Official information revealed that global fishing catches grew 400 percent between 1950 and 1994 following centuries of increasingly intensive commercial fishing, but it couldn’t last forever. By late 20th century many big fisheries began crashing and worldwide production leveled off in 1988.
It is said that fisheries and financial markets have a lot in common. According to a study both can collapse dramatically after reaching certain tipping points. While such tipping points are difficult to predict, there are still clues beforehand. Stock markets often behave erratically when a meltdown is coming, the researchers found, and fisheries may undergo odd fluctuations in population and body size before they crash.
Unlike financial systems bouncing back from collapse is no easier for fisheries. For instance when Newfoundland’s cod fishery collapsed in 1992 and Canada closed it for rehabilitation, many expected a quick recovery since cod reproduce so prolifically. Fish is the only major food that’s still largely gathered from the wild, and even as fish farming expands around the world, wild fishing is driving many prized species – such as bluefin tuna.
In 2006, Canadian marine ecologist Boris Worm predicted that all commercial fisheries will collapse by 2048 if overfishing isn’t stopped. Although he scaled back that forecast this year after taking into account some nations’ recent sustainability efforts, he and an international team of researchers still warned that 63 percent of fish stocks are dangerously low, with many still sinking.
