CHAPTER 28 Beyond Duplicity and Ignorance in Global Fisheries

CHAPTER 28

Beyond duplicity and ignorance in global fisheries

D. Pauly Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Canada.

Abstract

This chapter is based on the Ramón Margalef Prize awards Ceremony, Oct. 6, 2008; re-edited and updated from a 2009 article of the same title in Scientia Marina 73(2) 215–223. Three decades following World War II was a period of not only rapidly increasing fi shing effort and landings, but also of spectacular collapses, particularly in small pelagic fi sh stocks. This was also the period in which a toxic triad of catch under-reporting, ignoring scientifi c advice, and blaming the environment emerged as a standard response to ongoing fi sheries collapses, which became increasingly more frequent. The response to the depletion of tradi- tional fi shing grounds was an expansion of Northern Hemisphere fi sheries in three dimensions: southward, into deeper waters and into new taxa, i.e. catching and marketing species of fi sh and invertebrates previously spurned, and often lower in the food web. This expansion provided many opportunities for mischief, as illustrated by the European Union’s negotiated ‘agreements’ for access to the fi sh resources of Northwest Africa. Also, this expansion provided new opportunities for mislabeling unfamiliar seafood and misleading consumers, thus reducing the impact of seafood guides and similar effort toward sustainability. With fi sheries catches declining, aquaculture – despite all public relation efforts – not being able to pick up the slack, and rapidly increasing fuel prices, structural changes are to be expected in both the fi shing industry and the scientifi c disciplines that study it and infl uence its governance. Notably, fi sheries biology, now predominantly concerned with the welfare of the fi shing industry, will have to be converted into fi sheries conservation science, whose goal will be to resolve the toxic triad alluded to above, and thus maintain the marine biodiversity and ecosystems that provide existential services to fi sheries. Keywords: Conservation, overfi shing, IUU illegal unregulated and unreported fi sheries, quotas, fi sheries management.

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Statistics covering the ‘visible’ part of global fi sheries have existed since 1930s, when the unfortunate League of Nations fi rst attempted to report on the world’s economy. The United Nations, founded in 1944, followed this effort [1], with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) issuing the fi rst Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics in 1950. The data in these yearbooks, annually revised and updated, are also available online (at www.fao.org) and are not only widely used by the FAO and other UN agencies, but also by academics and other researchers to track the development of fi sheries by country, region, and globally, and to pronounce on their future prospects. This is especially true for the reports on the State of Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) that FAO now issues every 2 years [2]. However, as I learnt teaching fi sheries science on fi ve continents and interacting with hundreds of colleagues, many of these researchers are unaware of the manner in which this dataset is created, and of its defi ciencies (notably a huge ‘invisible’ catch (Fig. 1)), and which will have to be faced (especially because, as the phrase goes, this is ‘the only dataset we have’) if we want to seriously address the overexploitation of marine ecosystems. In the fi rst few decades after World War II, the growth of sea fi sheries was very rapid, whether it is measured in terms of input into the fi sheries (invested capital, vessel tonnage, and so on) or output (tonnage or ex-vessel values of the landings).

Figure 1: Global marine fi sheries catches, 1950–2004. This graph differs from the ‘offi cial’ (FAO) version of catch trend in that it accounts for (a) catch over-reporting by China [3]; (b) discarded by-catch [4], and (c) catch of IU fi sheries, based on Fig. 1 [5]. Note that the discards and the other catch of IU fi sheries are very tentative, but their values are certain to be considerable.

This period, which created the basis for the worldwide industrialization of fi sheries, was also a time when fi sheries appeared to behave like any other sectors of the economy, with increased inputs leading to increasing outputs. This is the rationale behind the subsidization of fi sheries, a subject to which we will return.

