Forget About Peak Oil- We Hit 'Peak Fish' in 1988

[JCMach1]

... The hammour of the Arabian Gulf and the North Sea cod have an unenviable thing in common. They are both down to around three per cent of their former abundance and rank among the third of the world’s fish stocks that scientists consider to have collapsed. If the Arabian Gulf or the North Sea fell within United States jurisdiction, they would be declared fisheries disaster areas and spawning areas, and vital habitat would be closed by law to commercial fishing.

But neither the North Sea nor the Arabian Gulf is managed in the cutting-edge way that the United States now manages some of its domestic fisheries – which has come about as a result of a healthy enthusiasm among environmental bodies for using the law to sue the authorities. (The other side of the coin is that 70 per cent of fish the US now consumes is from fisheries around the world, many of them unsustainable. Ditto the EU.) We in Europe and the Middle East go on hoping that something will turn up, that nature will somehow solve the problem, while doing rather less than is needed to bring about recovery.

We are beginning to realise that what we used to think of as a local problem, overfishing, is actually a global problem – and that we need to think globally and act locally to solve the problem of the oceans. For fishing, not pollution, is currently the principal destructive force across 70 per cent of the planet’s surface. And the state of the world’s fisheries is more disturbing than many people realise.

Currently, some 80 per cent of the world’s wild fish stocks are either fully or over-exploited, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Ninety per cent of the world’s large predatory fishes, such as cod, tuna and hammour or grouper, have gone – which means been eaten – since 1950. The majestic bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean is collapsing as I write, a story bound to take its place in the history of human stupidity and greed beside the blue whale and the Northern cod.

Now, if we go on hammering the sea as we have before, scientists are warning that we shall have collapsed the rest of the world’s commercial fisheries by some time in the middle decades of this century – to roughly the same level as the hammour and the North Sea cod. That is a disturbing prospect since in the same period the human population of the planet is expected to rise by a half.

In all the concern last year about food security, there was little talk of fish. But, thanks to some marvellous detective work which ironed out distortions in the official figures by Daniel Pauly and Reg Watson in 2001, we now know that catches of wild fish peaked in 1988 and have since been in decline. People talk about when we shall reach Peak Oil – the year oil production peaks and then begins to tail off. We already know that Peak Wild Fish was in 1988. In respect of wild fish, we have reached what the Club of Rome in the 1970s called a limit to growth... http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090613/WEEKENDER/706129809/1080