Herewith extracts from a few stellar essays on the crisis of global fisheries.
Daniel Pauly is a professor at the Fisheries Centre of the University of
British Columbia, which sponsors (with the Pew foundation) the Sea Around Us
Project; his "
Aquacalypse
Now” appeared in
The New Republic, September
28, 2009:
Our oceans have been the victims of
a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s
fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly
industrialized--with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later,
GPS--they first depleted stocks of cod, hake, flounder, sole, and halibut in
the Northern Hemisphere. As those stocks disappeared, the fleets moved
southward, to the coasts of developing nations and, ultimately, all the way to
the shores of Antarctica, searching for icefishes and rockcods, and, more
recently, for small, shrimplike krill. As the bounty of coastal waters dropped,
fisheries moved further offshore, to deeper waters. And, finally, as the larger
fish began to disappear, boats began to catch fish that were smaller and
uglier--fish never before considered fit for human consumption. Many were
renamed so that they could be marketed: The suspicious slimehead became the
delicious orange roughy, while the worrisome Patagonian toothfish became the
wholesome Chilean seabass. Others, like the homely hoki, were cut up so they
could be sold sight-unseen as fish sticks and filets in fast-food restaurants
and the frozen-food aisle.
The scheme was carried out by
nothing less than a fishing-industrial complex--an alliance of corporate
fishing fleets, lobbyists, parliamentary representatives, and fisheries
economists. By hiding behind the romantic image of the small-scale, independent
fisherman, they secured political influence and government subsidies far in
excess of what would be expected, given their minuscule contribution to the GDP
of advanced economies--in the United States, even less than that of the hair
salon industry. In Japan, for example, huge, vertically integrated
conglomerates, such as Taiyo or the better-known Mitsubishi, lobby their
friends in the Japanese Fisheries Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to
help them gain access to the few remaining plentiful stocks of tuna, like those
in the waters surrounding South Pacific countries. Beginning in the early
1980s, the United States, which had not traditionally been much of a fishing
country, began heavily subsidizing U.S. fleets, producing its own
fishing-industrial complex, dominated by large processors and retail chains.
Today, governments provide nearly $30 billion in subsidies each year--about
one-third of the value of the global catch--that keep fisheries going, even
when they have overexploited their resource base. As a result, there are
between two and four times as many boats as the annual catch requires, and yet,
the funds to “build capacity” keep coming.
The jig, however, is nearly up. In
1950, the newly constituted Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the
United Nations estimated that, globally, we were catching about 20 million
metric tons of fish (cod, mackerel, tuna, etc.) and invertebrates (lobster,
squid, clams, etc.). That catch peaked at 90 million tons per year in the late
1980s, and it has been declining ever since. Much like Madoff’s infamous
operation, which required a constant influx of new investments to generate
“revenue” for past investors, the global fishing-industrial complex has
required a constant influx of new stocks to continue operation. Instead of
restricting its catches so that fish can reproduce and maintain their
populations, the industry has simply fished until a stock is depleted and then
moved on to new or deeper waters, and to smaller and stranger fish. And, just
as a Ponzi scheme will collapse once the pool of potential investors has been
drained, so too will the fishing industry collapse as the oceans are drained of
life.
Unfortunately, it is not just the
future of the fishing industry that is at stake, but also the continued health
of the world’s largest ecosystem. While the climate crisis gathers front-page
attention on a regular basis, people--even those who profess great
environmental consciousness--continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable
practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no
more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In
the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish,
such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90 percent. One
study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048,
all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,” meaning that they will be
generating 10 percent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that
particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in
dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.
The extent of the fisheries’ Ponzi
scheme eluded government scientists for many years. They had long studied the
health of fish populations, of course, but typically, laboratories would focus
only on the species in their nation’s waters. And those studying a particular
species in one country would communicate only with those studying that same
species in another. Thus, they failed to notice an important pattern: Popular
species were sequentially replacing each other in the catches that fisheries
were reporting, and, when a species faded, scientific attention shifted to the
replacement species. At any given moment, scientists might acknowledge that
one-half or two-thirds of fisheries were being overfished, but, when the stock
of a particular fish was used up, it was simply removed from the denominator of
the fraction. For example, the Hudson River sturgeon wasn’t counted as an
overfished stock once it disappeared from New York waters; it simply became an
anecdote in the historical record. The baselines just kept shifting, allowing
us to continue blithely damaging marine ecosystems.
