For years it’s been impossible to
see illegal acts happening at sea, from overfishing to human rights abuses. Now
that’s changing, says Jacqueline Savitz.
By Jacqueline Savitz
7 June 2018
The next time you cook a fish or
order some seafood at a restaurant, think about the image above.
It’s a snapshot of all the
fishing happening on the ocean over a six-month period. If you zoomed in, you’d
see thousands of blue dots, each showing one instance of likely fishing
activity at one point in time. This image captures almost 20 million hours of
commercial fishing by tens of thousands of vessels around the world. As we
approach World Oceans Day this
week, it’s sobering to reflect on the fact that industrial fishing now occurs
in more than
55% of the ocean – an area more than four times bigger than all the
land used for farming.
The vast majority of fishing
vessels follow the rules governing fishing – but many are not, and these bad
actors can cause a lot of damage.
Vessels may take too many fish –
overfishing – which is causing our fisheries to collapse. Then there is the
problem of illegal fishing, which can occur in protected areas, in another
country’s waters or on the high seas. Many countries simply don’t have the
capacity to enforce fishery management rules. As a result, illegal
fishing has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, worth up to $23bn each year.
Because of overfishing – both legal and illegal – one third of fisheries
assessed in a study by the UN Food
and Agriculture Organisation were overfished and over half were fully
fished. This threatens jobs and food security for millions of people, all
around the world.
The trouble is, so much of this
illegal activity is hidden – it happens out to sea, making it difficult to
scrutinise what individual vessels are getting up to. To address the problems
facing our oceans, we need to know what’s happening beyond the horizon.
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