Unless fleets are slashed, the world may face fishless oceans in 40 years, UN experts say. In such a needful action, they add, 22 million jobs could disappear and 13 million fishing boats be scrapped.
“It’s not as absurd as it sounds, as already 30 percent of the ocean fisheries have collapsed and are producing less than 10 percent of their original ability”, said Pavan Sukhdev, head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Green Economy Initiative.
The UNEP will publish its Green Economy report in October, but a 48-page preview was released in mid-May.
When the world community failed to protect the seriously threatened bluefin tuna after heavy Japanese lobbying this spring, that was just a sign of the times, the experts warn. If such measures fail on a larger scale, the world is facing a much vaster catastrophe.
One billion people in the world, mostly from poor countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, the report says. For this, 35 million people globally are fishing, from 20 million boats. Some 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to fishing to 520 million.
The worst contributor to the dismal state of the global fish stocks, according to the UN, is government (and EU) subsidies, encouraging even bigger fleets to chase the waning fish.
“We are paying ourselves to destroy the very resource on which the whole fishing industry is dependant. We are in the process of eroding the natural capital that underpins our economies”, said Achim Steiner, UNEP’s Executive Director.
The annual $25 billion in government subsidies were described as “perverse” by Sukhdev, pointing out that the entire value of all fish caught in a year is only about three times as big, $85 billion.
“What is scarce here is fish”, Sukhdev said. “Not the stock of fishing capacity”.
The report makes a difference between “good” subsidies that actually encourage sustainability ($8 billion); “bad” subsidies ($14 billion); and outright “ugly” subsidies, which actively lead to depletion ($3 billion).
It calls for world leaders to scrap all counterproductive subsidies, but continue to invest $8 billion each year over the next 40 years to help fish stocks recover. That would involve removing up to 13 million fishing vessels and retraining up to 22 million fishers for other work.
No sinning nation or organisation is named in the preview, but the full report, prepared for the Rio+20 summit to be held in 2012, will contain tables and statistics that will “enable any reader to figure out where the problem is”, Sukhdev said.
Environmentalists have been especially critical to the fisheries policies of the Spanish and Japanese governments, as well as the EU.