowed to fall so low that a species is unable to spawn a healthy generation the following year.

Drawn up by scientists and organisations such as Ices (the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea), these quotas are discussed by fisheries ministers and fishermen at forums such as the EU. Both have vested interests, whether political or commercial. "If you put the fox in charge of the henhouse," Professor Roberts says, "decisions will be based on short-term constraints, such as paying the mortgage on the boat. Politicians, too, make choices that are beneficial to them or their constituents in the short term."

In other words, such gatherings often ride roughshod over the scientists' recommendations - as happened at a meeting of ICCAT (the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas) in Luxembourg in 2007, where quotas were being thrashed out for bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean. Scientists recommended an annual catch of 15,000 tonnes a year, with a preference for 10,000 tonnes - but EU ministers agreed a quota of 29,000 tonnes, enough to guarantee the collapse of the species. (Last year, quotas for 2009 were again set far higher than scientists were advising.)

In fact, the real amount of bluefin landed was 61,000 tonnes - four times what scientists had recommended - due to illegal and unreported fishing. Last month, the European Commission implemented a two-year control and inspection programme for bluefin tuna fisheries in seven Mediterranean countries, to clamp down on things such as illegal spotter planes used to track down tuna schools. Globally, black-market fishing is worth US$25bn (£17bn) a year. In Europe, 50% of the cod we eat has been caught illegally.

Those figures, and the Luxembourg debacle, are recorded in The End of the Line - the documentary, based on Charles Clover's book of that name, to be screened in UK cinemas from 8 June. However, the blatant disregard for science it portrays is not an isolated case. "We have analysed the decision-making of European fisheries ministers over the past 20 years," says Professor Roberts, "and systematically, year on year, they have set quotas that are 25 to 35% higher than the levels recommended by scientists."

How can our politicians get away with it? "There is no obligation upon them to take scientific advice," Professor Roberts explains. "What they will tell you is that it is only one of the things they have to consider. While they might be protecting a fisherman's livelihood in the term of one or two years, short-term decision-making like that guarantees stock collapse. It is not just a possibility, it is a certainty. The only uncertainty is how long it will take."

According to Professor Roberts: "What politicians should be deciding is how the catch is allocated within different nations. That is politics. What they shouldn't be deciding is how big the catch should be in the first place. That is science."

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