3.The rise and fall of modern fisheriesEarly pre-industrial fisheries management probably resulted from trial and error and hard lessons learned among fishing societies. Human population density was low, fish were abundant, fishing areas were large, and capture methods were rudimentary and inefficient. Regulation of fisheries was born out of necessity and not because early peoples were natural conservationists. For the most part, people considered that fish supplies were infinite until they discovered otherwise and were forced to manage them. But this belief that the sea is boundless, that the cornucopia of the ocean will never be empty, still pervades many fishing societies today whether they fish from dowls (handwoven basket-like boats) or trawlers and factory ships the size of football fields. This blinkered thinking was shaped by authorities such as the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius, the father of international law. In 1609 he wrote "Everyone admits that if a great many persons hunt on the land or fish in a river, the forest is easily exhausted of wild animals and the river of fish, but such a contingency is impossible in the case of the sea". This short-sightedness was further promulgated more than two centuries later by the eminent British scientist Thomas Huxley who stated in 1883, "I believe that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea-fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say, nothing we can do seriously affects the number of fish".
Within a decade, a Select Committee of the English House of Commons voiced its concern over the scarcities of fish in the North Atlantic and North Sea fisheries. In 1899, following six years of discussions between North American and European nations over dwindling fish supplies, Sweden hosted one of the world's first global fish conferences. This meeting led to the creation of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in 1902, the principal body that helps set policy for North Atlantic and North Sea fisheries. The hard lessons that coastal fishing communities had learned over centuries were soon to be rediscovered by industrial fisheries working on the `limitless seas'. Sad to say, they ignored the lessons of the past for nearly a century. The world's marine fish catch peaked at about 85 million metric tonnes in 1989, and has been slowly declining ever since. At the turn of the century, the world marine catch was three million tonnes. The FAO estimates that if fish populations are allowed to recover, and are managed responsibly, about 100 million metric tonnes of fish could be caught annually on a sustainable basis. Instead, in the past two decades, the world has witnessed the collapse of one fishery after the other. Fish populations in four of the world's 17 major fishing regions are seriously depleted, while catches in nine others are declining. Only in the Indian Ocean, where the use of modern fishing methods is just beginning, is the marine catch on the increase.
When explorer John Cabot arrived on the Grand Banks off the coast of North America in 1500, he remarked that the area was so "swarming with fish (that they) could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down with a stone". The rush for the Grand banks was on, and it continued off the coast of Canada and New England until the fisheries there were finally exhausted in 1993. After centuries of over-exploitation by sail, then steam, then gasoline and diesel-powered fishing vessels, stocks of Atlantic cod have reached their lowest levels ever, and haddock and other species declared commercially extinct. In 1993, the Canadian cod fishery was shut down off the Grand Banks, more than 40,000 jobs were lost, and US$1.8 billion in unemployment benefits were paid to the fishers. The reckless pattern among shell fishers was no better. Settlers plundered and polluted New England's Chesapeake Bay. Like John Cabot, the early European arrivals were overjoyed by the plentitude of oysters, and initially collected many of them using the sustainable techniques taught to them by the Algonquin Indians. But by 1860, these methods had long been discarded and a record number of oysters were landed, weighing some 52.2 million kg. By 1962, overfishing of oysters and sewage contamination had taken their toll on the bay, and only 6.6 million kg of oysters were landed. But fishing continued unabated until the mid-1980s when only a fragment of the original abundance of oysters remained. As McGoodwin points out, "What is fascinating - and also tragic -about the fishery industry is that it so actively participates in its own annihilation".
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Copyright 1996, The World Wide Fund For Nature