It was not until the 1990s that a
series of high-profile scientific papers demonstrated that we needed to study,
and mitigate, fish depletions at the global level. They showed that phenomena
previously observed at local levels--for example, the disappearance of large
species from fisheries’ catches and their replacement by smaller species--were
also occurring globally. It was a realization akin to understanding that the
financial meltdown was due not to the failure of a single bank, but, rather, to
the failure of the entire banking system--and it drew a lot of controversy. . .
.
To some Western nations, an end to
fish might simply seem like a culinary catastrophe, but for 400 million people
in developing nations, particularly in poor African and South Asian countries,
fish are the main source of animal protein. What’s more, fisheries are a major
source of livelihood for hundreds of million of people. A recent World Bank
report found that the income of the world’s 30 million small-scale fisheries is
shrinking. The decrease in catch has also dealt a blow to a prime source of
foreign-exchange earnings, on which impoverished countries, ranging from
Senegal in West Africa to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, rely to
support their imports of staples such as rice.
And, of course, the end of fish
would disrupt marine ecosystems to an extent that we are only now beginning to
appreciate. Thus, the removal of small fish in the Mediterranean to fatten
bluefin tuna in pens is causing the “common” dolphin to become exceedingly rare
in some areas, with local extinction probable. Other marine mammals and
seabirds are similarly affected in various parts of the world. Moreover, the
removal of top predators from marine ecosystems has effects that cascade down,
leading to the increase of jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton and to
the gradual erosion of the food web within which fish populations are embedded.
This is what happened off the coast of southwestern Africa, where an upwelling
ecosystem similar to that off California, previously dominated by fish such as
hake and sardines, has become overrun by millions of tons of jellyfish.
Jellyfish population outbursts are
also becoming more frequent in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where the
fertilizer-laden runoff from the Mississippi River fuels uncontrolled algae
blooms. The dead algae then fall to a sea bottom from which shrimp trawling has
raked all animals capable of feeding on them, and so they rot, causing
Massachusetts-sized “dead zones.” Similar phenomena--which only jellyfish seem
to enjoy--are occurring throughout the world, from the Baltic Sea to the
Chesapeake Bay, and from the Black Sea in southeastern Europe to the Bohai Sea
in northeastern China. Our oceans, having nourished us since the beginning of
the human species some 150,000 years ago, are now turning against us, becoming
angry opponents.
That dynamic will only grow more
antagonistic as the oceans become warmer and more acidic because of climate
change. Fish are expected to suffer mightily from global warming, making it
essential that we preserve as great a number of fish and of fish species as
possible, so that those which are able to adapt are around to evolve and
propagate the next incarnations of marine life. In fact, new evidence
tentatively suggests that large quantities of fish biomass could actually help
attenuate ocean acidification. In other words, fish could help save us from the
worst consequences of our own folly--yet we are killing them off. The
jellyfish-ridden waters we’re seeing now may be only the first scene in a
watery horror show. . . .
The truth is that governments are
the only entities that can prevent the end of fish. For one thing, once freed
from their allegiance to the fishing-industrial complex, they are the ones with
the research infrastructure capable of prudently managing fisheries. For
another, it is they who provide the billions of dollars in annual subsidies
that allow the fisheries to persist despite the lousy economics of the
industry. Reducing these subsidies would allow fish populations to rebuild, and
nearly all fisheries scientists agree that the billions of dollars in harmful,
capacity-enhancing subsidies must be phased out. Finally, only governments can
zone the marine environment, identifying certain areas where fishing will be
tolerated and others where it will not. In fact, all maritime countries will
have to regulate their exclusive economic zones (the 200-mile boundary areas
established by the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty within which a nation has the
sole right to fish). The United States has the largest exclusive economic zone
in the world, and it has taken important first steps in protecting its
resources, notably in the northwest Hawaiian islands. Creating, or re-creating,
un-fished areas within which fish populations can regenerate is the only
opportunity we have to repair the damage done to them. . . .
