According to the environmental organization Greenpeace, fishing in the open seas has increased by 8.5 percent between 2018 and 2022, although the direction should be the opposite in terms of marine nature.
Environmental organization Greenpeace’s report published on Thursday is concerned about the growth of industrial-scale fishing in the world’s seas.
A report summarizing satellite data on fishing vessel movements states that between 2018 and 2022, fishing in the open seas has increased by 8.5 percent. Fishing in areas with important conservation values increased more, by 22.5 percent.
Greenpeace conservation expert by Laura Meller according to the situation is unsustainable. Many fish stocks are overfished, so the catch is searched for more and more far away.
His criticism is aimed at industrial-scale fishing, which often does not respect the needs of local communities along the coast.
The tools are huge. The survey revealed that, for example, the North Atlantic had a total of more than 1,200 kilometers of longline on one day of the survey. A longline is a line that is lowered into the sea with hooks and baits on the hooks. It doesn’t distinguish whether the hooks catch tuna caught in the catch or, for example, sharks, rays or seabirds, which have decreased alarmingly in recent decades.
According to Meller, the longest individual long lines can be more than a hundred kilometers long today. The so-called by-catch can be the majority of the catch.
Particularly in Meller’s opinion, fishing is unecological, where the catches end up to a large extent as animal feed. This happens, for example, on the coast of West Africa, where local communities suffer when large international fishing vessels catch fish for fish oil and fish meal.
According to him, a similar situation also prevails in herring fishing in the Baltic Sea. The stock of herring, a key species in the Baltic Sea, is now in a weak state and the EU Commission has even proposed to stop fishing for it. The majority of the catch ends up as feed for fur animals and farmed fish. Five percent goes on people’s plates.
“One has to ask what and for whom, in the end, a fairly small number of fishing vessels empty the sea of life in all the seas of the world,” says Meller.
At the same time, diversity in the seas is under severe pressure anyway, as the seas warm and acidify due to the greenhouse gases released by mankind into the atmosphere. Global warming also changes the course of ocean currents.
According to Meller, the adaptation of marine ecosystems to changes should not be made even more difficult by excessive fishing and other industrial activities.
“The protection of the seas is very urgent. 30 percent of marine areas should be protected by 2030, and that task is huge. There is not too much time for that,” he says.
Countries of the world agree on a 30 percent conservation goal for Montreal in the UN agreement at the end of last year. At the UN meeting in March, on the other hand, a marine protection agreement was concluded, which provides the tools to establish protected areas also in international waters. That’s what Meller considered a breakthrough.
“It was an insane step forward and a great demonstration that the protection of the seas for the benefit of people and nature can overcome labor political tensions,” he says.
A marine protected area usually does not mean that cargo traffic cannot navigate through the area. According to Greenpeace, however, it should mean that industrial activities such as industrial fishing, deep-sea mining and oil drilling in the area would be banned.
The Norwegian fishing vessel Asbjørn Selsbane fishes for cod in the Norwegian Sea. Monitoring of cod stocks is taken into account in its fishing quota.
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