1.1 Emergence of the ‘toxic triad’ of fisheries

This period is also one of massive fi sheries collapses, wherein stocks that sus- tained entire fi shing fl eets processing plants and thousands of workers and their families seemingly disappeared overnight [6]. The California sardine fi shery is one of these, although it does live on in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Others, more prosaically, were rebuilt after a few years; examples are the fi shery for Atlanto-Scandian herring [7], and the Peruvian anchoveta fi shery, whose fi rst massive collapse occurred in 1972 [8]. The Peruvian example best illustrates an approach already prevalent in the heyday of the California sardine fi shery: blame the environment. Thus, in Peru it was El Niño that did it, never mind the fact that the actual catch in the year prior to the collapse was about 16 million tones [9], rather than the 12 million tones that were offi cially reported, which itself exceeded what the best experts of the time (John Gulland, Bill Ricker, and Garth Murphy) had recommended as sustainable. Various concepts have been deployed to apprehend these events. One of these is the ‘tragedy of the commons’ [10], which can be made to explain why the pathologies mentioned earlier were likely to occur in the largely unregulated fi sheries then prevalent. The concept proposed here, of a ‘toxic triad’ of 1) catch underreporting, 2) overfi shing (i.e. ignoring the scientifi c advice available at the time), and 3) blaming ‘the environment’ for the ensuing mess could be easily extended to cover more pathological aspects of fi sheries (thus, leading to a toxic tetrad.), but its three elements here are suffi cient for our purposes. The toxic triad existed long before its effects become widespread. However, when they did, a battery of new terms had to be coined to deal, at least conceptually, with the new development. Hence, the coining of the word ‘by-catch’ by Allsopp [11], and the emergence of the illegal, unregulated and unreported fi sheries (IUU) concept, without which the stark reality they describe cannot be apprehended fully. The toxic triad was fi rmly in place when, in 1975, catches peaked in the North Atlantic, before going into a slow decline continuing to the present [12]. However, this became unmistakable when the giant stock of northern cod off Newfoundland and Labrador collapsed, bankrupting an entire Canadian province and setting off a frantic search for something to blame (hungry seals, cold water and so on) other than the out-of-control fi shing industry [13].

1.1.1 A threefold expansion The toxic triad, indeed, provided a rationale for expansion, which occurred in three dimensions.

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1.1.1.1 Geographic expansion The relatively well-documented freshwater and coastal fi sheries of ancient times had the capacity to induce severe decline in, and even extirpate, vulnerable species of marine mammals, fi sh and invertebrates, as documented by a variety of sources [14]. However, it is only since the onset of industrial fi shing, using vessels powered by fossil fuel (i.e. in the 1880s, which saw the deployment of the fi rst steam- powered trawlers) that successive depletion of inshore stocks, followed by that of more offshore stocks, on so on, has become routine [15]. Thus, in the North Sea, it took only a few years for the accumulated coastal stocks of fl atfi sh and other groups to be depleted, and for the trawlers to be forced to move on to the central North Sea, then further, all the way to Iceland [15]. A southward expansion soon followed, toward the tropics [16], and through the development of industrial fi shing in the nascent Third World, often through joint ventures with European (e.g. Spanish) or Japanese fi rms [17]. Obviously, this expansion created new resource access confl icts and/or intensifi ed earlier ones, and hence the protracted ‘cod war’ between Iceland and Britain, or the brief ‘turbot war’ of March 1995 between Canada and Spain. At the close of the 20th century, the demersal resources of all large shelves of the world, all the way South to Patagonia and Antarctica, had been depleted, mainly by trawling, along with those of seamounts and oceanic plateaus [18]. In a recent assessment [19], it was estimated that from 1950 to 1980 industrial fi sheries expanded their reach by about 10,000 km2 per year; the increase was to 30,000–40,000 million km2 per year in the 1980, then declined. By 2000, the geographic expansion was essentially over, and the emphasis turned into two forms of expansion detailed in the following.

1.1.1.2 Bathymetric expansion The second dimension of the expansion of fi shing was in depth (i.e. offshore), which affected both the pelagic and the demersal realms. In the pelagic realm, the exploitation of tuna, billfi shes, and increasingly sharks (for their fi n [20]) by long lines and similar gear has strongly modifi ed oceanic ecosystems, which now have much reduced biomasses of large predators [21]. This is intensifi ed by the use of fi sh aggregating devices (FADs) which, starting around the Philippines [22], have spread throughout the intertropical belt and have made accessible to fi sheries small tuna and other fi sh that could not be captured before, thus representing an additional expansion of sorts. In the demersal realm, trawlers were deployed that can reach down to the depths of several kilometers. They yield a catch increasingly dominated by slow-growing, deep- water species with low productivity, which cannot be exploited sustainably [23, 24]. Therefore, given that the high seas (the waters outside Exclusive Economic Zones, see in the following) are legally unprotected against such depredations, their oceanic plateaus and seamounts are subjected to intense localized fi shing pressure, with sub- sequent collapse of the resources; the same is then repeated on the adjacent plateau or seamount. This fi shing mode is no more sustainable than tropical deforestation. The resulting changes in biomass induce, notably via altered food webs, massive changes in demersal and pelagic communities, which can be demonstrated

WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) Beyond Duplicity and Ignorance in Global Fisheries 523 and quantifi ed in various ways (see, e.g. [25].). The Marine Trophic index (MTI; [26];), i.e. the mean trophic level of fi sh of fi sheries landings, is one of the most widely used indicators for this purpose. The MTI is declining throughout the world, which means that fi sheries catches are based on small fi sh and the invertebrates at the base of the ocean’s food webs [27]. Both the MTI and the ‘fi shing down’ concept have recently been come under criticism, reaching all the way to denial of long-established facts – another case of ignorance or duplicity (see www. fi shingdown.org).

1.1.1.3 Taxonomic expansion This refers to previously spurned taxa being caught and processed [23, 28]. This form of expansion, which intensiﬁ es the effect of the other two, is the reason why North American and European ﬁ sh markets increasingly display unfamiliar seafood. This, on the other hand, offers many opportunities for mislabeling products and misleading consumers [28, 29], which is one more reason for the word ‘duplicity’ in my title.

2 Digression I: exclusive economic zones

In the early 1980s, the decade-long deliberations that had been triggered by various maritime countries unilaterally declaring ownership of huge swaths of their coastal waters led to the United Nations Convention on the Law of The Sea (UNCLOS). As a result of UNCLOS, all maritime countries could claim exclusive economic Zones of up to 200 miles, and hence (if they had the political clout) could throw out the distant water fl eets that were then operating wherever they pleased. Some more powerful countries did throw out the distant water fl eets that had operated along their coast, but then began subsidizing the development of national fl eets that soon became as destructive as the foreign fl eets had been. In the United States and Canada, this eventually led to the collapse of cod in New England and the Canadian East Coast. Others, notably several countries in Northwest Africa, tried to throw out ‘their’ distant water fl eets. However, without political clout, they were susceptible to blackmail (in cases their negotiators were honest) or bribery (in the other case), the result being that European and East Asian distant water fl eets are still operating in that region [30]. The continued presence of distant water fl eet from countries of the European Union is based on access ‘agreements’ of which each is a triumph of raw political power over the rhetoric of partnership and development aid – another realm in which duplicity reigns supreme. As for distant water fl eets from East Asia, the rhetoric is different. China, indeed, has no rhetorical stance: its fi sheries operate on what appear to be private agreements with local politicians that stay under every- body’s radar screen, showing up in the press only where its trawlers get into confl icts with local fi shers. This is a far cry from the situation of just a few years ago; when China was over-reporting its catches (see in the following). Japan, on the other hand, manages to add insult to injury: its fi sheries experts and embassies in Northwest Africa (and elsewhere, notably in the Caribbean and

WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) 524 Ecological Dimensions for Sustainable Socio Economic Development the South Pacifi c) argue that it is the whales that are responsible for the decline of the stocks, and hence that the countries in question should help re-establish ‘ecosystem balance’ by, among other things, voting at the international Whaling Commission in support of Japan killing more whales (see e.g. [31].). This line of argument, which would be specious anywhere, is particularly duplicitous in Northwest Africa, where distant water fl eets and overgrown ‘small-scale’ fi sheries have been unequivocally shown to be the cause of widespread stock declines (see contributions in [32]), and where baleen whales occur mainly during the reproduc- tive season, when they do not feed. Interestingly, in spite of the presence of numerous cetaceans in Japanese waters, this argument was not used by Komatsu-San at a conference held at the United Nations University on October 17, 2008, when he turned his attention to the sorry state of Japanese coastal fi sheries. Clearly, he felt he had to be serious. Strange enough, and this refers to the ignorance in my title, this line of argument works in that, probably with the help of other, more practical enticements, it has re-directed the scarce research resources of several Northwest African countries toward conducting costly ‘whale surveys’ – this in a region that does not have observers on board the vessels of distant water fl eets, and in fact, no practical way of even estimating their catches [33].

