Fishing about and about fishing

LOOKING BACK AT A FISHY CENTURY

 

(Abridged version “From motorisation to conservation” was published as

M.Ben-Yami’s column in World Fishing, December 1999).

 

The 20th century is expiring in front of our eyes along with the 2nd Millennium. Those of

us who were involved in World War 2 would hardly believe that they live to see what

they see at the dawn of the 21st. But, with one month to go, it's as a good opportunity as

any to glance at the diverse and often troubled fishing history of the last 100 years,

during which the industry underwent more than one revolutionary change, and in more

than one sense.

Motorisation. It began with mushrooming vessels motorisation in Europe, Japan, and

N.America, steam and diesel engines replacing sail power. In an FAO paper, David

Thomson of Scotland wrote that during the first half of the century fish markets were

extremely species and size selective, which forced most commercial fishermen to apply

selective, single-purpose gear and methods in single-purpose vessels. The nearest

thing to a multi-purpose fishery was trawling, but even so only a handful of bottom

species could find high-demand on European and North American markets. In the

North Atlantic, only 2 species really mattered: cod and herring. With a few exceptions,

such as the North Atlantic banks, most of the fishing was done in coastal waters.

Fishing was long considered trade that, apart from navigational skill, requires only

artisan’s, traditional knowledge. But fast modernization of fisheries and the growing size

of fishing vessels required also specially trained personnel. Already in the second

quarter of the century Japan and Russia recognized the importance of establishment of

modern fishery industry and founded fishing schools and colleges. Later, especially after

WW2, other countries, followed suit.

Post-war expansion. After World War 2 things have dramatically changed. The world,

starved for animal-protein, welcomed new technologies that offered new options to the

industry. Fishermen adapted some of those, such as hydro-acoustics and radar, from

the naval inventory. Synthetic fibres, outboard engines, extensive power range of

diesels, mechanically and hydraulically powered winches, and net and line haulers

provided both small and larger scale fisheries with additional efficiency, security of

operation, and improvement of working conditions.

Concurrently, came mechanical refrigeration and freezing, midwater trawling, application

of synthetics in construction of fishing gear, ever larger fishing vessels and, following the

first stern-trawlers, the British "Fairfree" and "Fairtry", hundreds of giant factory trawlers

were built at a grandiose scale most of them for Soviet-Block fishing fleets.

Reality frustrated quite a few technological hopes that soared high after WW2. Such

were, for example, atomic reactors on the bottom of the sea creating artificial upwelling

enriching nutrient-exhausted upper layers, electric fishing in sea water, automated

fishing with pumps, light, and electric current, trawlnets towed by pairs of remotecontrolled

unmanned submarines, fishing with sound attraction, adaptation of the

Magnus' rotor effect in trawls to replace trawl boards, and massive fisheries of

mesopelagic fishes and krill. On the other hand, hydro-acoustics fish-finding and gearmonitoring

equipment was fast improving. In the 3rd quarter of the century it integrated

computer technology, thus achieving amazing degree of resolution and data

interpretation.

Exclusive Economic Zones. The cod war between Iceland and Britain paved the way

for the international acceptance of the 200-mile wide EEZ, which gave all coastal

nations nominal control over their fishery resources. Some of them have been able to

assume such control, others - not yet, or partly only. The declaration of EEZ hit many

European distant-water operations and their fishing ports later combined with the

downfall of the centrally controlled economies to bring about the collapse of their

mammoth fleets of factory ships.

The second half and, especially, the fourth quarter of the 20th century have witnessed

many technological and economic developments which together with swelling fish

markets have supported the explosion, superseiners, freezer-trawlers, giant midwater

trawlnets, autolining, out-growing tuna in cages, first attempts at krill industry, and

research and production of artificial bait and light lures. Far Eastern markets developed

to attract huge amounts of fish and promoted, for better or worse, production of highvalue

sashimi tuna, shark fins, and marine crustaceans, mollusks, and sea cucumbers.

Also in Europe and N.America constantly growing fish markets became the driving force

behind investments in salmon, shrimp, gilthead bream, and bass farms, and in fishing

fleets. All this led eventually to over-capacity.

Contradictory processes. Meanwhile, marine fish production from the wild has grown

fivefold since World War 2, ranging in recent years around 90M MT. Certain fisheries

still keep growing, but at a decelerating rate, while many stocks have been overfished

and more – exploited to their utmost. Aquaculture on land keeps expanding, and

together with the mushrooming marine farming just approached a fifth of the world’s fish

yield.

The world’s population is incessantly growing and so is the demand for marine protein.

But the marine fish stocks are finite, though fluctuating with various environmental and

anthropogenic factors, and there’s little prospect for much growth of yields. Aquaculture

bears more promise, in spite of such constraints as high production costs, availability of

fodder of marine origin, and various environmental problems.

But another consequence of this growth of human population, was accelerating

urbanization, industrialization, and farming intensification, which resulted in increasing

pollution of marine ecosystems. In extreme cases, man-caused pollution streaming

down rivers may end in disasters, such as the collapse of the Black Sea fishery ecosystem

of late 1980s and early 1990s. Major engineering works, like up-stream dams,

coastal structures, and shrimp farming ponds that replaced extensive mangrove areas,

affected to various degrees inshore and offshore fish habitats and nursery areas.

Environmental issues

Concurrently evolved powerful environmental movement in the form of a rather

amorphous cluster of green organizations directed its conservationist efforts at marine

environment, in general, and fisheries in particular, with mixed intentions and results. Of

major importance has been "Greenpeace"'s contribution to improved management and

revival of whale populations. Green ideologies range from a credible desire for

sustainable fisheries to lunatic pleas to save all marine organisms. Green activities

affected fisheries in several ways, starting with enforcing turtle-escape devices in shrimp

trawlnets, through total banning of "setting on dolphins" in the E.Pacific tuna purse-seine

fishery, and ending with building up of unprecedented populations of certain fish-eating

marine mammals that brought about the need for culling of some of their populations.

