Seven of the world''s top 10 marine fish species - approximately 30 per cent of all capture fisheries output - are fully exploited or overexploited, according to a UN State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) report.
The authors said that if serious economic, social and ecological drawbacks are to be avoided, reversing depleted wild fish stocks will be a "challenging necessity," reports FIS.
It was time to coincide with a meeting of representatives of nearly 50 countries UN Food and Agriculture Organisations (FAO) Rome headquarters for the 26th meeting of the agency's Committee of Fisheries (COFI).
SOFIA said fish stocks in the Northeast Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea are in the greatest need of recovery.
These are followed by the Northeast Atlantic, the Southeast Atlantic, the Southeast Pacific and the Southern Ocean. Of these, seven per cent are depleted, 16 per cent are overexploited and SOFIA said not able to sustain further harvesting, and 52 per cent are fully exploited, that is, fished at their maximum biological productivity.
Only three per cent of marine stocks are under-exploited, while 21 per cent are moderately exploited and could support modest increases in fishing and in harvest.
Over-exploited stocks, however, would not be able to sustain any kind of future harvesting activity, the report said.
Solutions
Solutions recommended by the authors involve decreasing or temporarily halting fishing activities in overexploited fisheries, reducing destruction of the underwater environment, and actively rehabilitating damaged habitats.
"While recovery of depleted stocks is urgent, it is just as important to avoid depleting still-healthy stocks in the first place by matching fishing efforts to what these stocks are capable of supporting," said Ichiro Nomuro, FAO assistant director general of Fisheries.
Considering the limited progress achieved in the last decade in this respect, restoring depleted stocks to healthy biomass levels by 2015, a goal set at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, represents "a high-order" challenge, the report says.
For around the last 50 years the proportion of marine fish stocks with potential for growth in population diminish as the category of stocks deemed overexploited or depleted increased.
Fish consumption grew from 93.6 million tonnes in 1998 to 100.7 million tonnes in 2002, providing 2.6 billion global citizens with at least 20 per cent of their average per capita animal protein intake, the report said.