2.1 The crisis of fisheries

2.1.1 Direct and indirect drivers The expansion trends established in the 1980s and 1990s have led to the crisis at the onset of the 21st century, of which the following are major elements. 1. There is, in the global fi sheries sector, a huge overcapacity (i.e. excess fi shing vessels), variously estimated as two to three times that required to generate present catches [5, 34, 35]. This is probably an underestimate, given the increase in the effi ciency of vessels in locating and catching fi sh of about 2–3% per year across a wide range of vessel types, which implies a doubling of effective fi shing effort in about 30 years [36]. 2. The biomass of traditionally targeted large fi sh (cod and other demersal fi sh, tuna and other large pelagics) has been reduced by at least one order of magni- tude since the onset of industrial exploitation [15, 21, 37]. The generality of these fi ndings has been contested (see in the following), but they can be straight- forwardly reproduced by anyone willing to reconstruct population sizes prior to industrial exploitation, as done, e.g. for New England cod by Rosenberg et al. [38]. Without such reconstruction, arguments about depletion will be essentially useless, as subjective perceptions of abundance are biased by shifting baselines [39], a bias empirically shown to be extremely strong [40]. 3. One aspect of global fi sheries, but one often not perceived as the scandal it is, is that about one third of the world catch of fi sheries – sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and other small pelagic fi shes – is wasted as animal feed (mainly as fi shmeal, of which about half is consumed by aquaculture), although it could

easily be converted to human food (see contributions in [41, 42]). As such, it would contribute far more too human nutrition (including to the supply of omega-3 fatty acids) than through aquaculture (which inserts a trophic step between these fi sh and humans), while avoiding the bioaccumulation of persistent organic pollutants that makes farmed carnivores such as salmon so problematic [43]. Note also that as the supply of small pelagics is not expected to increase in the future, the expansion of aquaculture is also going to be limited, at least if aquaculture is conceived as raising of carnivorous fi sh (salmon, seabass, and tuna), as is usually implied in western countries. Note, though, that two-thirds of aquaculture production occurs in China, where the major species farmed are herbivorous freshwater fi sh and marine bivalves, neither of which require fi shmeal [2]. For example, the expansion of farming of high trophic level fi sh in the Mediterranean, i.e. ‘farming up’ [44], contrast with the ‘fi shing down’ occurring there, as elsewhere in the world [26]. Thus, large quantities of small pelagics are fi shed to feed relatively few farmed fi sh (mainly tuna), leaving no food for marine mammals [45] and less fi sh for people who cannot afford to eat bluefi n tuna sushi. Over 50% of the fi sh caught in the world is traded internationally, and many industrialized countries either have huge distant water fl eets (as, e.g. Spain still does) and/or purchase most of the fi sh they consume (e.g. as Germany, the United States, and Japan do). In any case, there is a large net fl ow of fi sh from developing to industrialized countries, with serious consequences for the food security of the (protein-defi cient) least developed countries [16, 46, 47]. Various market-based initiatives in industrialized countries are based on the belief that by changing consumer behavior they can change the way fi sh stocks are exploited [27, 28]. The UK-based Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the best known of these, but there are also a multitudes of seafood guides which, as their name implies, are meant to advise consumers as to the ‘sustainability’ of the species offered in seafood markets and restaurants [28, 48]. However, even if this goal was reached, it would still not solve the food security problem caused by the trans- fer of fi sh from developing to industrialized countries. On top of it, government subsidies to fi sheries – the grease that keeps the whole creaky system going – were recently re-estimated as $ 27 billion per year [49], up from the previously accepted fi gure of $20 billion per year [50]. Of these, the overwhelming majority is ‘bad’ subsidies, because they enhance fi sh catching capacity (see contributions in Sumaila and Pauly [51]). This applies especially to fuel subsidies, which allow profi table exploitation of depleted stocks, and thus directly contribute to the problems alluded to the aforementioned [52]. However, this could also be hint at a solution, as most industrial fi sheries, and particularly the fuel-intensive trawl fi sheries, now depend on subsidies, especially fuel subsidies, which make them extremely sensitive to the increasing cost of fuel [20]. This will be enhanced by the long-term fallout out of the bank collapses in the fall of 2008, and the eventual outcome of negotiations of the World Trade Organization, which intends to abolish subsidies because they distort markets [52].

