Fishing
Table of Contents
Introduction
Commercial fishing is the activity of catching fish and other seafood for commercial profit, mostly from wild fisheries. It provides a large quantity of food to many costal communities around the world.
50-100 g of protein per day is considered a healthy range for many active adults.
"Fish is one of the most popular forms of animal protein, with over 3.2 billion people relying on it as 20% of their protein intake. This number is even higher in island and coastal regions, with individuals in those areas relying on fish for up to 70% of their protein intake. As consumption continues to increase due to health-conscious consumers, concerns about the ethics of the fishing industry are beginning to arise due to the threat it raises to our oceans."
Currently around 90% of fish stocks are overexploited, and nations are scrambling to find alternative protein sources, often turning to farmed fish. Unfortunately, even though 90% of the bycatch we turn into fish meal is perfectly safe for human consumption, and would more efficiently feed people than animals, an estimated 71% of fishmeal is fed to aquaculture farms. This is a major problem because most of the food becomes fish waste, bones, skin, and other inedible materials. The fishing industry will not be able to keep up with the growth and demands of the aquaculture industry, which is why aquaculture is driving deforestation for soy production which is also a major feed source.
Impact of Climate Change
"Our changing climate is affecting life in the oceans, as droughts, floods, rising seas, ocean acidification, and warming oceans change the productivity of our waters and where wildlife live, spawn, and feed. Marine species tend to be highly mobile, and many are moving quickly toward the poles to stay cool as average ocean temperatures rise. These shifts can cause disruptions as predators become separated from their prey. The shifts can also cause economic disruptions if a fish population becomes less productive or moves out of range of the fishermen who catch them."
Overfishing
"Industrialized fishing practices are a primary threat to marine life worldwide. Global fish stocks are being overharvested at ecologically and economically indefensible levels. Heavily subsidized commercial fisheries undermine sensitive ocean ecosystems, threaten climate stability, jeopardize global food security, and imperil marine wildlife."
"The number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-third of the world's assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations."
In 2018, we were warned that 90% of global fisheries had already been used up, with not enough large, adult fish left to help their populations to remain viable, thanks to humanity's obsession with harvesting the largest fish (the 6 population collapses of various types of cod serve as a good examples of this pattern).
In fact, at our current rate of extraction, it's estimated that our oceans will run out of fish by 2048!
"An investigation by Greenpeace last year revealed that 29% of the UK’s fishing quota is owned by five families, all of whom feature on the Sunday Times Rich List. A single Dutch multinational, operating a vast fishing ship, holds a further 24% of the English quota. The smallest boats – less than 10 metres long – comprise 79% of the fleet, but are entitled to catch just 2% of the fish.
The same applies worldwide: huge ships from rich nations mop up the fish surrounding poor nations, depriving hundreds of millions of their major source of protein, while wiping out sharks, tuna, turtles, albatrosses, dolphins and much of the rest of the life of the seas. Coastal fish farming has even greater impacts, as fish and prawns are often fed on entire marine ecosystems: indiscriminate trawlers dredge up everything and mash it into fishmeal.
The high seas – in other words, the oceans beyond the 200-mile national limits – are a lawless realm. Here fishing ships put out lines of hooks up to 75 miles long, which sweep the sea clean of predators and any other animals that encounter them. But even inshore fisheries are disastrously managed, through a combination of lax rules and a catastrophic failure to enforce them.
For a few years, the populations of cod and mackerel around the UK started to recover. We were told we could start eating them again with a clear conscience. Both are now plummeting. Young cod are being illegally discarded (tipped overboard) on an industrial scale, with the result that the legal catch in UK seas is probably being exceeded by roughly one-third. Mackerel in these waters, thanks to the scarcely regulated greed of the fishery, lost its eco label a few weeks ago.
The government claims that 36% of England’s waters are “safeguarded as marine protected areas” (MPAs). But this protection amounts to nothing but lines on the map. Commercial fishing is excluded from less than 0.1% of these fake reserves. A recent paper in the Science journal found that the trawling intensity in European protected areas is higher than in unprotected places. These MPAs are a total farce: their only purpose is to con the public into believing that something is being done." - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/09/seas-stop-eating-fish-fishing-industry-government
Even Lakes Are In Danger
Drivers of Overfishing
Fleet Overcapacity
"The size and capacity of the EU fleet is estimated to be 2 to 3 times above the sustainable level in a number of fisheries, according to European Commission figures. This overcapacity drives overfishing, making the fleet economically unviable. Too many, powerful and destructive boats are chasing too few fish.
