An abundant scientific and journalistic literature continues to warn of the current trend towards the collapse of schools [I]. So, as with other aspects of the socio-environmental crises in which we are sinking, it will not be reasonable to plead ignorance when this decline, caused by corporate overfishing, industrial pollution and warming waters, reaches the end of the line.
The publication by FAO of the 2016 edition of its The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture emphasizes “the urgency of reversing the current trend of overexposure and pollution in order to restore aquatic ecosystem services and the productive capacity of the oceans” [II]. Leaving aside the productivist and anthropocentric conception of this document, which reduces the oldest life laboratory on the planet to a fish factory lacking raw materials, it is important here to draw attention to the very serious situation of overfishing caused by large fishing corporations and fishing trawl net (trawling). The voracity of the intensely carnivorous societies we have become has more than doubled in the last 55 years per capita. Always according to FAO, in the 1960s, we consumed 9,9 kg of fish per capita per annum. In the 1990s, 14,4 kg per capita. In 2013, 19,7 and in 2014, 20,1 kg per capita, and in 2013 industrialized countries consumed 26,8 kg of fish per capita, largely imported from poor countries, since the northern seas are no longer capable of satisfying the Euro-North American appetite.
In a previous document, FAO stated that 52% of global fish stocks were fully exploited (fully exploited), 17% overexploited (overexploited) and 7% had already been sold out (depleted) [III]. In the 2016 report, based on data from 2013, the overfishing situation deteriorated further, with “31,4% of fish stocks fished at a biologically unsustainable level”, 58,1% of stocks already fully exploited and only 10,5 .XNUMX% of them still have potential for further exploration. FAO itself admits, however, that the quality of its data is questionable, as it is provided by governments interested in hiding the decline of their fish resources. [IV].
More realistic data is provided by Sea Around US, an organization based at the University British Columbia, member of the Global Fisheries Cluster and led by leading experts on the subject. These researchers estimate that around 30% of global fishing is illegal and therefore not accounted for by FAO. [IN]. Figure 1, below, illustrates the problem well.
These data show that, as early as 2003, 32% of schools had collapsed, 39% were fished beyond their restoration capacity, 29% were at the limit of sustainability and 0% still had potential for further exploitation. In a 2016 article, the two senior scholars at Sea Around Us, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, show the clear decline in maritime fish stocks, which began in the 1990s and described in the graph in figure 2. [YOU]:
The graph shows that this decline is the almost exclusive responsibility of fishing corporations, a highly oligopolistic sector. In fact, according to Henrik Österblom and co-authors of a work published in 2015, thirteen multinational corporations control between 19% and 40% of the largest and most valuable marine fish stocks, “including species that play important roles in their respective ecosystems. They dominate all segments of marine food production, operate through an extensive network of subsidiaries and are deeply involved in decision-making relating to fisheries and aquaculture.” [VII]. The revenue of these thirteen corporations (0,5% of the 2.250 companies in the fishing and aquaculture sector worldwide) corresponds to 18% of the value of marine food in 2012 (USD 252 billion).
FAO not only fails to correctly identify those truly responsible for the brutal reduction in fish stocks, but also underestimates the scale of the problem, stating that fishing removed 86 million tons of fish from the seas in 1996 and 81,5 million in 2014. The real numbers are significantly larger. According to Pauly and Zeller, in the 1990s marine fishing reached a peak of 130 million tons, falling since the middle of that decade at a rate of 1,22 million tons per year, to reach 109 million in 2010. [VIII]. Pauly assesses in another location that “fishing is decreasing by 2% per year, but it seems more stable. What they are doing is decimating one stock and then moving to another, which means they will run out of fish within a few decades.” [IX].
This rate of decrease is consistent with a meta-analysis carried out by a team of 14 scholars coordinated by Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia, Canada) [X]. The study, published in 2006, presented such alarming results that it prompted a long article in New York Times [XIV], in which Worm declared that an extrapolation of the observed trends would lead to a collapse of 100% of the schools examined by 2048, as shown in figure 3:
And the scholar concluded: “I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know what the future will bring. But there is an end point on the line and it will occur in our lifetime.”
Just as an example, a third of all species of sharks, these magnificent animals that have populated the seas for 400 million years, are now threatened with extinction. It is considered that around one hundred million of them are killed each year, mainly by large ships, who hunt them for their fins or simply discard them [XII].
Yes, as if their responsibility for the depletion of fish stocks wasn't enough, corporations are largely responsible for the waste of their own merchandise. If anyone still thinks that capitalism is the best economic system when it comes to resource allocation, think again. Large fishing vessels discard almost 10% of global fishing, no less than 10 million tons of fish per year, as can be seen in graph 2, above. “This is the equivalent of throwing away 4.500 Olympic-sized swimming pools of fish per year,” says Dirk Zeller, one of the study’s authors. [XIII]. He explains that this discard occurs for five reasons: (1) fishing techniques make some fish unmarketable; (2) the fish are too small; (3) the species is out of season; (4) fishing targets other species and (5) ships continue fishing in the hope of catching larger fish, in this case discarding the smaller ones, as there is no room for them all in the freezers and the quotas have already been reached.
More than half of the world's large metropolises are coastal. The sea that will periodically flood them throughout the second half of the century will, as we have seen, be a sea without fish. But it will have transformed, on the other hand, into a garbage dump for industrial civilization, with a dominance of plastics, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), heavy metals, methylmercury, nitrogen and urban solid waste (MSW), as will be seen in the next article.
[I] See, for example, Charles Clover's book-report, “The End of the Line”, from 2006, the documentary of the same name by Rupert Murray, based on this book and released in 2009, available athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXNhQn9VeKs>, the testimony of Paul Watson, creator of the NGO Sea Shepherd, about the upcoming extinction of blue tuna, inhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-07H6RN5Y> and the beautiful and terrible documentary Sharkwater by Robert Stewart, 2006, available athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1ZtJJi0c4>.
[III] See FAO, “General situation of world fish stocks” (no date).
[IV] See FAO, The State of World Fisheries (cit, p. 16): “Data quality remains a concern for some major producers. Marine catches reported by Indonesia and Myanmar have increased markedly and continuously in the last 20 years. However, the fact that reported capture production did not decline significantly or continued to increase when natural disasters occurred (eg the tsunami of December 2004 and Cyclone Nargis in May 2008) made FAO concerned about the reliability of their official statistics”.
[IN] See “Sea Around Us study finds 30 per cent of global fish catch is unreported”, 18/VI/2016.
[YOU] See Pauly & Zeller, “Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining”. Nature Communications., 7, 19/I/2016.
[VII] Cf. Henrik Österblom et al., “Transnational Corporations as 'Keystone Actors' in Marine Ecosystems”, Plos One, 27/5/2015. Of these 13 multinationals, 4 are based in Norway, 3 in Japan, 2 in Thailand, one in Spain, one in South Korea, one in China and one in the USA.
[VIII] Cf. “Sea Around Us study finds 30 per cent of global fish catch is unreported”, 18/VI/2016 (cit.).
[X] See Boris Worm et al., “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services”. Science, 314, 5800, 3/XI/2006, pp. 787-790.
[XIV] Cornelia Dean, “Study Sees ‘Global Collapse’ of Fish Species.” The New York Times, 3/XI/2006.
[XII] Cf. M. Hoffmann et al., “The impact of conservation of the status of the world's vertebrates”. Science, 330, 2010, pp. 1503-1509; Martine Valo, “Massacre en haute mer”. Le Monde, 1/IV/2015.