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2.2 Subjective factors and masking effects

In addition to the objective factors or drivers mentioned above, there are a number of subjective elements, some bordering on duplicity (and some crossing that border), that contribute to the crisis being masked, or at least misapprehended, and thereby contribute to the decline of marine biodiversity and ecosystem overexploitation. The fi rst of these factors was the massive over-reporting of catches by China through the 1990s, which misled the FAO and the world into believing that global landings were increasing, while in fact, they were slowly decreasing [3]. This occurred because an independent statistical system does not exist in China, i.e. favorable production statistics can be manufactured by a mid-level offi cial seeking advancement, including in the fi sheries sector [53]. We note in passing that the FAO, which now presents world fi sheries statistics with and without China, also has doubts about Chinese aquaculture statistics as well [2]. Another masking factor is that the per capita consumption in industrialized countries, especially in the European Union and United States, is still increasing. This implies, given a stagnating or declining global catch, that per capita consumption in developing countries (excluding China) should decline. Reliable data on fi sh consumption in developing countries do not exist to test this (which will be convenient to some). In the meantime, consumers in the European Union and the United States are left to enjoy frissons of guilt when ordering seafood not sanc- tioned by their many seafood guides (see the aforementioned text). However, the most potent masking factors, because they provide governments with the excuses they need not to intervene and counter negative trends are, as in the case of global warming, the denials of self-styled ‘skeptics’, and their misuse of ‘uncertainty’. The skeptics are effective because science needs skepticism and must recognize uncertainty, fi sheries science being no exception. Ludwig et al. [54], in a brilliant paper, now repudiated by its co-authors, out- lined how scientifi c uncertainty is being used in fi sheries to hold off intervention until it is too late to prevent stock collapses, i.e. it is not used in a precautionary fashion. This problem can be aggravated when, additionally, the skeptics combine their denials with innuendos on the objectivity and ethics of conservation- orientated scientists, the journals that publish their research and the donors that fund it – as done by Lomborg [55] for the environment as a whole or [56] for the case of fi sheries (see also [57]).

3 Digression II: the underreporting of fisheries catches

Except for China, whose political system encourages over-reporting of domestic catches, and a few instances of strongmen insisting on increasing catches in the countries they thought they controlled (e.g. Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in the early 1980s), the catch data available to the public and most scientists are biased downward, and against small-scale ﬁ sheries. This occurs in two steps 1) government scientists generally study and the statistical system they set up usually

WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) Beyond Duplicity and Ignorance in Global Fisheries 527 monitors only commercial fi sheries (and not recreational and small-scale, arti- sanal, or subsistence fi sheries, even if they collectively land the bulk of the national catch [58]; 2) the national agencies that report national catches to the FAO, which compiles and maintains the only global database of fi sheries statistics, are usually not the departments of fi sheries or similar entities, but the ministries of agriculture, or fi nance, or their statistical offi ces, which also tend to emphasize ‘cash crops’, i.e. exportable products such as shrimps and tuna, while giving short thrift to – and at worst completely ignoring – small-scale fi sheries catches, even though it is these catches that feed their rural populations [59–61]. These two problems are so widespread that the Sea Around Us Project [62] has initiated a systematic reconstruction of the real catch (i.e. including those of IUU fi sheries) of all maritime countries of the world, which is expected to be completed in 2013.

3.1 The global fisheries crisis as an opportunity for renewal

3.1.1 The renewal of fisheries science Clearly, we now have a situation in which a substantial fraction of the fi shing industry is willing to sacrifi ce the future of fi sheries, a future that can be sustainable only if the underlying resources are allowed to recover, and to rebuild their biomass. The most important task for a renewal of fi sheries and fi sheries research will therefore be the reduction of overall fi shing effort. Without this, nothing else will work. Ecosystem-based considerations will also play a part [63, 64]. This implies ensur- ing, among other things, that we do not attempt to maximize catches from both predators and their food organisms. Here, no-take marine reserves will have to be perceived not as scattered and small concessions to conservationist pressure, but as a legitimate and obvious management tool designed to re-establish natural refuges lost to the geographic and bathymetric expansions, as described earlier [23]. Indeed, avoiding the extinction of species, previously protected by their inac- cessibility to fi shing gear, should become a major goal for future management regimes. This would link fi sheries scientists with the vibrant communities of researchers now working on marine biodiversity and conservation issues. Such linking, however, is not easily brought about, as suggested in the following paragraphs.

