This [unedited] guest post is by a student in my EEP100 class (background post).
Please praise/critique/comment on its economic quality and importance to you.
Ben Rego says:Recently in the San Francisco chronicle I read a story about how more and more dead seals were turning up on beaches around the bay. The article went on to say how the seals are starving because of the decline in fisheries around the Bay Area. The decline in fisheries has been talked about for some time now. The largest catch on record was 86 million tons in 1989 but since then it has been two long decades of declining catch yields.
Scientists in Nature magazine estimate that over 90% of the worlds predatory fish are gone and that the sea will crash by 2048 assuming no change in practices. In the United States alone one quarter of the fisheries are overfished with another quarter experiencing overfishing. The impending collapse of domestic fisheries would have a devastating effect on our economy and economies worldwide. In the early 1990s New England's cod fishery collapsed which caused 20,000 jobs to be lost. In 1992 a Canadian fishery collapsed causing 40,000 people to lose their jobs and destroying the marine ecosystem in that region.
This problem is fixable though. With minimal regulations on catching only the maximum sustainable yield we will be able to fish what we need and since fishermen maintain high profits despite lower stock abundance no jobs will be lost by catching less.
Bottom Line: Fishery collapse is very real and if better regulations aren’t set up to prevent them from collapsing then thousands will lose their jobs not to mention a major food source will disappear.
If you want to know more about the decline of fisheries worldwide here is an interesting pdf to read that gives a good overview. It’s a little dense though.
DZ's Note: The Economist on governments paying for over-fishing.
6 comments:
I'm curious whether the collapse of the New England and Canadian fisheries and subsequent job losses motivated fishers elsewhere to work to prevent the same happening to them. For example, how are San Francisco/Northern California fishing industries addressing this threat?
Mr. Rego:
It's not the fishermen who are harming the fisheries. It's guys like Warren "Old Man Non-River" Buffet who have plopped tens of thousands of dams and levees into all of our rivers. They make too much money off their destructive plugs to let us obliterate them for the sake of the fishies and the water cycle. These dams and levees have partitioned off entire river systems into stagnant little succo-eco-systems, separating off the fishies' from their ancient supplies of allochthonous resources. A good example of allochthonous resources ---> the Salmon which not-so-long-ago would swim all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Redfish Lake in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Can you guess why they called it "Redfish Lake" and "Little Redfish Lake"? The Salmon would spawn at Refish lake, then they would die and then their bodies became beaucoup allochthonous resourses for the other fishies!
See http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/Y2785E/y2785e02.htm
for futher info. Cutting off fish food and starving the little fishies is not the only harm done by dams. Where's Hayduke when we need him? I hear Hayduke's a part-time night watchman but I don't know where. If you see Hayduke, ask him to contact me, he and I are Vietnam Veterans and we want to discuss allochthonous resources.
Mr. Rego, you should pick up this Summer's edition (I believe it was July) of Science Magazine, where a huge overhaul of the earlier fishery-collapsing claims took place, with the help of the scientists who made the earlier claims.
It would seem that the oceans' fisheries are more complicated than first thought. It also seems that California (pre-MLPA) has had the best fishery management in the world (well, us and NZ), with recovering stocks.
I have a few comments in response to everyone else's comments.
Kathryn - the answer to your question is no. The typical response of fishermen to greater controls over fisheries and reductions in catch limits is to sue NMFS to slow or prevent their implementation.
Dr. Hamid Rasool - the fishermen are definitely harming fish stocks (in addition to the dams). Overfishing is a global phenomenon and it clearly isn't restricted to anadromous fish stocks. See for example red snapper, grouper and Atlantic bluefin Tuna. Also look at the fact that there is a widespread need for fish stocking in order to maintain fish populations in lakes that are both affected and unaffected by the construction of dams.
Josh - I think the paper you are referring to has Boris Worm and Ray Hilborn as the main authors. It might also be useful to look at the paper Sibert et al. 2006. Biomass, size and trophic status of top predators in the Pacific Ocean. Science 314:1773-1776
Aaron, that's the paper. It's great that the two scientists with opposing views were able to come out with such a comprehensive, honest look at world fisheries.
I don't disagree with the threat to top predators, but I waned to point out that there are a number of successful methods for protecting stocks, and some include fishing.
thanks for the comments. I will be sure to read up on that article in Science when i rewrite this blog. Your comments helped a lot!
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