Millions of tonnes of prime fish off limits to humans

Every year for the past 60 years, an average of 20 million tonnes of fish caught in the global ocean have not been used to nourish people.

A new study emerging from the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries reveals that from 1950 to 2010, 27 per cent of commercial marine landings were diverted to uses other than direct human consumption.

This trend has not changed in recent years and it poses serious questions regarding food security, as most of the diverted fish are classified as food-grade or prime food-grade.

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The looming extinction of the Maui dolphin

Maui’s dolphin. Photo by New Zealand Department of Conservation, Flickr

The world’s rarest and smallest known subspecies of dolphin, the Maui dolphin, is about to go extinct. Its population is down to 60 individuals from 2,000 in the 1970s.

Journalist Christopher Pala just launched a series of articles focusing on the reasons behind the disappearance of this subspecies of the Hector’s dolphin and the actions governments are taking (or not) to stop the death toll from rising.

Follow this link to read the first article of the series in Science.

Why did FAO choose to ignore the existence and trends of the reconstructed catch data?

Marine Policy recently published “Comments on FAOs State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA 2016),” authored by the Sea Around Us leaders Drs. Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller.

Both scientists expressed their concern over the implications for resource management and global food security of ignoring information aimed at filling the gaps that exist in the data reported by countries to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

They divide their observations into a few main points:

VIDEO: How much is fished in your country’s waters?

Photo by Alper Çuğun, Flickr.

Trawl nets, drift nets, longlines, etc. have allowed fleets across the world to turn their fishing operations into massive extractive activities.

In several countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones, such expansion has led to depleted fish stocks. Some of those countries, however, have enough capital to buy access to other countries’ waters, extract their resources and sell them across continents. “They are just exporting the problem,” the Sea Around Us Senior Scientist Dirk Zeller has said.

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