FISHING OF THE WORLD
FROM THE OCTOBER 2010 "NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC" MAGAZINE
By Paul Greenberg
Just before dawn a seafood summit convenes near Honolulu
Harbor. As two dozen or so buyers enter the United Fishing Agency
warehouse, they don winter parkas over their aloha shirts to
blunt the chill of the refrigeration. They flip open their cell
phones, dial their clients in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Honolulu -
wherever expensive fish are eaten - and wait.
Soon the big freight doors on the seaward side of the
warehouse slide open, and a parade of marine carcasses on pallets
begins. Tuna as big around as wagon wheels. Spearfish and
swordfish, their bills sawed off, their bodies lined up like dull
gray I beams. Thick-lipped opah with eyes the size of hockey
pucks rimmed with gold. They all take their places in the hall.
Auctioneers drill core samples from the fish and lay the ribbons
of flesh on the lifeless white bellies. Buyers finger these
samples, trying to divine quality from color, clarity, texture,
and fat content. As instructions come in over cell phones, bids
are conveyed to the auctioneer through mysterious hand gestures.
Little sheets of paper with indecipherable scribbling are slapped
on a fish's flank when a sale is finalized. One by one fish are
auctioned and sold to the highest bidder. In this way the marine
wealth of the north-central Pacific is divided up among some of
the world's most affluent purchasers.
Every year more than 170 billion pounds (77.9 million metric
tons) of wild fish and shellfish are caught in the oceans -
roughly three times the weight of every man, woman, and child in
the United States. Fisheries managers call this overwhelming
quantity of mass-hunted wildlife the world catch, and many
maintain that this harvest has been relatively stable over the
past decade. But an ongoing study conducted by Daniel Pauly, a
fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, in
conjunction with Enric Sala. a National Geographic fellow,
suggests that the world catch is neither stable nor fairly
divided among the nations of the world. In the study, called
SeafoodPrint and supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts and
National Geographic, the researchers point the way to what they
believe must be done to save the seas.
They hope the study will start by correcting a common
misperception. The public imagines a nation's impact on the sea
in terms of the raw tonnage of fish it catches. But that turns
out to give a skewed picture of its real impact, or seafood
print, on marine life. "The problem is, every fish is different;"
says Pauly. "A pound of tuna represents roughly a hundred times
the footprint of a pound of sardines."
The reason for this discrepancy is that tuna are apex
predators, meaning that they feed at the very top of the food
chain. The largest tuna eat enormous amounts of fish, including
intermediate-level predators like mackerel, which in turn feed on
fish like anchovies, which prey on microscopic copepods. A large
tuna must eat the equivalent of its body weight every ten days
to stay alive, so a single thousand-pound tuna might need to eat
as many as 15,000 smaller fish in a year. Such food chains are
present throughout the world's ocean ecosystems, each with its
own apex animal. Any large fish - a Pacific swordfish, an
Atlantic mako shark, an Alaska king salmon, a Chilean sea bass -
is likely to depend on several levels of a food chain.
To gain an accurate picture of how different nations have
been using the resources of the sea, the SeafoodPrint researchers
needed a way to compare all types of fish caught. They decided to
do this by measuring the amount of "primary production" - those
microscopic organisms at the bottom of the marine food
web-required to make a pound of a given type of fish. They found
that a pound of bluefin tuna, for example, might require a
thousand pounds or more of primary production.
In assessing the true impact that nations have on the seas,
the team needed to look not just at what a given nation caught
but also at what the citizens of that nation ate. "A country can
acquire primary production by fishing, or it can acquire it by
trade;" Pauly says. "It is the sheer power of wealthy nations to
acquire primary production that is important."
Nations with money tend to buy a lot of fish, and a lot of
the fish they buy are large apex predators like tuna. Japan
catches less than five million metric tons of fish a year, a 29
percent drop from 1996 to 2006. But Japan consumes nine million
metric tons a year, about 582 million metric tons in
primary-production terms. Though the average Chinese consumer
generally eats smaller fish than the average Japanese consumer
does, China's massive population gives it the world's biggest
seafood print, 694 million metric tons of primary production. The
U.S., with both a large population and a tendency to eat apex
fish, comes in third: 348.5 million metric tons of primary
production. And the size of each of these nations' seafood prints
is growing. What the study points to, Pauly argues, is that these
quantities are not just extremely large but also fundamentally
unsustainable. Exactly how unsustainable can be seen, global
analyses of seafood trade compiled by Wilf Swartz, an economist
working on Seafood' Print. As the maps on page 86 show, humanity
consumption of the ocean's primary production changed
dramatically from the 1950s to the early! 2000s. In the 1950s
much less of the ocean was being fished to meet our needs. But as
affluent nations increasingly demanded apex predators, they
exceeded the primary-production capacities of their exclusive
economic zones, which extend up to 200 nautical miles from their
coasts. As a result, more and more of the world's oceans had to
be fished to keep supplies constant or growing.
Areas outside of these zones are known in nautical parlance
as the high seas. These vast territories, the last global commons
on Earth, are technically owned by nobody and everybody. The
catch from high-seas areas has risen to nearly ten times what it
was in 1950, from 1.6 million metric tons to around 13 million
metric tons. A large part of that catch is high-level, high-value
tuna, with its huge seafood print.
The wealthier nations that purchase most of the products of
these fisheries are essentially privatizing them. Poorer
countries simply can' of afford to bid for high-value species.
