The emergence of the United Nations’ Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in the late 1970s, which enabled countries to claim EEZs reaching 200 miles into the open sea, including essentially all coastal shelves, put the responsibility for fisheries resource management squarely with maritime countries, thus ending many decades, even centuries in some cases, of fighting over traditional fishing grounds (Johnstone 1977). Unfortunately, the opportunity that this offered was lost by most countries. The international race for fish that had characterized earlier fisheries development continued unabated. Indeed, governments or supranational entities—the United Nations Development Programme, the EU— or international development banks (see Mannan 1997) subsidized the growth of national fisheries to replace the just-displaced DWF of foreign countries. As well, they enabled the DWF to come back through UNCLOS-sanctioned, and often bargain-priced, ‘fishing agreements’, as between the EU and individual West African countries (Kaczynski & Fluharty 2002).
Fisheries scientists contributed to this, notably by publishing estimates of potential yields now known to have been wildly over-optimistic (review in Pauly 1996).
The post-UNCLOS technological and geographical expansion extended the trend of catch increase, if at a slower rate. Global catches began to decline in the late 1980s, a trend reversal due to broad-based collapse of the underlying ecosystems, long masked by systematic over-reporting by China (Watson & Pauly 2001; figure 1), and the targeting of deep water stocks (see figure 3). Several major studies, by Jackson et al. (2001), Christensen et al. (2003), and Myers & Worm (2003), showed that marine fisheries impact their resources base and their supporting ecosystems far more strongly than commonly assumed, thus providing further support for our explanation of observed catch trends.
However, most government fisheries laboratories still work mainly along traditional lines, i.e. performing assessments for single-species fisheries, in view of estimating their TAC. At the same time, many of their staff attempt to fight off claims by conservationists asserting, with increasing public support, that these fisheries impact on numerous other (‘bycatch’) species, and, in fact, engage in serial destructions of their supporting ecosystems (Rosenberg 2003).
Formulating alternatives to these developments will require freeing of these laboratories, and the regulatory agencies they are part of, from their subservient relationship with the fishing industry, and the re-establishment of their role as guardians of what are, after all, publicly owned resources (Macinko & Bromley 2002; Okey 2003). Indeed, we believe that it is the perception of regulatory agencies as captive of the narrow interests of an extractive industry that is behind the widespread, if not well-articulated, public demands for some sort of EBFM, as expressed, for example, in the WSSD, held in Johannesburg in 2002.
Thus, we suggest that, rather than railing about the imprecision of EBFM, we should treat it as a guiding principle, as is done in Canada with the concept of ‘good government’, which underlies federal public policy; or the right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’, which underlies much jurisdiction in the USA; or ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’, which inspire much of the public and political discourse in France. Indeed, it is our impression that broad concepts of this sort, despite their vagueness, provide one of the few avenues for framing debates about complex, value-laden issues. Moreover, we venture that a consensus could quickly emerge around the notion that EBFM should maintain, or where necessary re-establish, the structure and function of the ecosystems within which fisheries are embedded (NRC 1999; see also Garcia & de Leiva Moreno 2003). This could involve, among other things, regulating fisheries such that the mix of species caught maintains the relative abundance of the same species in the ecosystems, just as the overall gas mileage of the cars in a country is, or can be regulated, by putting a cap on the aggregate mileage of the cars sold by each manufacturer.
Answers to all your Biology Questions
