meat is murder

The article from the delivers again the bad, old news that our oceans are being fished to a barren, extinct wasteland. And this does not even touch upon the agonising deaths of the countless millions of individual fish that are killed in the process.

The madness of the over-fishing of our oceans shows no signs of abating. A research paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco yesterday shows that, as fish stocks in coastal waters become more and more depleted, trawlers are moving further out to sea.

This is incredibly foolish on the part of the fishing fleets that are engaging in this practice. Deep-sea fish such as the orange roughy
 

and the grenadier are slow growing and do not breed in large numbers. The roughy can live for more than a century and takes decades to reach sexual maturity. This means it is especially vulnerable to over-fishing.

A survey of deep-sea fish living in the north-west Atlantic has shown that 40 per cent of species for which data are available are already in decline. By over-exploiting these remote stocks, fishermen are destroying their own future livelihood.

These fleets are also wrecking marine biodiversity in the areas in which they operate. Bottom trawling is responsible for the loss of more than 95 per cent of the coral from deep-sea reefs. The dragnets of the trawlers destroy in the space of a few hours pristine ecosystems that have often taken thousands of years to grow. In the process, the homes of countless rare species are lost. The destruction of the coral also destroys a valuable natural record of the earth’s changing climate. This is ecological vandalism.

What makes this rape of the seas even more outrageous is that our governments are subsidising the process to the tune of $150m (£80m) a year. Twelve states provide fuel subsidies for their fishermen to make the long voyages into unregulated international waters, including Japan, Spain, South Korea, Russia, Australia, Ukraine, France and Iceland. According to researchers at the University of British Columbia, without subsidies such expeditions would be uneconomical.

The desire of governments to support their fishing communities is understandable. But it makes no sense to sponsor over-fishing. There is only one sane course of action: the subsidies should end, bottom trawling should be outlawed and a system of strict international regulation for high seas fisheries must be established.

The warnings of what will happen otherwise are unequivocal. According to a major scientific study last year there will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current fishing trends continue. We are at risk of wiping out one of mankind’s oldest sources of food and doing untold damage to one of our planet’s fundamental ecosystems.