Citizens these nations can also lose out if their govern
ents enter into fishing or trade agreements with wealthier
nations. In these agreements local fish are sold abroad and
denied to local citizensthose who arguably have the greatest need
to eat them and the greatest right to claim them.
Although supermarkets in developed nations like the U.S. and
Japan still abound with fish flesh, SeafoodPrint suggests that
this abundance is largely illusory because it depends on these
two troubling phenomena: broader and broader swaths of the high
seas transformed from fallow commons into heavily exploited,
monopolized fishing grounds; and poor nations' seafood wealth
spirited away by the highest bidder.
Humanity's demand for seafood has now driven fishing fleets
into every virgin fishing ground in the world. There are no new
grounds left to exploit. But even this isn't enough. An
unprecedented buildup of fishing capacity threatens to
outstrip seafood supplies in all fishing grounds, old and new. A
report by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recently concluded that
the ocean doesn't have nearly enough fish left to support the
current onslaught. Indeed, the report suggests that even if we
had half as many boats, hooks, and nets as we do now, we would
still end up catching too many fish.
Some scientists, looking at the same data, see a different
picture than Daniel Pauly does. Ray Hilborn, a fisheries
scientist at the University of Washington, doesn't think the
situation is so dire. "Daniel is fond of showing a graph that
suggests that 60 to 70 percent of the world's fish stocks are
overexploited or collapsed;" he says. "The FAO's analysis and
independent work I have done suggests that the number is more
like 30 percent." Increased pressure on seafood shouldn't come as
a surprise, he adds, since the goal of the global fishing
industry is to fully exploit fish populations, though without
damaging their long-term viability.
SeafoodPrint could also give consumers a map around that
roadblock - a way to plot the course toward healthy, abundant
oceans. Today there are dozens of sustainable-seafood campaigns,
each of which offers suggestions for eating lower on the marine
food chain. These include buying farmed tilapia instead of farmed
salmon, because tilapia are largely herbivorous and eat less fish
meal when farmed; choosing trap-caught black cod over long-lined
Chilean sea bass, because fewer unwanted fish are killed in the
process of the harvest; and avoiding eating giant predators like
Atlantic bluefin tuna altogether, because their numbers are
simply too low to allow any harvest at all.
The problem, say conservationists, is that the oceans have
reached a critical point. Simply changing our diets is no longer
sufficient if fish are to recover and multiply in the years
ahead. What Pauly and other conservation biologists now believe
is that suggestions must be transformed into obligations. If
treaties can establish seafood-consumption targets for every
nation, they argue, citizens could hold their governments
responsible for meeting those targets. Comparable strategies have
worked to great effect in terrestrial ecosystems, for trade items
such as furs or ivory. The ocean deserves a similar effort, they
say.
"Barely one percent of the ocean is now protected, compared
with 12 percent of the land;" Enric Sala adds, "and only a
fraction of that is fully protected:" That's why National
Geographic is partnering with governments, businesses,
conservation organizations, and citizens to promote marine
reserves and help reduce the impact of fishing around the globe.
In the end, neither Pauly nor Sala nor the rest of the
SeafoodPrint team wants to destroy the fishing industry,
eliminate aquaculture, or ban fish eating. What they do want to
change is business as usual. They want to let people know that
today's fishing and fish-farming practices are not sustainable
and that the people who advocate maintaining the status quo are
failing to consider the ecological and economic ramifications. By
accurately measuring the impacts nations have on the sea,
SeafoodPrint may lay the groundwork for effective change, making
possible the rebuilding of the ocean's dwindling wealth. Such a
course, Pauly believes, could give the nations of the world the
capability, in the not too distant future, to equitably share a
truly bountiful, resurrected ocean, rather than greedily fight
over the scraps that remain in the wake of a collapse.
Who Catches and Who Consumes
Wealthy nations once obtained most of their fish by fishing.
Today they're more likely to buy a swordfish than to catch it.
Japan purchases more than twice as much fish as it catches, while
Peruvians, the number two seafood producers in the world, consume
barely any at all.
Catch: Top 20
LANDINGS
(MILLION METRIC TONS OF FISH)
China
(except Taiwan) 9.9
Peru 8.3
Japan 4.4
Chile 4.2
Indonesia 4.2
India 3.4
Russia 3.1
Thailand 2.6
Norway 2.6
Philippines 2.0
Denmark 2.0
Iceland 1.9
South Korea 1.7
Vietnam 1.6
Malaysia 1.3
Mexico 1.3
Myanmar 1.1
Canada 1.1
Taiwan 1.0
TOTAL 62.6
......
Consumption: Top 20
LANDINGS
(MILLION METRIC TONS OF FISH)
China (except Taiwan) 13.6
Japan 9.0
U.S. 4.7
Indonesia 3.6
India 3.1
South Korea 2.7
Thailand 2.4
Russia 2.1
Philippines 2.1
Nigeria 1.8
Spain 1.6
Taiwan 1.5
U.K. 1.5
Norway 1.4
Malaysia 1.4
France 1.4
Mexico 1.4
Italy 1.3
Vietnam 1.3
Chile 1.3
TOTAL 59.2
......
Note:
Mankind has shown in the past that they are able to reverse
serious problems that threaten land, rivers, lakes, forests,
and air. Mankind can reverse damages they do to this planet, IF
they have the will of mind. Mankind is capable of bringing back
the sea and the fish in it to health. They may yet have time to
do this.
What is written in the book of Revelation is for the last 42
months of this age, and the miracles of destruction that both
mankind and God will bring on this earth.
Keith Hunt
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