Scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference yesterday warned that fuel subsidies that allow deep-sea trawling fleets to destroy fish stocks must be banned.
The conference was told that this fishing method is devastating marine species and reef habitats that have taken centuries to grow and are very slow to reproduce.
Subsidies of more than $152 (£78m) are given to the deep-sea fishing industry each year, with most of them coming from Japan, Russia, South Korea and Spain. Without the subsidies, the global industry would operate at an annual loss of $50 million because it uses huge quantities of fuel to drag the 15 tonne nets.
Oceanographers, economists and marine biologists said that an international ban on fuel subsidies would prevent much of the damage at a stroke.
“Eliminating global subsidies would render these fleets economically unviable,” said Rashid Sumaila, of the University of British Columbia in Canada, an economist who led the analysis of fishing subsidies. “From an ecological perspective we cannot afford to destroy the deep sea. From an economic perspective, deep-sea fisheries cannot occur without subsidies. The bottom line is that current deep fisheries are not sustainable.”
Selina Heppell, of Oregon State University, said: “One of the adaptations to living in a cold dark place is to slow way down. The orange roughy (one of the main species fished) grows so slowly that it may not reach sexual maturity until it is 34 years old, and may live to be 150 years old.
“While it may be a good short-term business practice to fish out stocks and move on, we now see global declines of targeted species,” said Robert Steneck, of the University of Maine. “The harvest of deep-sea fishes is a lot like the harvest of old-growth timber, except we don’t ‘replant’ the fish.”
An attempt to ban unregulated deep-sea fishing at the UN failed in December.
