Environmentalists and fishermen rarely agree on anything. It’s a pity because conventional logic would say that, fundamentally, environmentalists and fishing people should stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a common cause for maintaining resources – sustainability – while blending that with their sensible usage. Unfortunately, all too often there is controversy between the two in many countries, and even globally.
Today, sustainability is the core concept defining a desired long-lasting state. The EU has adopted sustainable development as one of its core objectives. It is about developing practices of resource use compatible with environmental constraints, and social /economic needs.
Fisheries management means managing the process in which fishing people exploit, in a sustainable manner, fish-resources within fishery ecosystems. These are bound together in every fishery, and influenced by such external factors as people’s cultures, markets, technology, and logistics, on the one hand, and fishery-independent natural, biotic and non-biotic trends and fluctuations on the other. Joe Borg, the EU’s Commissioner for Fisheries, said last February that his management’s challenge is to find “a balance between economic growth from sea-related activities and the protection of the environment which is essential to their sustainability”.
In short, for all practical purposes, sustainability in fisheries must be the golden means to exploiting fisheries resources, without depleting them. Unfortunately, it appears that this buzz word sounds different when pronounced by fishermen and by environmentalists.
Abuse of the term
For example, as reported by www.Fishupdate.com, George MacRae, secretary of the Scottish White Fish Producers’ Association said that the term sustainable fishing is often abused and that “…to the environmentalist it means reducing commercial fishing to no more than a very small, inshore, one-man vessel industry with the interests of seaweed/fauna growing on the seabed being preferable to the development of an industry that has been of great benefit to Scotland over the generations producing top quality nutritional food…”. He’s anxious that “…the interests of the environmentalist are being taken aboard locally, nationally and internationally at a galloping pace”.
But Carol Phua, Fisheries Policy Officer at World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), told the EU Commission in Brussels last March, "It is only by reducing the capacity of the European fishing fleet that a solution to the problem of over exploitation of the marine environment can be found. The fishing industry cannot exist if there are no fish left".
Dr. Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia is the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us project, www.seaaroundus.org, sponsored by the US-based Pew Charitable Trusts to document and assess the fate of global fisheries.
He thinks the world has passed "peak fish" and landings will keep deteriorating unless there's political action to stem global overfishing, adding that the crisis in the world's fisheries is less about scientific proof than about attitude and political will.
No more science
"We don't need more science”, Pauly said. “This is a message that's different from many of my colleagues. Of course we need to learn more about fish. But research is often publicly funded on the grounds that this is an alternative to other political action”.
Dr. Pauly is adamant that bringing an end to overfishing requires recognizing the “deep divide between the fishing industry and those who eat fish”. He argues that fisheries companies are primarily interested in maximizing short-term profit, with little or no regard for the long-term sustainability of fish stocks, and that fishing “needs to be reigned in for its own good." He believes that a reduction of excess capacity, the creation of "no-take zones" covering about 20% of habitats, and political enforcement of sustainable fishing levels, will result in more fish for our tables. According to other reports, only about 0.5% of the oceans are in protected areas, compared to 12% of the earth's land surface in parks for nature and wildlife preservation.
But what Dr. Pauly fails to see or just ignores are dozens of toxic chemicals, upstream water and air pollution and their joint effect on coastal marine areas, and that the most deadly pollution affecting coastal habitats including fish nursery and feeding grounds, comes from industrial sources, specifically the petro- and electro-chemical sectors.
Ignoring natural environmental factors is also ridiculous. Dr. Gary Sharp, a California Based systems ecologist, has talked and written for years of the crucial influence of climatic and oceanic processes and fluctuations on fish populations. Species with narrow temperature preference limits, are affected by thermal anomalies that delay or hasten spawning and hatching, and displace spawning grounds. Survival of larvae and juveniles depends, apart from hydrographic conditions, on availability of the right food, at the right place and time, as well as on the rate of predation.
"We used to think that if you got hold of fishing, all your problems would be solved," said James H. Uphoff Jr., a biologist at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "But now all these ecological problems crop up, and we don't understand them."
No doubt, wherever occurs impoverishment of commercial fish populations (a term I prefer to use for combined causality, which happens in almost every instance when the term overfishing is brought up), fishing would probably be one of the causes. But any a priori blaming of every negative change in fish population solely on fishing is certainly wrong and demonstrates either ignorance or intentional fallacy. Not once has such an assumption led fishery management to a debacle. In ecology there's almost never one single factor that's responsible for an ongoing process or for a given situation. No moratoria will restore fish stocks that unfavourable hydrographic changes or massive pollution chased from an area or forced it into producing only poor year classes.
To be continued in the next issue...
benyami@actcom.net.il
