Fishing about and about fishing
THE MEANING OF SUSTAINABILITY - 1
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, only too often a controversy between the two, at times on low fire, at times raging, is going on in many countries, and even globally
Nowadays, sustainability has become the core concept defining desired long-lasting state. EU has adopted sustainable development as a one of its core objectives. It is about developing practices in utilization of resources compatible with environmental constraints, and with social and economic needs.
Fisheries management means managing the process in which fishing people exploit in a sustainable manner fish-resources within fishery ecosystems. Those three are bound together in every fishery, and influenced by such external factors, as people’s cultures, markets, technology, and logistics on 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 differently when pronounced by fishermen and by environmentalists.
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 (sustainability) 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 last March the EU Commission in Brussels: "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 U.S.-based Pew Charitable Trusts to document and assess the fate of global fisheries.
Dr Pauly thinks that the world has passed "peak fish" and fish landings will keep deteriorating unless there's political action to stem the global overfishing, and he says that the crisis in the world's fisheries is less about scientific proof than about attitude and political will.
"We don't need more science – said Pauly - 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 fishery “needs to be reined in for its own good." He believes that a reduction of excess fishing capacity, the creation of "no-take zones" covering about 20 per cent 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 percent of the oceans are in protected areas, compared to about 12 percent of the earth's land surface set aside 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 that affects coastal habitats including fish nursery and feeding grounds, comes from industrial sources and, in particular, from the petro-chemical and electro-chemical sectors.
Ignoring natural environmental factors is also ridiculous. Dr.Gary Sharp, a California Based systems ecologist, has been talking and writing for years of the crucial influence of climatic and oceanic processes and fluctuations on fish populations, well documented in the history of mankind. 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, also 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 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 populations solely on fishing is certainly wrong and demonstrates either ignorance or intentional fallacy. Such assumption not once 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 stock that unfavourable hydrographic changes or massive pollution chased it from an area or forced it into producing only poor year classes.
M. Ben-Yami Column World Fishing, June 2006
THE MEANING OF SUSTAINABILITY – 2
While sustainability and sustainable development represent consensual values, their implementation is often subject to controversies. The U.N. system recognizes sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. To achieve it, a balance between environmental integrity, social development and economic development must be found. Sustainable development of the global oceans and adjacent inland and coastal areas (more than 60% of the world’s population lives within 60 kilometers of the coast) includes pursuit of science and technology that support human development and sustainable fishing practices, and calls for a cross-disciplinary methodology.
One of the reasons for the fishermen-environmentalists hullabaloo is the pseudoscientific and fallacious demonization of fishing as the sole cause of whatever is happening in the marine ecosystem, while what is happening to fishing people and their communities is ignored. It’d be more constructive if the plight of oceans’ living resources would be represented in a more balanced and scientifically accurate way. The often ignored or obfuscated truth is that marine ecosystems are affected by many factors; fishing being only one of them, and hardly always the most important.
Some examples.
Last March, Washington Post reported that a slowly killing mycobacteriosis epidemic affects the condition and size of the striped bass population and endangers the fishery, which fuels a $300 million industry in Maryland and Virginia. in the heavily polluted Chesapeake Bay
In its 2003 Yearbook UNEP says that the 150 dead zones in bays and semi-enclosed seas worldwide are a greater peril than overfishing, and scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science wrote: “…oxygen depletion is likely to become the keystone impact for the 21st Century, replacing the 20th Century keystone of overfishing." Some of such dead zones extend up to 27,000 square miles.
According to Dr.de Brooke, Curator of Birds at the University of Cambridge, seabirds consume 70 million mt of food. Compare it to the 80 million mt of global landings. Kristin Kaschner, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, reported some years ago that the amount of fish eaten by marine mammals worldwide is estimated at roughly 10 times the worldwide ocean fish harvest.
A recent study of krill-salmon relationship in British Columbia carried out by Dr.Tanasichuk shows that it is the abundance of krill that’s critical for salmon abundance.
The UNEP's Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) reported that decreasing river flows raise salinity in estuaries, deplete and displace fish and aquatic plant species. The report considers climate variability the key controlling factor in fishing yields for about half of the world's large marine ecosystems, including the East and West Greenland shelves, the Benguela Current off Southwest Africa, the Canary Current off Northwest Africa and the Humboldt Current off the west coast of South America.
Over the past decades, modes of climatic variability such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been related to shifts in ecosystem structure, species composition, distribution and biogeochemical processes. Pollution of rivers causes hypoxia in coastal waters, while the retreat of the polar ice-caps affects the marine habitats.
According to Prof. Yoon Jong-Hwa of the (international) Centre for the Research of East Asian Marginal Seas (CREAMS), there’s sufficient evidence that the Sea of Japan's deep, cold currents, which circulate nutrients for surface plankton and life-providing oxygen underwater, are slowing and failing, and he associates shrinking of fisheries yields with this phenomenon.
No doubt, controlling fish harvests is not enough to ensure sustainable fishery and healthy ecosystems. The environmentalists’ and some scientists’ advice that by only controlling fishing they’d achieve sustainability is often counter-productive.
Nowadays, however, more and more people and institutions seem to see light. For example, the UN Atlas of Oceans reports on integration of upstream catchment and marine management: The ICRAN-Mesoamerican Reef Alliance (ICRAN-MAR) engages stakeholders in reef conservation, around three key components: Watershed (Catchment) Management, Sustainable Fisheries, and Sustainable Tourism. In Europe, the condition of the Baltic Sea is mainly controlled by the catchment and river nutrient loads. In Australia, the Great Barrier Reef Protection Plan wants to “halt and reverse the decline in water quality entering the Reef within 10 years” while reducing the progressing pollution of the waterways entering the Reef and affecting its biota.
In most coastal areas, rehabilitation of marine habitats and restoration or protection of essential upstream environments and coastal hydrology functions are essential to future fisheries sustainability. The fundamental message is that for such sustainability we must restructure general coastal management. Environmentalist NGOs and everyone involved in trying to secure sustainability must realize that there has to be a balance between the needs of the people and the conservation of living resources, and both sides need to be prepared to compromise.
I think that the current positive development stems from the recognition that, climatic conditions permitting, sustainability can only be achieved by integrated and balanced approach, involving upstream and downstream influences, fisheries, and any other human activities that affect coastal ecosystems. There is a growing understanding of the complexity of the systems to be managed and of the futility of simplistic approaches, such as those of the, recently less and less prevailing, fishery management science based on inadequate mathematical models.
In my view, scientists and environmentalists who want to assure sustainability by only controlling fishing are wrong, and their advice is counter-productive. It is quite frustrating that some scientists, such as e.g., Dr. Daniel Pauly, who I'm sure, know better, keep talking of "saving the oceans" just by shutting down fisheries or by closing off major sea areas to fisheries, and hardly even mention the whole set of other vectors, whatever may be their relative roles in each separate ecosystem. I think it's foolish not to consider physical, environmental factors, and it's fishy to play down non-human predation, nowadays enhanced by protecting marine mammals, inshore habitat destruction, much of it caused by longshore development, and upstream and marine pollution from industrial, municipal, and agricultural sources.