Worldwide Decline in Fisheries
Submitted by Aguanomics Blog
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.
