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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 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. How sustainable is your canned tuna? It depends on the retailer (8/13/2008) To aid concerned tuna-lovers, Greenpeace has ranked eight of the top canned tuna retailers in order from most sustainable to least. Canned tuna from John West, the biggest retailer of tuna in the UK, proves to be the worst of the lot, whereas Salinburys is the most environmentally-friendly. In a press release Greenpeace said that Salinburys is "the only tinned tuna brand that is fished using sustainable methods". The global rich are eating the poor's fish: new report shows tropical fish catch gravely under-estimated (7/10/2008) After a week of bad news regarding marine life — it was reported that half of U.S. coral reefs are in fair to poor condition and one-third of all coral species are threatened globally — there is still more: a study of twenty tropical islands showed that recreational and subsistence fishing has gone almost completely unreported from 1950 to 2004. In fifteen of twenty cases the fish take was at least doubled when local fish catches were added, and in the most extreme case, American Samoa, the amount of fish collected was 17 times what was previously recorded. 1/3 of corals face extinction (7/10/2008) Nearly one-third of reef-building corals are vulnerable to extinction, according to an assessment of 845 species of coral. Rising temperatures, increased incidence of disease, and human disturbance are driving the trend. Large shark populations fall 97% in the Mediterranean (6/12/2008) Populations of some shark species in the Mediterranean have plunged by more than 97 percent over the past 200 years, report researchers writing in the journal conservation Biology. Several species are at risk of extinction. Comments? News options News index | RSS | News Feed Advertisements: Organic Apparel from Patagonia | Insect-repelling clothing |
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