The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #123812   Message #2730444
Posted By: Emma B
24-Sep-09 - 11:23 AM
Thread Name: BS: Irish vote on Lisbon treaty looms
Subject: RE: BS: Irish vote on Lisbon treaty looms
'the Fishing industry is ruin ........ in all countrys
I wonder why ........ '

As it says on the WWF website

"Valuable fish stocks, as well as a whole host of other marine life, are severely threatened by overfishing, caused largely by poor fisheries management."

'The global fishing fleet is currently 2.5x larger than what the oceans can sustainably support1 - meaning that humans are taking far more fish out of the ocean than can be replaced by those remaining.

As a result:

52% of the world's fisheries are fully exploited, and 24% are overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion
Seven of the top ten marine fisheries, accounting for about 30% of all capture fisheries production, are fully exploited or overexploited
As many as 90% of all the ocean's large fish have been fished out Several important commercial fish populations have declined to the point where their survival is threatened

Why is this happening?

Many fishers are well aware of the need to safeguard fish populations and the marine environment.
However, the greed and waste of some large commercial fleets combined with modern developments in fishing technology have had an enormous effect on fishing worldwide.'

Last year the Scottish Government described as a "scandal" the massive overfishing of mackerel that has been carried out by Icelandic boats.
full BBC report

Greenpeace also comments on the detrimental effect of technology intensive fishing vessels - the world's fleet of industrialized fishing vessels.

"As more and more fish stocks decline, debt-ridden industrialized fleets are under increasing pressure to spend greater time and effort to catch fish, or to find other stocks, even new species, to exploit in a repeat of their destructive pattern of overfishing"

Greenpeace concludes that the relatively small number of 35,000 industrialized vessels larger than 100 GRT - by number about one-per cent of the world's entire fishing fleet - catches between half and two-thirds of the world's reported catches from marine fisheries

Sadly this is a worldwide problem

I'm not certain what skarpi means by the EU's response to Iceland..
...perhaps it is as....the Greenpeace site points out

'Whaling and EU membership are incompatible – the EU is likely to request that Iceland end whaling, as one of the conditions of accession'