3.2 Changes for which the time had come

One of the few good things about getting old is that one develops a ﬁ ne-grained appreciation of the various forms of change. One such form is the insidious grad- ual shifting of our baseline, which affects so much of our perception of the state of biodiversity [39]. Another type of change is that which occurs when insights pile up in society, but are not released before some abrupt event or ‘tipping point’ [65]. Examples of such events that I was able to be (a very small) a part of are the May 1968 Parisian revolt against an increasingly autocratic Charles de Gaulle, and the 1986 Peoples’ Power revolution in Manila against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

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Other such changes were the civil rights movement in the United States, of which I saw only the tail end and which heralded the emergence of a new mindset that could no longer comprehend how the old one was ever acceptable. Change also occurred in my chosen profession, fi sheries science. When I was a student, I was taught that the work I was learning to do was supposed to be used by fi sheries managers who would ensure that the fi sheries were optimized and put on some rational footing so that society would benefi t. I worked fi rst in developing countries, many of them with mighty fi sheries, but the fi sheries scientists that I interacted with, and for whom I adapted some of the classical stock assessment models for use in the tropics, were in no way connected to those making decisions about fi sheries. Specifi cally, they had no connection to the heads of fi shing enterprises (often called ‘fi shermen’) and the fi nanciers of fi shing ventures, not to speak of the politicians who facilitate and subsidize these projects. In other words, these fi sheries scientists had no way of effectuating change based on scientifi c evidence. Later, when examining fi sheries in Europe and in North America, and on a global basis, I found that this lack of access was the rule and that well-managed fi sheries were the exception. I could also see the damage that fi sheries do to marine ecosystems and biodiversity and that my discipline, fi shery biology, did not have the conceptual apparatus for dealing with biodiversity-related issues. In fact, they were not considered legitimate research issues. Therefore, at several forums, notably the ICES annual meeting in 2000 and the 4th World Fisheries Congress in Vancouver, at both of which I was the keynote speaker, I tried to argue from within the fi sheries profession for the need to extend our discipline from one implicitly interested in keeping fi shing fl eets operating to a broader one devoted to maintain- ing the ecosystem and the resources embedded therein, upon which the fi sheries ultimately depend. I did this because I considered legitimate the argument made by ecologists who viewed ecosystems as more than larders from which we extract what we want, without accounting for the externalities of fi shing (Fig. 2). For a while I believed that these efforts, paralleled by those of numerous other colleagues, notably Jackson et al. [14], and the late Ransom A. Myers and co- workers, would be successful in generating a new consensus. Who can argue against the need to maintain the fi sh that maintain the fi shery? Now, with the pub- lication of a contrarian article on ‘faith- based fi sheries’ by Hilborn [56], even more absurd papers later, and their apparently positive reception by a number of my colleagues, I see that this is not obvious at all. Instead, what has emerged in our discipline is a discussion about standards of evidence, and indeed about what constitutes evidence. Such ‘meta-discussion’, i.e. discussion about the ways we ought to conduct ourselves, is indicative of a deep malaise, and of fundamental changes having occurred in our discipline, where two schools now fi ght for supremacy, i.e. to represent the discipline as a whole. One school focuses on the profi tability of fi shing enterprises and on fi shing ‘rights’ (see in the following), the other on marine ecosystems and their ability to generate services, including fi sheries catches. Between them, name calling has become the fashion in a way that would have been impossible in the times of

Figure 2: Internalization of so-called external costs in the history of Western countries (adapted with modifi cations from Table 4, p. 81 in Hardin [68] with human population growth superimposed): 1) raw materials, internalized well before the Common Era (C.E.); 2) labor, with invention of the horse collar in 1000 C.E., leading to a decline of slavery, fi nally abolished in 1863 C.E.; 3) beginning and spread of free public educa- tion; 4) industrial accidents: development of probability theory and of insurance schemes; 5) industrial diseases: pollution control, culminating in the US Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970, and the Clean Water Act of 1977; 6) the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer in 1989; 7) the US Superfund Programme (1980) to clean up previously uncontrolled hazardous waste sites; and 8) environmental damage due to fi sheries, which is still to be internalized.

