The difficult balance between sea conservation and fishing exploitation

More than 250 researchers from sixty countries participate in a global campaign to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to fisheries, where, contrary to the general idea, overfishing considerably reduces profitability, they say.

To do this, they propose, the fishing effort should be adapted to the natural regenerative capacity of the fishing grounds and created marine protected areas of sufficient size.

About 35% of fisheries are at risk of economic collapse as overfishing reduces fish stocks to biologically unsustainable levels, according to FAO.

This concern was expressed to Efe by researchers Rashid Sumaila and Anna Schuhbauer, professors at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), and César Bordehore, professor and researcher at the Multidisciplinary Institute for the Study of the Environment ‘Ramón Margalef’ from the Spanish University of Alicante (east).

According to the FAO’s ‘State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020’ report, the Mediterranean is the most overexploited sea in the world, as nearly 65% ​​of its fish is subject to unsustainable extraction, followed by the southeast Pacific and the Atlantic (with almost half of its marine resources in that situation).

Sumaila, Schuhbauer and Bordehore emphasize that overexploitation means lower productivity and consequently lower economic performance.

“The fishing biomass in the ocean is like the capital in the bank – they illustrate -: if we withdraw only the interest generated annually by the principal capital, we will obtain the maximum profitability and income, but if we remove part of the capital, the accumulated interest will be every times smaller and they will give us a lower profitability ”.

The oceans as a whole

The three specialists maintain that the oceans must be considered as a whole, without treating separately fishing, carbon sequestration and the conservation of biodiversity.

They propose that all maritime countries should adopt a policy “consistent and aligned” in their national waters with the SDGs related to oceans, marine biodiversity and fisheries.

They also denounce that “the ocean did not receive all the attention it needs” at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in 2021 (COP26), held last November in Glasgow (United Kingdom).

And they remember the letter that Sumalia, Bordehore and many other colleagues published last October in the international scientific journal Science to propose that the World Trade Organization (WTO) prohibit subsidies to fishing activities that favor overexploitation.

They suggest that, as a complement to the reduction of fishing effort, many more marine areas of “no-fishing” reserves and of sufficiently sized regulated fishing should be declared in suitable places.

“If the collapse occurs, in addition to biodiversity, we lose fish, money and livelihood, mainly from the poorest countries,” they warn.