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Foreign fishing fleets deplete African fish stocks mongabay.com July 18, 2007 Heavily subsidized foreign fishing fleets are depleting coastal fish stocks of poor Africa countries, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Depletion is affecting coastal communities that rely heavily on fish catch as a source of protein and as a livelihood. Nevertheless, the European Union pays for the right to fish African waters. The country of Mauritania gets more than $116 million per year from the E.U. for a license to fish its coast. China, Russia, Ukraine have also signed deals with the country. The African fisheries sector is an important source of food and income to millions of Africans, generating more than $2.7 billion a year in annual export revenue and provided direct employment for over 10 million people. 200 million African eat fish on a regular basis. Related articles Sharks in trouble after nations fail to create sustainable management programs (11/6/2008) Sharks are disappearing from the ocean at startling rates: currently one-in-five of these famous marine predators are threatened with extinction. According to a report from the Australian Government and TRAFFIC—an organization that monitors wildlife trade both legal and illegal—the collapse of shark populations is being caused largely by rising demand for shark fin in Asia. The report shows that legal fishing for sharks has become nearly as detrimental as illegal, since few fisheries have management strategies concerned with sustainability. One-third of global marine catch used as livestock feed (10/30/2008) Despite continuous warnings of emptying oceans due to overfishing, a new report finds that one-third of the world’s total marine catch is not feeding humans, but livestock. The fish are ground-up into meal and fed to pigs, poultry, and even farm-raised fish. Mediterranean bluefin tuna originate in the Gulf of Mexico (10/2/2008) Researchers have discovered a previously unknown migratory route for the northern bluefin tuna, proving for the first time that the species' Mediterranean and North American subpopulations interact. According to the paper published in Science the two groups meet as juveniles then return to their birthplace to spawn. For a critically-endangered species that is still heavily fished, the new finding has large conservation and management implications. A solution to worldwide fishery collapse? (9/18/2008) In November 2006 a study on global fisheries received a lot of attention: employing 53 years worth of fishery data, Boris Worm predicted that by 2048 the ocean would be empty of fish. Essentially there would be nothing left to catch. Already, Worm reported, fishing stocks had collapsed in 29 percent of the world's fisheries. Although scientists called for rapid and overhauling changes to fisheries, the fishing industry carried on business-as-usual. Now, two years later, a study in Science proposes to have found the solution to the global fishery-collapse. The long-ignored ocean emergency and what can be done to address it (8/18/2008) This year has been full of bad news regarding marine ecosystems: one-third of coral species threatened with extinction, dead-zones spread to 415 sites, half of U.S. reefs in fair or bad condition, increase in ocean acidification, tuna and shark populations collapsing, and only four percent of ocean considered pristine. Jeremy Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of California, San Diego, synthesizes such reports and others into a new paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Naional Academy of Sciences, that boldly lays out the scope of the oceanic emergency and what urgently needs to be done. Comments? News options
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