Scientists predicted that if fishing around the world continued at its present pace, fish stocks would begin to decline, resulting in the final global collapse of wild fisheries. The best way to stop this is to simply fish more sustainably, allowing fish stocks time to recover between harvests, just as a forest might be managed for logging.
In this endeavour the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1995 created the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, a voluntary guide to sustainable fishing — which means controlling illegal fishing, reducing excess fishing capacity and minimizing destructive practices like ghost fishing, when gear is left in the water after a ship departs, still killing sea life.
It is fact that sustainable fishing remains far more theory than practice. According to the study by the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the Federal University of Rio Grande and the World Wildlife Federation looked at fishing policies and practices from the 53 countries that account for 96 percent of the world’s fish catch, to see how well they followed the FAO’s code.
It is informed that a relatively scrupulous government offers no guarantee of fish-stock safety; Canada, Pitcher notes, has great fishing laws but in recent years, under a conservative government, they haven’t always been executed. The FAO code is valuable in principle, an excellent guide to a more sustainable fishing industry, but it’s voluntary and lacks the teeth needed to save the world’s fisheries. Of course, the very global nature of fishing, which often takes place outside any single nation’s territory, makes it a classic tragedy of the commons.
