Fisheries Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Fisheries encom pass the variety of human activities to harvest aquatic animals and plants. The term includes the harvest of fish per se as well as crustaceans, seaweeds, mollusks, and marine mammals, but not aquaculture. Fisheries can be in either inland, coastal, or high seas environments. Globally, about 90 million metric tons of fish are landed yearly, about one-eighth from inland waters, the remainder from the oceans. Fishing gears or instruments for harvest are quite diverse: from static gears such as fish traps, weirs, hooks and lines, and gillnets, to mobile gears like spears, cast nets, haul and purse seines, trawls, and dredges.

Fishers can be differentiated into two main categories: artisanal and commercial. Artisanal fisheries are typically defined by low levels of capitalization and productivity and the use of catches for subsistence or localized markets, whereas commercial fisheries are defined oppositely as highly capitalized, efficient, and oriented toward global markets. These ideal types seldom capture the empirical reality of fisheries, as many fishers deemed artisanal have motorized boats, sell their catches for distant markets, and can be quite efficient; and many deemed commercial supply local buyers only, have small boats, and are engaged in fishing informally in concert with other sources of livelihood, a characteristic generally ascribed to artisanal fishers.

Dependence on Fishing

There are about two million fishers in Africa-the vast majority artisanal-and this number is increased several times when marketing and processing jobs are included. Six million people are employed in fishing or fisheries-related jobs in India. Fisheries are of paramount importance for often-rural localities, as they can provide employment, a tax base for local services, and cultural value. Seafood (from aquaculture and fisheries) accounts for only a small percentage of total caloric intake in almost all countries, but in many countries it accounts for 20 percent or more of protein intake and is cheaper than alternative protein sources. Many southern islands and coastal nations and Japan are highly dependent on fisheries for their food security. People in Global North countries on average eat 27 kilograms of seafood per year, while those in the Global South, nine kilograms. The reasons for this disparity include differences in human population and fishery productivity, fishery exports and imports, and the harvest of fish by foreign versus domestic fleets.

Fish also contribute to human nutrition indirectly through fishmeal. Some 30 million tons a year, a third of global catches, are reduced into about six million tons of fish meals and oils; the majority goes to feeding livestock like pigs and chickens, while aquaculture and industrial purposes get smaller portions.

Geographic Distribution

Geographic distribution of fisheries stocks is very uneven. Some species are immobile or localized, like mollusks or shrimp, while others like tuna are highly migratory. Estuarine and reef ecosystems can equal the most prolific terrestrial ones in terms of productivity. Upwelling zones-where currents at continental margins push up deep water and mix it with surface layers-are also highly productive. The oceans as a whole are estimated to produce two-fifths of the earth’s total primary productivity. In marine ecosystems, a productive plant biomass feeds a proportionately larger standing stock than terrestrial ecosystms. Since much of that stock consists of zooplankton that are not harvested by people, fisheries are more dependent on secondary and tertiary consumers, which are more abundant in the water than on land per unit of primary productivity. Target species on the high seas tend to be trophically more distant from primary production than those of estuarine and inland fisheries.

For thousands of years, people have engaged in fisheries, but the extent of exploitation expanded with the increase in oceanic navigation in the 16th century. The Grand Banks fishery for groundfish was incorporated into European-centered trade networks at this time, and became a prize contested between the maritime powers. In the Atlantic world economy, salted fish was a cheap source of protein for poor Europeans and African slaves in the Caribbean. Whaling expanded to supply oil for lighting and the finest lubricants available for industrial machinery.

These harvests did little to exploit the potential wealth of the sea, however, nor did the artisanal fisheries that existed in most parts of the world. The limits of the world’s oceans became more visible after the industrialization of Global North fisheries from the late 19th century on through advances in shipbuilding and the means to preserve, distribute, and market seafood. Worldwide fisheries production stood at some 45 million tons in 1945. Growth in production was rapid after this time, but has since stabilized and the majority of fish stocks are now presumed to be either fully or over-exploited. Foreign fleets, decolonization, and the prospect of offshore mineral wealth spurred a movement toward extending jurisdiction over the sea to 200 miles by coastal nations. These territories were enacted by the late 1970s and are now known as Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ’s). A lack of controls on new entrants and national fishery development programs in northern countries followed extended jurisdiction and quickly replaced or surpassed the excluded foreign fishing capacity. This high fishing pressure and the treatment of the nationalized sea as a resource frontier contributed to the collapse of many fisheries since this period, such as the cod fisheries of the northwest Atlantic in the early 1990s.

Another option for northern fishing fleets was to enter agreements with southern countries for access to their waters. The European Union, through its Common Fisheries Policy, enters into fishery access agreements with African countries, exporting European excess fishing capacity south and African fish north. These agreements, which are a major source of funds for many governments, are controversial because of conflicts between foreign fleets on domestic artisanal and commercial fishers and the diversion of fish from nations with many hungry people.

Fish Trading

International trade in fish amounted to $71 billion in 2004, four-and-a-half times the amount in 1980. Over three-quarters of all fish landings are in the Global South, and south-north fish exports produced a net trade surplus for the south of $20 billion in 2004. Japan, the European Union, and the United States are the biggest seafood importers, taking fishmeal and high-value species and exporting cheaper fishes.

