More pressure on global fish stocks as scientists warn of underreporting of catches
- added July 9, 2008
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Fish catches in some of the poorest nations in the world have been grossly underestimated, scientists warned yesterday.
The implication is that global fish stocks, already widely acknowledged to be under heavy pressure, are in far more in danger than thought. The underreporting particularly threatens the hundreds of millions of poor people around the world who rely on fish for subsistence.
A reconstruction of actual catches in 20 places around the globe showed that fish landings that were not reported were at least as high as the declared catch, and sometimes more than 16 times higher.
The new study, presented to the 11th international coral reef symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was conducted by scientists from the Sea Around Us project, an international research group based at the University of British Columbia. They visited the locations, questioned local officials and made their own estimates of subsistence fishery calculations since 1950.
They found huge disparities. In American Samoa, the annual haul of fish was 16.6 times greater than the declared catch. Hawaii's anglers and sport fishermen took enough to double the declared catch. The catch off Mozambique was more than six times the official estimate, despite the country's government selling permits to EU fishing fleets. And Tanzanian officials failed to include the island of Zanzibar in its data, although Zanzibari fishermen accounted for 30% of the total catch.
Dr Dirk Zeller and Jennifer Jacquet of the Sea Around Us project found that domestic catches in 20 Pacific islands had been declining by between 54% and 86% since 1950, probably because of overfishing near population centres.
This shows that the underreporting does not suggest there are more fish in the sea than thought. Instead it confirms that many fisheries could be perilously close to extinction
The implication is that global fish stocks, already widely acknowledged to be under heavy pressure, are in far more in danger than thought. The underreporting particularly threatens the hundreds of millions of poor people around the world who rely on fish for subsistence.
A reconstruction of actual catches in 20 places around the globe showed that fish landings that were not reported were at least as high as the declared catch, and sometimes more than 16 times higher.
The new study, presented to the 11th international coral reef symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was conducted by scientists from the Sea Around Us project, an international research group based at the University of British Columbia. They visited the locations, questioned local officials and made their own estimates of subsistence fishery calculations since 1950.
They found huge disparities. In American Samoa, the annual haul of fish was 16.6 times greater than the declared catch. Hawaii's anglers and sport fishermen took enough to double the declared catch. The catch off Mozambique was more than six times the official estimate, despite the country's government selling permits to EU fishing fleets. And Tanzanian officials failed to include the island of Zanzibar in its data, although Zanzibari fishermen accounted for 30% of the total catch.
Dr Dirk Zeller and Jennifer Jacquet of the Sea Around Us project found that domestic catches in 20 Pacific islands had been declining by between 54% and 86% since 1950, probably because of overfishing near population centres.
This shows that the underreporting does not suggest there are more fish in the sea than thought. Instead it confirms that many fisheries could be perilously close to extinction
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