A new study places the annual global catch at roughly 109 million tonnes, about 30 per cent higher than the 77 billion officially reported in 2010 by more than 200 countries and territories. The new data suggest that global catches actually peaked at 130 metric tons in 1996 and have declined sharply by about 1.2 million metric tons every year. “The catch of the world is higher than reported, which would seem to be a good thing but it also reveals that the catch is declining faster” explained Daniel Pauly from the university of British Columbia.
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“Our results differ very strongly from those of the FAO”, Daniel Pauly, a professor the University of British Columbia in Canada and lead author of the study, told reporters during a press call. “It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another”, reports Newser. The FAO data set is known to have trouble with underreporting (or no reporting) for the fisheries of many nations, and for a lack of data on subsectors like subsistence, artisanal and illegal fishing, and for discarded fish.
A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the national data many countries have submitted to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has not always accurately reflected the amount of fish actually caught over the past six decades.
And with the sustainable management, it is for sure that both fish and fishermen will persevere into the future. The statistical report released by the FAO officials state that about 86 million metric tons of global marine fisheries were caught in 1996, which has slightly been declined since then. “It’s no longer acceptable to mark down artisanal, subsistence, or bycatch catch data as a zero in the official record books”.
But their findings indicate flaws in how the data is collected.
Last year, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned that stocks of tuna and other fish have declined by more than 50 per cent since 1970, triggering alarm that the planet’s fish stocks have reached on the brink of collapse. The researchers claim this method was able to provide far more accurate picture of the scale of the impacts of fishing across the world.
Raising alarm over overfishing, Pauly said, “This sounds weird when you’re in the [U.S.] and you know that there’s a Coast Guard protecting the waters”.
We are “fishing harder and catching less fish” which will ultimately lead to the decline of fish populations in our waters. And this will be important to consider, not only for the health of the oceans, but for the health of the millions of people worldwide who depend on fish for their food and their livelihoods.
He also pointed out that underreported locations don’t intend to cover-up catches that aren’t being reported.
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“If we let go a little bit and allow the stock to rebuild, we would get nearly the same catch but on a sustained basis”, he said, adding that the North Sea herring is an example of a species that successfully rebuilt its stock after it was wiped out in Norway in the 1960’s. “Basically, the oceans are more productive than we thought before”.
