Background: Industrial fishing: emptying our seas

Giant ships using state-of-the-art sonar can pinpoint schools of fish quickly and accurately. The ships are floating buildings with fish processing and packing plants, huge freezing systems, fishmeal processing plants, and powerful engines to drag enormous fishing gear through the ocean.

Wherever they operate, the capacity of industrial fishing fleets exceed the ocean's ecological limits. The trend of the past century is of fishing down the food chain. As larger fish species are wiped out, the next smaller fish species are targeted. Canadian Fisheries expert Dr. Daniel Pauly warns that if this continues our children will be eating jellyfish.

Ocean life simply cannot replace itself due to the speed, determination and force with which it is being plundered. Simply put, more and more people are competing for less and less fish and exacerbating the existing oceans crisis.

Scientists agree that the biggest threat to marine biodiversity is overfishing while fishery research and management institutions have fallen far behind the rapid advances in fishing technology.

Unregulated plunder

Regulation of fishing vessels is universally inadequate. In Canada and worldwide, the fishing industry is often given access to fish stocks before the impact of their fishing practices is known.

Moreover, the fishing practices destroy habitat as well as inhabitants. Bottom trawling, for example, destroys entire ancient deep sea coral forests.

As impacts are felt throughout marine ecosystems, scientists are warning that the oceans will suffer profound changes as a result of overfishing and destructive fishing practices.

Solution: regulation of industrial fishing >>