Maintaining a fleet that is too large and powerful in relation to the available resources is uneconomic and often the cause of overfishing. The Commission's Green Paper identified overcapacity as a fundamental problem of the CFP. Fleet overcapacity leads to:
intense competition for limited resources, which leads to a low profitability of fishing operations and may motivate fishers to take high risks and/or engage in illegal fishing;
increased political pressure to set quotas above scientifically recommended levels and to maintain perverse subsidies; and
excessive impacts on marine ecosystems and fisheries resources.
In 2009, the fishing sector operated at a loss of almost 5%, according to figures presented by the European Commission. This is a symptom of too many fishers competing for limited resources. Subsidies received by the sector compensate for some of these losses and create the illusion that fishing is still a viable business." - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2011/11/14/fleet-overcapacity-is-driving-overfishing
Where and how should fleet capacity be reduced?
"The vast majority of European fish stocks are being fished unsustainably. Fleet overcapacity is one of the main drivers behind overfishing of most or all of these stocks.
To effectively reduce overcapacity, it is essential to:
assess fishing capacity in relation to available resources;
aim measures at segments of the fleet that contribute most to stock depletion and damage to the wider marine environment, and least to the social, economic and cultural fabric that sustains coastal communities; and
establish a detailed capacity reduction strategy with clear targets and timelines, ideally within multiannual plans." - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2011/11/14/fleet-overcapacity-is-driving-overfishing
How can job losses be limited?
"Nobody benefits from the current state of affairs in fisheries management: employment in the EU catching sector has fallen by 31% since 2002 and the profitability of the sector has steadily declined. While a reduction in fleet capacity to sustainable levels is likely to further reduce the number of jobs, the prospect is one of growing revenues and better pay and investment opportunities as stocks recover.
Moreover, by targeting segments of the fleet that contribute most to stock depletion and environmental destruction, yet least to job creation, it is possible to achieve significant reductions while minimising job losses." - https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheets/2011/11/14/fleet-overcapacity-is-driving-overfishing
Fishing Subsidies
Fuel Subsidies
As of 2019 "fuel subsidies represent nearly a quarter (22%) of all financial support provided to fishing fleets."
The same article explains that, "Asia offers the largest subsidies to its fleets. The continent contributed 55% of the global total, followed by Europe (18%) and North America (13%). China was the largest single contributor, making 21% of the global subsidy payments, followed by the USA (10%) and Korea (9%). Those numbers represent quite different approaches and impacts, Sumaila says. Subsidies from China and Korea are mostly classified as damaging, while those from the US government tend to be beneficial."
Demand for Livestock & Aquaculture Feed
"One-third of the world’s ocean fish catch is ground up for animal feed, a potential problem for marine ecosystems and a waste of a resource that could directly nourish humans," according to this article.
"The fish being used to feed pigs, chickens and farm-raised fish are often thought of as bait, including anchovies, sardines, menhaden and other small- to medium-sized species, researchers wrote in a study to be published in November in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
These so-called forage fish account for 37 percent, or 31.5 million tons, of all fish taken from the world’s oceans each year, the study said. Ninety percent of that catch is turned into fish meal or fish oil, most of which is used as agricultural and aquacultural feed.
Ellen Pikitch, executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, called these numbers “staggering.”
“The reason I find that so alarming is that it’s an enormous percentage of the world fish catch,” Pikitch said by telephone. “And fish are fundamentally important to the health of the ocean overall.”
Forage fish are near the base of the marine food web, nourishing larger fish, ocean-dwelling marine mammals and sea birds, especially puffins and gulls, the study said."
Fishing Quotas
"Scientific advice on the maximum sustainable yield was followed for 59 stocks, but there are more than 100 governed by the quota system; in the north Atlantic, advice was mostly not followed, according to campaigners. More than half of the North Sea and north Atlantic key stocks have been estimated to be overfished.
Rebecca Hubbard, the programme director at Our Fish, a campaigning organisation, said: “This should have been the year in which fishing quotas finally followed scientific advice, and EU fisheries ministers made history by ending overfishing in EU waters.
“Instead, we saw another absurd all-night meeting behind closed doors, where ministers haggled over fishing quotas like kids trading football cards. By choosing to set fishing limits above scientific advice for many stocks, they have ignored European citizens and all of the evidence that shows ending overfishing will deliver healthy fish stocks, more jobs and security for coastal communities.”" - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/19/eu-fishing-quotas-risk-stocks-overfishing
Harmful Fishing Practices
Harmful Fishing Practices including:
Trying to catch the largest fish and throwing small ones back mean that the older and bigger fish who produce the most eggs are constantly removed from eco-systems and further reduces the number of offspring which can be produced at any given time. Some popular fish species can't breed until they are 6 years old, much older than livestock on land who generally at around a year old or less.