* * *
The sorry state of ocean life has
led to a new kind of fish story—a lament not for the one that got away but for
the countless others that didn’t. In “Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish”
(St. Martin’s; $25.99), David Helvarg notes that each year sharks kill some five
to eight humans worldwide; meanwhile we kill a hundred million of them. Dean
Bavington, the author of “Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the
Newfoundland Cod Collapse” (University of British Columbia; $94), observes that
two hundred billion pounds’ worth of cod were taken from Canada’s Grand Banks
before 1992, when the cod simply ran out. In “Four Fish: The Future of the Last
Wild Food” (Penguin Press; $25.95), Paul Greenberg estimates that somewhere in
the range of a hundred million salmon larvae used to hatch in the Connecticut
River each year. Now the number’s a lot easier to pin down: it’s zero. “The
broad, complex genetic potential of the Connecticut River salmon,” Greenberg
writes, has “vanished from the face of the earth.”
The assumption of the inexhaustibility of the sea’s
resources is found in Hugo Grotius’s Mare
Liberum (The Free Sea) of 1609;
it received repeated affirmation thereafter. Kolbert draws attention to a
lecture of Thomas Huxley at the opening of the 1883 Great International
Fisheries Exhibition, affirming the belief that “probably all the great sea
fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously
affects the number of the fish.”
Huxley’s views dominated thinking
about fisheries for most of the next century. In 1955, Francis Minot, the
director of the Marine and Fisheries Engineering Research Institute, in Woods
Hole, Massachusetts, co-wrote a book titled “The Inexhaustible Sea.” As yet, he
observed, “we do not know the ocean well enough. Much must still be learned. Nevertheless,
we are already beginning to understand that what it has to offer extends beyond
the limits of our imagination.” In 1964, the annual global catch totalled
around fifty million tons; a U.S. Interior Department report from that year
predicted that it could be “increased at least tenfold without endangering
aquatic stocks.” Three years later, the department revised its estimate; the
catch could be increased not by a factor of ten but by a factor of forty, to
two billion tons a year. This, it noted, would be enough to feed the world’s
population ten times over. Michael L. Weber observes, in “From Abundance to
Scarcity” (2002), that as recently as the nineteen-nineties U.S. policy was
predicated “on the belief that the ocean’s productivity was almost limitless.”
In the meantime, “machinery” beyond
Huxley’s wildest imagining was being developed. Purse seines were introduced in
the nineteen-thirties. These giant nets can be played out around entire schools
of fish, then gathered up with drawstrings, like huge laundry bags. Factory
freezer trawlers, developed after the Second World War, grew to be so
gargantuan that they amounted to, in effect, seafaring towns. In the
nineteen-fifties, many fleets added echo-sounding sonar, which can detect fish
schools long before they surface. Today, specially designed buoys known as
“fish aggregating devices,” or FADs, are deployed to attract species like
yellowfin tuna and blue marlin. So-called “smart” FADs come equipped with sonar
and G.P.S., so operators can detect from afar whether they are, in fact, surrounded
by fish.
In the short term, the new
technology worked, much as Huxley had predicted, to swell catches. But only in
the short term. In the late nineteen-eighties, the total world catch topped out
at around eighty-five million tons, which is to say, roughly 1.9 billion tons
short of the Interior Department’s most lunatic estimate. This milestone—the
point of what might be called “peak fish”—was passed without anyone’s quite
realizing it, owing to inflated catch figures from the Chinese. (These fishy
figures were later exposed as politically motivated fabrications.) For the past
two decades, the global catch has been steadily declining. It is estimated that
the total take is dropping by around five hundred thousand tons a year.
Meanwhile, as the size of the catch
has fallen, so, too, has the size of the creatures being caught. This
phenomenon, which has become known as “fishing down the food web,” was first
identified by Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia.
In “Five Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems” (Island Press;
$50), Pauly follows this trend to its logical—or, if you prefer,
illogical—conclusion. Eventually, all that will be left in the oceans are
organisms that people won’t, or can’t, consume, like sea slugs and toxic algae.
It’s been argued that humans have become such a dominant force on the planet
that we’ve ushered in a new geological epoch. Pauly proposes that this new
epoch be called the Myxocene, from the Greek muxa, meaning “slime.” . . .
* * *
There is a useful
archive of
magazine essays on the fisheries crisis at the Sea Around Us Project.