Much less effective, however, has been the impact of the environmental movement on

marine and upstream pollution. Critical observers are claiming that one reason for this

partial default is the participation of some major polluters in foundations that finance

green organizations. Others allege that some environmentalists prefer to focus on

commercial fisheries, while ignoring recreational ones, which may be a product of an

intense competition for resources with the increasingly powerful sport fishing lobby.

Also commercial fisheries keep competing with each other, especially small-scale

versus large-scale fisheries over inshore and coastal fishing grounds.

Technology. The advancing technology made today's fishing vessels into powerful

fishing machines. Nevertheless, on many fishing grounds they are catching less fish per

investment dollar and per fuel unit than their weaker predecessors were catching

decades ago. The technology that perfected fish capture, navigation, handling and

processing, failed to provide the gear selectivity needed to minimise the impact on

fishery ecosystems and prevent unneeded bycatch. Focusing mainly on where the

money was, it contributed rather towards the exhaustion of fish stocks than towards

maximizing their protection and sustainable utilisation.

This century saw many people who brought about great technological changes, among

them, a Russian engineer F.I.Baranov, and Japanese scientists M.Tauti, and T.Terada,

who pioneered the science of fishing technology, Vigneron and Dahl the French

fishermen who put sweeps between trawlnets and trawlboards, Matrosov - oval, slotted

trawlboards; Mario Puretic - inventor of power block, and P.G.Schmidt of MARCO who

influenced purse-seine fisheries all over the world; Simonsen, the Norwegian WW2

resistance radio-operator who founded SIMRAD the pioneer in fishing sonars, Hilmar

Kristjonsson and J.O.Traung of FAO who made fishing gear technology and fishing

boats architecture into internationally recognized engineering disciplines, the German

fishing technologist J.Schaerfe, later of FAO, invented remote-controlled trawl-mouth

monitor, Arthur Heighway the journalist from NZ who founded both Fishing News

International and Fishing News Books which since the 1950s was the leading publishing

house of books on fisheries and fishery sciences, including many FAO fishing manuals,

P.G.Borisov introduced fishing with underwater light attraction to the Russian Caspian

and Black Sea sprat and horsemackerel fisheries. P.Klust of Germany and J.Reuter of

Holland introduced testing standards for fishing ropes and twines. F.Sueberkrub, a

German naval architect invented in 1950s the Suebercrub doors - a breakthrough in

midwater trawling, and A.L.Fridman od the Kaliningrad Technical University developed

scientific methodology for fishing gear design.

Fish population dynamics models. F.I.Baranov also fathered fishery modelling, but

these were two British scientists, Ray Beverton and Sydney Holt, M.B.Schaefer, an

American, W.E.Ricker of Canada, and several others, who developed the earlier

mathematical models of F.I.Baranov and E.Russel into working models of fished

populations. During the 1950s and 1960s these models were eagerly and

enthusiastically adopted by fishery biologists, and soon became the main tool used to

assess fish stocks, calculate permissible yields, and advise fishery managers on TACs,

catch quotas, and other steps. In the 1980s, Daniel Pauly produced an adaptation for

tropical multi-species fisheries. Many fisheries became regulated. Riding piggy-back on

these models that soon became "bio-economic", Fridmanian and Thatcherian

economists came up with the thesis that stocks can only be sustainably exploited if they

become a subject to free market forces through individual tradable quotas or other

privatisation options.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, this management methodology came under a

growing criticism by both, social scientists and ecologists. "It ignores fishing people and

their communities, and does not take into account the social costs which may exceed

the financial profits that may be shown by fishing companies, and does not produce true

social and national benefits" - said the former. "Stock assessment models ignore interspecific

oscillations and environmental influences on fish populations, as if their

dynamics depend solely on fishing"- said the latter. Critics included scientists, as John

Caddy and Serge Garcia, biologists of FAO, Russ McGoodwin, an American socioanthropologist,

Gary Sharp, a fishery bio-oceanographer, Parzival Copes, an economist,

and many people from the fishing industry and environmentalist organizations. Even the

late Ray Beverton, one of the founding fathers of the model-based management, in his

swan song lecture at the 1992 World Fisheries Congress in Athens, spelled out their

inadequacies and warned against misuse of the models.

Ecosystem. So, during the last decade of the 20th century the concept of eco-system

management came into being. Not that, at this time, we know how to go about it, but we

now understand that fish and fishermen are only two of the many elements of large and

very complex and dynamic, ever changing and pulsating eco-systems. We now know

that the widely used models are too simplistic. They may and may not give us the right

idea on stock size, allowable catch, and sustainable yields. Mostly not, for Nature is

humbling us constantly. The latest surprise: off Newfoundland where cod disappeared,

the fishery industry has been compensated by huge catches of crustaceans. The catch

value has reached record highs, although the benefits from fishery shifted to different

people.

This was a stormy, horrible, and wondrous century. It carried the fishing industry from a

world of steam engine into one of nuclear power, electronics, and cyber-space. But it

dragged the humanity through 2 horrible wars and the greatest mass killings in the

history, including Holocaust – an industrialized genocide. It brought prosperity to some,

longer life expectation to many, but left many more below reasonable life standards. For

the fisheries industry this was a century of headlong expansion and tumultuous

modernization, possibly too fast and too much for its own good. Most recently, however,

a new trend appeared, a trend of rational, national and international management of the

various fisheries and their natural resources.