Catch and release unfortunately results in the death of fish who get the bends when dragged from deep water, or puts them at risk of dying from starvation or infection after hooks have gone through their mouths.
Bottom Trawling "destroys the natural seafloor habitat by essentially rototilling the seabed. All of the bottom-dwelling plants and animals are affected, if not outright destroyed by tearing up root systems or animal burrows."
Cyanide Fishing "kills coral polyps and algae, turning many coral reefs — the “rainforests of the oceans” — into marine deserts. "A square metre of reef is destroyed for every live fish caught using cyanide," says biologist Sam Mamauag of the International Marinelife Alliance (IMA) in the Philippines."
Dynamite Fishing "is one of the most destructive forms of fishing because it indiscriminately kills any animal in the blast area—from fish eggs and plankton to whales and dolphins—and devastates corals."
Gillnets are walls of netting that traps fish by their gills. They catch everything in their path including endangered species who drown, get strangled, and if they are removed and released then their gills are ripped off so they die anyway.
Harpoon Fishing
Whaling "Despite international opposition to commercial whaling and declining demand for whale meat, Norwegian whalers still brutally killed 575 minke whales during the 2021 season, which is the highest number killed since 2016.
The International Whaling Commission issued a global moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982, which went into effect in 1986, but Norway has formally objected to it and has killed more than 14,000 minke whales since 1993.
For the last three years, it’s issued a self-allocated quota of 1,278 minke whales, although it hasn’t killed as many and the country has continued to face criticism from around the world over concerns that not only is it incredibly cruel, it’s certainly unsustainable — especially considering the fact that many whales who are killed are pregnant females.
Whale hunting is unconscionable for many reasons. Whales are intelligent and lead social and emotional lives. Yet whalers still hunt them with grenade-tipped harpoons, and a significant percentage do not die or fall unconscious immediately, with some experiencing more than 20 minutes of excruciating pain and horror before dying. Whales are keystone species essential to their ecosystems and play a critical role in mitigating the climate crisis. In killing them, humans harm all the other animals who share the ocean with them, and ourselves.
What makes this situation all the more frustrating is that the citizens of Norway do not support whale hunting. The industry remains largely subsidized by the government and is partially propped up by unwitting tourists who consume whale meat. Norwegian whalers have admitted to dumping whale meat overboard, and recently uncovered documents have revealed that whale meat is even sold for dog food."
Catch & Release
Catch ad release has long been considered humane, but studies have found that fish actually get the bends worse than humans. A condition that causes oxygen in our blood stream to expand, causing pottentially deadly problems for humans often causes fish's eyes and organs to rupture. Some suffocate on deck or are crushed to death by other fish before being thrown over board.
When done after catching with a hook, fish struggle to feed and don't have access to medical care like we'd provide to a dog or child with a puncture through their mouth, meaning fish who are able to eat, may still die later from putrid wounds.
The best way to catch fish (perhaps for a study or biodiversity count) is to use nets or similar traps that won't harm the fish, allowing them to be returned with nothing more than some stress and confusion.
Gillnets
A gill net is "... a floating wall of monofilament-line, designed to snare fish by their gills as they try to swim through the net mesh.
In most cases, nets are left out overnight and are pulled up in the morning, and anything that has become entangled in them is pulled into the boat.
But the net doesn’t discriminate or know regulations.
Anything that swims into it while it’s deployed is entangled, and in most cases, will thrash itself to death.
Gill nets routinely catch juvenile fish that don’t meet minimum size requirements, as well as mature fish that are over slot regulations.
These fish that fall outside of what commercial fishermen are legally allowed to keep are labeled as “discards”.
They are ripped out of the net and thrown back into the water.
Because these fish have been ensnared by their gills, removing them from the net without damaging their gills is virtually impossible.
Because of the violent removal process, independent gill net studies show that “discard” mortality rates (death after being in a gill net) average between 64%-78%.
Even if these fish survive the initial netting, they most likely die later on.
The simple fact is that gill nets kill almost everything that they come in contact with (including non-fish, such as birds, endangered turtles, and even dolphins)." - https://www.saltstrong.com/articles/north-carolina-gill-net-problem/
Solutions
Solutions used by the industry include: increasing net monitoring accompanied with certification, using wider gauge net to reduce bycatch of undersized fish, and the use of "'pingers’: acoustic alarms attached to nets which deter marine mammals."
Contact your representative if these are legal in your country's water to tell them you want gill nets banned, or if they are being used illegally in your waters, that you want better monitoring and prosecution of companies using these nets.
Concrete Block Planting Project If you are not already working with an environmental group that can do this, then support those that do.
