A Fishy Story

A surprise night out last Friday, with my darling, led to a sudden moment of realisation. I had better eat some fish. This isn’t exactly an earth-shattering decision for me. My darling doesn’t like the stuff, so hasn’t added too many fish recipes to her mental cookery book. This means that whenever we pay someone else to cook something, I am drawn to the ocean-based life forms, because I haven’t seen anything like that on a plate for a while. This time, though, my thoughts were a little darker. I suddenly thought that I should eat it because it could only be a matter of months before it will be too expensive to eat, and in a few years, there won’t be any fish on the menu anywhere.

I have been living up here since the Canadians fished the Grand Banks empty of Cod, so this nightmare scenario has been around for almost a generation, now, but this is way different, friends: This is no fish, anywhere, to eat. Basically the lessons we learned back in the early nineties haven’t been learned and – in the best traditions of our destructive genus – we have grown the killing to cover the earth. My thanks to Oceana for the following facts and figures:

Since the late 1980’s, the worldwide catch of fish has been declining. This is the first time that this has ever happened – and they mean ever. The stocks of ‘big’ fish like Sharks, Marlin, and Tuna are 90% lower than 50 years ago. That’s basically the time that Beatlemania hit. Not only Cod have been fished to the verge of extinction, one third of the planet’s fisheries have now collapsed from over fishing. We could lose the other two thirds within a matter of decades if current trends continue. This is more than less Pumpkin Salmon on our restaurant plates. We all know that this is another case of food security, economic survival, and planetary health.

In an attempt to find anything that is still swimming down there, we are now dredging the ocean floor to get whatever can still flop on the deck. These bottom trawls are using nets that could cover the mainland US in size, when added together for a year of plunder. They are damaging rock outcrops and coral where the smaller fish grow up to be the large ones the fishermen are looking for. These nets catch everything, whether it is wanted or not, so ‘by catch’ results are full of birds, turtles, mammals and fish not fit to eat that are tossed back dead, or dying.

So how are we facing the situation of turning the World’s seas into deserts? We are subsiding the fishing industry to allow this to continue, to the tune of about $20 Billion worldwide. That’s you and me hurrying the process along. Considering the entire global catch is worth about $80 Billion, this is a quarter of the amount the industry makes! As a business model, this ranks alongside the Bank Bailout.

Have we reached the end? No – it’s the end of the beginning, but it’s time we collared our decision makers and told then that we have to stop. It’s too late to alter what the industry is doing, so before we rape another sector of the global food chain, and force millions of workers in the industry to go hungry, it’s time for the politicians to get involved and stop this.

This is more than our beer battered fish and chips on the odd occasion – it is another step toward our global extinction, and taking our entire planet with us.