Date: May 2010

Title: Oceans' fish stocks could vanish by 2050

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Ed Pilkington ...in THE HINDU newspaper (19th May 2010)

More than 20 million people employed in the fishing industry may need to be retrained for other work over the next 40 years if the final collapse of fish stocks in the world's oceans is to be avoided, the U.N. warned on Monday. The U.N.'s environment branch, UNEP, gave a preview of its green economy report that will be published in October. It said if the world remained on its path of overfishing, by 2050 fish stocks could become uneconomic to exploit, or extinct.

Pavan Sukhdev, head of the initiative, said: “Already 30 per cent of the ocean fisheries have collapsed and are producing less than 10 per cent of their original ability.” At the heart of the analysis is the $27 billion in subsidies it estimates is being injected into fishing every year, mainly by developing countries. The U.N. says the subsidies are huge in terms of the scale of the industry, amounting to almost a third of the $85-billion total value of fish caught. Among those subsidies, the U.N. defines $8 billion as “good”, in that they encourage sustainable fishing of healthy stocks. Most of the subsidies are “bad”, meaning they lead to overcapacity and exploitation, and about $3 billion of the subsidies are “ugly”, leading to the depletion of fish populations.