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Food from the Sea
Fishing is one of the oldest uses to which the oceans have been put. To this day, fish and seafood play an important role in providing many people with nutrition and protein. Aquaculture – the cultivation of fish on land or in coastal areas – also has a tradition that dates back thousands of years and today supplies nearly half of the fish products consumed by humankind. Both branches of industry have caused damage – severe damage in some cases – to marine ecosystems. This chapter explores how changes in governance can help place fishing and aquaculture on a sustainable footing in future, thus enabling both to contribute to the transformation towards sustainability. To this end, this chapter not only investigates fishing (Section 4.1) and aquaculture (Section 4.2) in isol ation, but also examines how each interacts with the other (Section 4.3). For example, the most important fish-farming methods used in marine aquaculture are dependent on marine fish caught in the wild, which indirectly increases the pressure on marine ecosystems. Section 4.4 examines the systemic effects of global environmental changes on fishing and aquaculture. For both sectors, these effects will gain in importance in the future. The focus here is on the anthropogenic effects on the oceans of other branches of industry: emissions of greenhouse gases and CO2 leading to climate change and ocean acidification, and inputs of other harmful substances causing eutrophication, dead zones and the pollution of marine ecosystems. Fish is not the only product of fisheries and aquaculture. They also deliver other marine animals (seafoods such as crustaceans, molluscs, snails and squids) and, in aquaculture, algae. The topic of whales is not dealt with here, as they have been scarcely relevant to human nutrition since the moratorium declared by the International Whaling Commission in 1986. Both fishing and aquaculture should always be seen in the context of other uses (such as energy generation, tourism and nature conservation).
4.1 Marine fishery 4.1.1 Status and trends of fisheries From a global perspective, marine fisheries are in a very worrying state (Froese et al., 2012; Beddington et al., 2007; FAO, 2012b: 13; Maribus, 2013). There is broad scientific and political consensus that the global limits of use have already been reached or even exceeded. Urgent action is therefore needed to conserve or replenish fish stocks (WSSD, 2002: para. 30a; Worm et al., 2009; Mora et al., 2009; FAO, 2010b; Costello et al., 2012b). So far, few countries are making real progress towards sustainable management of their fish stocks. The EU has slowly begun to move in the direction of sustainability (Section 7.4.1.7). Marine fisheries experienced a tremendous upswing in the latter half of the 20th century (FAO, 2011a). Annual landings of fish rose from 16.8 million tonnes in 1950 to 86.4 million tonnes in 1996. Since then, catches have stagnated at around 80 million tonnes a year, with a slight downwards trend (Figure 4.1-1; FAO, 2012b: 11). However, stagnating yields certainly do not mean that a stable, sustainable state has been reached in which stocks and catches are in equilibrium. On the contrary, catching the same amount of fish requires a greater global fishing effort, and this has indeed increased by 54 % since the 1950s (Anticamara et al., 2011). The more readily accessible natural stocks are increasingly being depleted by fishing. Fisheries are compensating by switching to other stocks (‘serial depletion’; Srinivasan et al., 2012). The limits of what is technically possible in the fishing industry are being pushed back further and further by ever-more-advanced methods for locating and catching fish (Berkes et al., 2006). Today, industrial fishing fleets can sail to very remote regions of the high seas (such as the South Pacific) in search of new fish stocks. They are increasingly fishing the eco-
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