Ray Beverton and I presume, the other gentlemen (yes, they were all men) who founded quantitative fi shery science. I am not the neutral observer in this, as the contribution attests, but I think it is obvious that the next generations will expect fi sheries to perform well in not only operational and fi nancial terms, but also in ecological terms. This will involve overcoming the results of the conceptual sleight of hand by a number of fi sheries economists, in which the need of fi shers to have a predictable access to the resources [66] has been turned into claims that these resources should be handed over to them in perpetuity, along with the exclusive ‘rights’, the resulting privatization of a public good being called ‘rights-based fi shing’ [67], or more recently ‘catch shares’. (Catch shares imply that only a few fi shing fi rms have access to a fi sheries resources previously shared between all those exploiting it. Duplicity?). In most countries, the fi sheries resources in the EEZs belong to the state (i.e. to us all), and these resources could be managed in the same manner as public forests

WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) 530 Ecological Dimensions for Sustainable Socio Economic Development or rangelands, through leases or temporary licenses that can be auctioned [69, 70]. This would help address the overcapacity problem as effi ciently as through ‘rights- based fi shing’, while avoiding the privatization of a public good, of which we should be weary given the experience of the last decades, culminating in a fi nancial crisis largely caused by the unmooring of the market from all ethical constrain.

4 Conclusions

There are basically two alternatives for fi sheries science and management: one is obviously continuing with business as usual, i.e. accommodating subsidy-driven overcapacity without bothering about externalities (Fig. 2). This would lead, in addition to further depletion of marine biodiversity, to intensifi cation of ‘fi shing down marine food web’, which ultimately involves the transformation of marine ecosystems into dead zones [71]. The other alternative is to convert fi sheries science and management into life-affi rming disciplines, which, rather than maximizing return to fi sheries, would be devoted to implementing some form of more balanced, ecosystem-based fi sheries management, requiring consideration of more stakeholders than the fi shing industry alone. This transformation would also require extensive use of ocean zoning and spatial closures, including no-take marine protected areas (MPAs). Indeed, MPAs must be at the core of any scheme intending to put fi sheries on an ecologically sustainable basis. They presently cover a cumulative area of about 1 of the world’s oceans, and the annual increase of this area about 5% is not high enough for various internationally agreed targets to be reached, e.g. 20% coverage in 2020, as proposed by the World Park Congress [72]. Thus, if marine biodiversity is to be maintained and functional ecosystems re- established where un-controlled exploitation has obliterated them, then we will have to set up larger MPAs, at a faster pace, as is also advocated by most marine ecologists, and by all non-governmental organizations working on the marine environment. It is comforting that this thought was anticipated by Ramon Margalef [73] long before it became fashionable: ‘Probably the best solution would be a balanced mosaic or rather a honeycomb, of exploited and protected areas. Conservation is also important from the practical point of view: lost genotypes are irretrievable treasures, and natural ecosystems are necessary as references in the study of exploited ecosystems’.

Acknowledgments

I thank the Honorable Mr. José Montilla, President of the Generalitat of Catalonia (Spain), and the Management and Jury of the Ramon Margalef Prize for the opportunity to prepare this contribution which, although concerned mainly with ﬁ sheries management, also deals with the aquatic ecosystems. Ramon Margalef studied mainly the lower trophic levels of ecosystems; with this account, covering mainly

WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) Beyond Duplicity and Ignorance in Global Fisheries 531 their upper trophic level, we have them covered, as the phrase goes, from ‘end to end’. My gratitude also goes to Drs. Marta Coll, Isabel Palomera, John Celecia and Ms. Teresa Sala Rovira, who all contributed to my sojourn in Catalonia, and Dr. M.P. Olivar for inviting the a version of this contribution to be published in Scientia Marina. Finally, I thank the Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia, and in particular Dr. J. Reichert, for steady support of the Sea Around Us Project, in the course of which many of the ideas presented here were developed. This is a contribution of the Sea Around Us Project, a scientiﬁ c collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the Pew Environment Group.

References

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