Habitat Destruction
As fishermen work harder to catch fewer fish, their fishing methods can cause negative impacts to the marine environment. Fishing vessels with trawling nets or dredges destroy ocean habitats collecting organisms from coral to shellfish and other bottom-dwellers along in their path. These fishing practices destroy shelter, feeding and breeding grounds that are essential for species survival. Many of the species impacted by these methods have problems recovering from such complete habitat destruction as areas are dredged and trawled multiple times a year.
Pollution
Cyanide
Cyanide fishing is primarily used to capture exotic fish for the pet trade industry. Cyanide not only kills many fish on contact, but also harms the surrounding reef.
Bilge Waste
This include sewage, engine oil, and other toxic chemicals. The trails can be seen from space.
Fuel Emissions
Subsides for the fishing industry fuel overfishing. One "analysis found that fuel subsidies represent nearly a quarter (22%) of all financial support provided to fishing fleets.
Fuel subsidies are widely considered among the most harmful because they make it affordable for more vessels to spend the time at sea necessary to chase down dwindling fish populations."
Nitrogen
Plastic Pollution
Ghost Gear
"Some kinds of fishing gear can be even more destructive when they become lost or forgotten in the water because they continue to catch animals, a phenomenon known as “ghost fishing.” This is particularly wasteful and destructive because the gear can ensnare tons of animals that aren't being harvested or used in any way. Fishing piers can be sites of ghost fishing as lures and lines become wrapped around pilings, where animals swimming by become trapped. Fish are not the only victims, however, as birds that dive into the water for prey can also get caught in the lines when they enter the water."
Click the Fishing Industry Waste button to learn more about the pollution created and dumped in our oceans or emitted into the atmosphere.
Bycatch
"Wherever there is fishing, there is bycatch—the incidental capture of non-target species such as dolphins, marine turtles and seabirds. Thousands of miles of nets and lines are set in the world's oceans each day. Modern fishing gear, often undetectable by sight and extremely strong, is very efficient at catching the desired fish species—as well as anything else in its path. A staggering amount of marine life—including turtles, dolphins and juvenile fish—is hauled up with the catch, and then discarded overboard dead or dying."
Impacts on People & Communities
Overfishing Is Driving Hunger, Civil Unrest, & Mass Immigration
Slavery
"Marine fisheries are in crisis, requiring twice the fishing effort of the 1950s to catch the same quantity of fish, and with many fleets operating beyond economic or ecological sustainability. A possible consequence of diminishing returns in this race to fish is serious labour abuses, including modern slavery, which exploit vulnerable workers to reduce costs. Here, we use the Global Slavery Index (GSI), a national-level indicator, as a proxy for modern slavery and labour abuses in fisheries. GSI estimates and fisheries governance are correlated at the national level among the major fishing countries. Furthermore, countries having documented labour abuses at sea share key features, including higher levels of subsidised distant-water fishing and poor catch reporting. Further research into modern slavery in the fisheries sector is needed to better understand how the issue relates to overfishing and fisheries policy, as well as measures to reduce risk in these labour markets." - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07118-9
Solutions
Calls to Action
Level 1-3
Buy/cook/provide plant, seaweed, and mushroom based alternatives.
Support Sustainable Marine Management In some countries people have very few economic options other than to harvest marine life. In these cases it is best to focus on helping these people learn the more sustainable, and safer methods. Such as those explores on our Mangrove and Oyster Reef pages.
Help Remove Ghost Gear This can include collecting, processing, producing products from the gear, and buying the gear to support removal efforts.
Level 3-4
End Fishing Subsidies to destructive fishing companies. The same money can be redirected to habitat protection, and sustainable fishery practices like seaweed farming.
Organizations
North America
Net Your Problem this organization's "mission is to engage a variety of stakeholders and partners to create an economically viable pathway to recycle end of life fishing gear, improve waste management, contribute to the circular economy, and reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions related to virgin plastic production." They have locations in Canada and the USA, but have to send their harvested netting to Europe for recycling.
Oceana
New Zealand
Ghost Diving NZ (GDNZ) is the New Zealand branch of an international organisation who collaborate worldwide with various local groups of technical and salvage divers to remove lost fishing gear.
GDNZ have embraced this concept and diversified it by also removing rubbish and debris, fishing gear, abandoned fishing nets and various other dumped items we find from the local environment.
Check our website and follow us on socials to keep informed of events, coastline clean-ups, access discounted training sessions and support our efforts to make our wonderful country even more beautiful."
Further Reading
Click the Fishing Industry button and/or the Food Security button to learn about the other effects fishing has on the environment and people.
Click the Seafood Alternatives button for ideas on how to enjoy seafood flavors without the ecological or humanitarian impact of the fishing industry.
If you want to help clean up harm done by fishing and other human activities, consider the following resources:
Mangroves