Jul 05 2008
What’s happening to all the fish?
All the current news on fisheries seems to be bad. Africa is being particularly severely hit. Lake George on the Uganda-Democratic Republic of Congo boarder is in trouble because of dwindling fish stocks due to overexploitation. If fishing can raise funds then why doesn’t that money get used for proper management to sustain the fish?
What I find most immoral is the effect of commercial fishing fleets operating of the coasts of East and West Africa which is putting local fishermen out of business. Local authorities can’t do much, they don’t even have sea worthy vessels to pursue the illegal fishing vessels. And where there are legal agreements the terms are tilted strongly in favor of the fishing company - usually they don’t even have limits on amount of fish that can be taken. The consequence has been the collapse of local fisheries and in desperation young men are fleeing west Africa in search of a new life and economic fortunes in Europe - often making a dangerous sea voyage to get to Spain. Nobody wants these illegal immigrants, but how come nobody is putting 1 and 2 together? Arghhh it makes me so mad!
It gets worse! We never seem to have enough money to put good management systems in place do we? Yet oddly, we do have billions to resolve crises when they strike. According to this article International Donors have pledged the sum of $1.4 billion at a Conference in the Niger capital Niamey to help save the Niger River from drying up. Why is it drying up? Because of bad management …..wouln’t it have been cheaper to solve the problem before it became a crisis? Apparently the money will be used among other things to build dams, and plant trees (I bet I can guess which countries the contractors come from).
On the other extreme and bizarre, Japan, Norway and Iceland are trying to argue that the global decline of fish is due to the growing number of whales!. At the latest International Whaling Commission meeting the Humane Society International, WWF and the Lenfest Ocean Program presented three new reports debunking the science behind the ‘whales-eat-fish’ claims emanating from whaling nations Japan, Norway and Iceland. The countries had hoped that the whales-eat-fish argument has been used to bolster support for whaling, particularly from developing nations.
“It is not the whales, it is over-fishing and excess fishing capacity that are responsible for diminishing supplies of fish in developing countries,” said fisheries biologist Dr. Daniel Pauly, director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre.
Meanwhile in Canada imprisoned fish have had a taste of freedom, 30,000 farmed Atlantic salmon that had escaped from a fish farm near Campbell River. Some have been caught by anglers in the area – poor things they must have thought they were free at last from that concentration camp!
One response so far
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