State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2004 - Library

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The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2004
By fostering collaboration among international institutions and individual scientists,
FAO expects that this programme will generate a peer-reviewed and multidisciplinary
aquatic food safety and quality knowledge base. Its long-term goals are to support
member countries in the areas of safety and quality (including authenticity) of
food produced from aquatic species. Under this programme, the use of information
technologies will be maximized to facilitate information dissemination and to enhance
capacity-building initiatives in developing countries.
A list of common names linked to the Aquatic Food Programme knowledge base
containing scientific data could be useful for preparing and implementing a new Codex
inclusion procedure and, more generally, for further work on species identification and
for enhancing international fish trade transparency.
Depleted stocks recovery: a challenging necessity
THE ISSUE
During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste de
Lamarck and Thomas Huxley assumed that the size of the oceans and the high
fecundity of commercially exploited fish and shellfish meant that, under the conditions
prevailing at that time, the risk of extinction of fishery resources was low. These
scientists overestimated the ocean’s resilience to fishing and underestimated both the
future demand and the potential progress in fishing efficiency. However, the fact that
local natural renewable resources could be depleted through wasteful competition
and lack of ownership has been known literally for centuries, 42 and by the end of the
1960s the “tragedy of the commons” was already common knowledge. 43 The problem
of overfishing was already recognized by the first FAO Fisheries Technical Committee
in 1946 and was flagged recurrently in the successive FAO fisheries conferences, for
example in Vancouver (1973), Rome (1984) and Reykjavik (2002), to cite just a few
major events. The depletion issue was flagged again at the start of the twenty-first
century in The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2002, which indicated that
“An estimated 25 percent of the major marine fish stocks … are underexploited or
moderately exploited … About 47 percent of the main stocks or species groups are
fully exploited … 18 percent of stocks or species groups are reported as overexploited
… The remaining 10 percent have become significantly depleted, or are recovering
from depletion.” Among the stocks considered depleted, the Northeast Atlantic and
the Mediterranean and Black Seas are the areas with stocks having the greatest need
for recovery, followed by the Northwest Atlantic, the Southeast Atlantic, the Southeast
Pacific and the Southern Ocean areas.
The depletion of stocks contravenes the basic conservation requirement of the
1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and of sustainable development. It is also
contrary to the principles and management provisions adopted in the 1995 FAO Code
of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. It affects the structure, functioning and resilience
of the ecosystem, threatens food security and economic development, and reduces
long-term social welfare. The demand for fish as human food may reach around
180 million tonnes by 2030 and then neither aquaculture nor any terrestrial food
production system could replace the protein production of the wild marine ecosystems.
The Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development
specifically urges the need to “Maintain or restore stocks to levels that can produce the
maximum sustainable yield with the aim of achieving these goals for depleted stocks
on an urgent basis and where possible not later than 2015.” Considering the trends
since 1946, this time-frame certainly represents a high-order challenge.
42
S.M. Garcia and J. Boncoeur. 2004. Allocation and conservation of ocean fishery resources: connecting rights and responsibilities.
Paper presented at the 4th World Fisheries Congress, Vancouver, Canada, May 2004, as an opening to the session on Allocation and
Conservation.
43
G. Hardin. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162: 1243–1248.