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 col- lapses, 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 con- cerned 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. WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) doi:10.2495/978-1-84564-75 - /68 028 520 Ecological Dimensions for Sustainable Socio Economic Development 1 Introduction 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 over- exploitation 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. 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 521 This period, which created the basis for the worldwide industrialization of fi sher- ies, 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 eas- ily 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. WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 64, © 2013 WIT Press www.witpress.com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) 522 Ecological Dimensions for Sustainable Socio Economic Development 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 pow- ered 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 geo- graphic expansion was essentially over, and the emphasis turned into two forms of expansion detailed in the following.