Economic-development aid programs to newly decolonized countries brought about considerable change to those nations’ fisheries. The first of these projects, the Indo-Norwegian Project, begun in Kerala, India, in 1952, promoted motorization of traditional fishing craft; introduction of new boat types and fishing gears; and construction of freezing plants for export-oriented production where salting, drying, and fresh products for local markets previously predominated

The Blue Revolution

Fisheries modernization, often called the Blue Revolution, created commercial fleets in many southern countries and increased export earnings, and its new technologies were selectively adopted by many artisanal fishers. It also exacerbated conflict between fishing sectors as the new fleets, which received most international development aid and often enjoyed state support, harvested fish stocks utilized by the preexistent fishers and used destructive gears such as bottom trawls. The modern fleets had their own problems, and many became bankrupt during the era of structural adjustment that dismantled state support and increased the prices of imported inputs. Likewise, those small-scale fishers who adopted motorization found themselves in great difficulty meeting increasing expenses under structural adjustment.

Fisherpeople in places like southern India organized into social movements from the 1970s onward to restrict the activities of modernized fleets. These groups have won some victories and gained national and international awareness of their grievances, but most development assistance continues to privilege capital-intensive, export-oriented fisheries. While much modernization has taken place, artisanal fishing are still estimated to harvest a quarter of global landings.

Fisheries have a range of ecological effects on target and nontarget species. Fishing takes biomass out of the marine environment and changes the age profile of fish populations. It can alter predator and prey relationships and disturb benthic flora and fauna, which can have secondary effects. Overfishing can result from harvesting organisms before reaching maximum size or value, or reducing organisms’ their ability to spawn or otherwise reproduce.

“Bycatch,” or the harvest of unwanted, non-target species, amounted to some 27 million tons in a 1994 estimate, the equivalent of 30 percent of global fish landings. Most of this “bycatch” is not brought to shore but returned to the sea, often a large proportion dead or dying. Some fisheries, such as shrimp trawling, have on average high bycatches of several times the weight of target species landed, while others such as herring and anchovy have very little. Bycatches rearrange energy flows through marine ecosystems, with seabirds benefiting the most as witnessed by explosions in their populations correlated to increases in bycatch-intensive fisheries. “Bycatch” provoked the two most prominent international trade disputes over fisheries to date, the tuna-dolphin and turtle-shrimp cases, both of which involved the World Trade Organization or its predecessor in rulings over environmental concerns about harvesting practices.

Marine benthos, the organisms that live on the sea bottom, can be greatly harmed by fishing gears that interact with the seafloor. Sandy and muddy seafloors with little emergent benthic life can return to a pre-fished condition within six months or less, while areas with more surface roughness and abundant epifauna like immobile filter feeders could take many years to recover.

Fishery Science and Management

The twin goals of fishery science and management – developing fisheries resources and protecting them from overexploitation-form the foundation of bioeconomics, which aims for the maximization of surplus value from a given fishery while sustaining the conditions of production. To achieve these ends, managers sample fish populations to derive stock assessments and guidelines for harvest. One sampling technique is surplus population modeling, which shows the number of fish over natural mortality a fishery may harvest to reproduce the population. Management attempts to maintain populations at a rate of maximum surplus production, where neither too few breeding stock exist to reproduce nor too many adults to slow down rates of increase. The rate of harvest that approximates this condition is known as Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). Given that fishery population parameters are very difficult to know with certainty and environmental factors may alter conditions unpredictably, managers may set a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) according to a Maximum Consistent Yield (MCY) that factors in a precautionary margin. Another target often used in management is Maximum Economic Yield, the harvest that produces the greatest net return on aggregate capital investment.

The concept of “The Tragedy of the Commons” is synonymous with fisheries because of the common property nature of fishery resources. Openaccess fisheries are prone to overcapitalization, where more is invested than necessary to harvest a fishery stock. This reduces overall fishery profitability and can aggravate tendencies toward overfishing. Mitigating these tendencies has taken many forms, most commonly limits on participation, restrictions on gear types, and time and spatial closures of fisheries. Marine Protected Areas (MPA’s), where little or no fishing is allowed, have become increasingly popular. While proponents of fishery modernization have pushed for Individual Fishing Quotas to resolve common property problems through marketization of access, this trend is opposed by many fishers who see it as a means of dispossessing them from their livelihoods. Common property theorists offer an alternative prescription for co-management of fisheries through institutional mechanisms to control and allocate access to resources. Perspectives from political ecology that examine the distributional effects on producers from conservation programs are important to the future of fisheries as terrestrial natural resource management strategies are increasingly employed in aquatic contexts.

Bibliography:

Jennings, et al., Marine Fisheries Ecology (Blackwell Science, 2001);
Le Sann, A Livelihood from Fishing: Globalization and Sustainable Fisheries Practices (Intermediate Technology, 1998);
Tvedten and B. Hersoug, Fishing for Development: Small-Scale Fisheries in Africa (The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1992).