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.
Fish sale at the beach. Photo by indiawaterportal.org, Flickr.
The morning after accepting the 2017 Ocean Award in the Science category, the Sea Around Us leading team, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller, met with the British press at the Science Media Centre.
As the Sea Around Us team revealed in its 2016 Nature Communications paper, global fish catches have been declining, on average, by 1.2 million metric tons per year since 1996.
This decline has resulted in lower per capita seafood availability and threatens food security in poor, developing countries. In fact, a group of scientists, among them the Sea Around Us Senior Scientist Dirk Zeller, has predicted that 11% of the global population could face micronutrient and fatty-acid deficiencies driven by fish declines over the coming decades.
That is 845 million people living with extremely low levels of iron, zinc or vitamin A.
This means that time series with 64 years’ worth of data (1950-2013) are available for free on www.seaaroundus.org, as is our catch mapping tool.
The documentation of data, methods, and assumptions made for this update will be presented for each country and territory in early 2017, after a further update to 2014 has been completed.
Fishermen in Żejtun, Malta. Photo by Ramon Casha, Flickr.
As the Sea Around Us team revealed in its 2016 Nature Communications paper, fish catches have been declining, on average, by 1.2 million metric tons per year since 1996.
This decline has resulted in lower per capita seafood availability and threatened food security in poor, developing countries. In fact, a group of scientists, among them the Sea Around Us Executive Director Dirk Zeller, has predicted that 11% of the global population could face micronutrient and fatty-acid deficiencies driven by fish declines over the coming decades.
That is 845 million people living with extremely low levels of iron, zinc or vitamin A.
“Considering nutrients found only in foods derived from animals, such as vitamin B12, and DHA omega-3 fatty acids (almost exclusively derived from meat consumption), we calculate that 1.39 billion people worldwide (19% of the global population) are vulnerable to deficiencies because fish make up more than 20% of their intake of these foods by weight,” the group has written.
There are many reasons why fish stocks are declining worldwide. However, and as the Sea Around Us principal investigator Daniel Pauly summarizes in the below video, at the root of the problem lies indiscriminate human activity.
