fisheries

fisheries From earliest times and in practically all countries, fisheries have been of industrial and commercial importance. In the large N Atlantic fishing grounds off Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, European and North American fishing fleets have long taken cod, herring, haddock, flounder, and mackerel; the recent collapse of some of these stocks has been devastating to local economies. Worldwide, the most important catches include herring, smelt, cod, haddock, perch, tuna, mackerel, salmon, trout, shrimp, smelt, and flounder. The annual world catch of fish averaged more than 100 million tons in the 1990s. China, by far the world's leading fishing country, has had about 25% of this total, while the United States has averaged about 5% of the world catch. Per capita consumption of fish and shellfish in the United States averages about 15 pounds.

Commercial Fishing Methods

The commercial methods chiefly used—each with a great variety of modifications—employ encircling nets (purse seine, haul seine, trawl seine), entangling nets (gill and trammel), lines, and traps (for lobster and crab). Trawlers and purse boats take most commercial catches. Since World War II, Japan and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) have been operating factory ships that freeze or can fish shortly after they are caught. The drying, canning, salting, and preserving of fish comprise a vast industry with, in addition, the manufacture of numerous byproducts, including glue, fertilizer, and in Asia, fish sauces.

Control of Fishing Rights

Because of the economic importance of the industry, numerous disputes have developed over fishing rights. Increasingly concerns about overfishing, pollution, and declining fish catches have forced governments to pass measures designed to protect and conserve this resource. In the United States, domestic fisheries are generally governed by state regulations, except where the Constitution provides for national control as a result of the treaty-making power and the regulation of navigation, customs, and interstate commerce. State fishery legislation is generally designed to protect the fisheries by regulating the way fish are caught, imposing catch limits, closing some waters to commercial fishing, reducing the times when fishing is legal, and protecting certain species. National governments generally restrict fishing rights within territorial waters to citizens and may establish jurisdiction over portions of the open sea, but the right to take products from the high seas is a subject for international agreements.

History of Fisheries Regulation

Fisheries have occupied an important place in the economic structure of many countries throughout history. The Black Sea fisheries formed an important source of Phoenician and Greek income; Spanish and Sicilian waters yielded fish for Rome; the economy of the Hanseatic League was partly based on the North Sea herring fisheries; cod fishing was a chief industry of New England; and fisheries in the Pacific are vital to Japan. For that reason fishing rights have long been the basis of controversy.

In the modern age such disputes have generally been settled by arbitration or by treaties. Fishing rights that had been enjoyed by the American colonists on the entire Atlantic coast were confirmed in the Treaty of Paris (1783), but the right to dry fish on the Newfoundland coast and on the settled parts of the Labrador and Nova Scotian coasts (except by agreement with the inhabitants) was expressly denied. The outbreak of the War of 1812 led to a new treaty (1818) that further restricted American rights. This convention was replaced by the reciprocity treaty of 1854, which abolished all restrictions except for shellfish. But disputes continued until 1910, when the North Atlantic Coast Fisheries Arbitration at The Hague ended the prolonged controversy. Canada and the United States in 1923 and 1930 signed agreements regulating the halibut fisheries of the N Pacific.

In 1882 Great Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, and Belgium signed the North Sea Fisheries Convention, which ended lawlessness in that area by granting a mutual right of visit, search, and arrest to the public vessels of the treaty powers. A similar treaty, regulating the fishing banks off Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, was signed by Great Britain and Denmark in 1901, and three years later Anglo-French rights in the N Atlantic were set forth in a convention. The fisheries of the Pacific have also been the subject of many international agreements, such as the Japanese right to fish in specified sections of Siberian waters, first granted by the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 and continued by later agreements.

To stabilize international rules governing national rights in the oceans, the United Nations convened the Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1974; one of its concerns was to protect fisheries. The oceans have long been used as a dumping ground, but pollution levels in the open seas as well as coastal areas have risen sharply, thus endangering fisheries. Another threat has been overfishing, which in some areas has severely depleted the available catch. In 1996 the U.S. federal government imposed strict limits on fishing in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, in order to protect the declining New England fishing industry; in 1999 restrictions were imposed along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in an attempt to conserve depleted stocks of shark, tuna, and marlin. Overfishing is not limited to seas off developed nations; the Java Sea in Indonesia, for example, has been fished to the point where local fishermen cannot count on a catch sufficient to feed their families.

For many years, most countries recognized a 12-mi exclusive fisheries zone, but the rise of fleets of factory ships that could catch and process huge quantities of fish severely reduced catches. The Law of the Sea Treaty (1983) established a 200-mi limit inside which countries had the exclusive right to regulate fishing, and in 1997 the United States set a 200-mi territorial zone to protect its fisheries. The United Nations sponsored (1999) a nonbinding agreement among seafaring nations to address the problem of overfishing worldwide by reducing the size of their fishing fleets.

International efforts to protect marine resources have also involved whaling . The International Whaling Commission outlawed most whaling in 1986, but some countries have refused to comply.

Bibliography

See R. Browning, Fisheries of the North Pacific (1980); L. Anderson, The Economics of Fisheries Management (1986); R. A. Carey Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman (1999).

fisheries, a general term used to denote all the activities concerned with the catching of fish commercially, whether by long-lining, net, or other means. Until about 1900, commercial fishing was largely unregulated. However, the introduction of modern fishing boats fitted with refrigeration—which allows the boats to remain longer over fishing grounds—and electronic aids such as sonar, meant that regulations on an international scale have had to be introduced. International efforts to try and curb overfishing, and to clamp down on those doing it illegally, are one of the environmental issues facing mankind today.

The carbon dating of fish bones in kitchen middens has shown that humankind has been catching marine fish for tens of thousands of years. In the 19th century a committee of investigation chaired by T. H. Huxley (1825–95) concluded that the oceans offer an inexhaustible resource of fish, and this attitude prevailed for decades afterwards. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, in 2000 worldwide marine fisheries landed a little under 100 million tonnes of fish, providing 15% of animal protein, amounting to 13 kilograms (28 lb) per capita. However, this figure underestimates the fish that were killed, because at least 20% more were discarded as trash fish and by-catch.

Trawls dragged along the seabed leave a trail of destruction. It is estimated that over half the area of the North Sea is trawled over each year, some parts as frequently as ten times. Globally, over 50% of fish stocks are either overfished or fished to their maximum sustainable capacity, so fishery scientists are desperately seeking to establish how the catches can be maintained while still enabling fishermen to make a living. Marine fishing and aquaculture gives employment to about 20 million people worldwide, and has an annual value of $55 billion. The scales of various fisheries range from individual artisanal fishermen using simple basic equipment catching fish for their own consumption, to large technically sophisticated fishing boats that are fishing to sell their catch for profit.

Commercial fisheries can be subdivided into pelagic (living in the water) and demersal (living on the seabed) fisheries, the former catching fish in the water using purse seine nets and long-lines, whereas demersal fisheries target fish on the seabed using trawls, dredges, and traps. Each population of fish that is targeted is called a stock. A stock may be the total population of a particular species, or populations of the same species that spawn in different areas and at different times of year. For example, in the North Sea there are several stocks of herring. In theory a stock can be exploited to give the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) by catching fish at the same rate that they are being replaced. However, the number of new young fish (recruits) entering the stock fluctuates extensively year by year. This is because of variations in weather and climate, making accurate assessments of MSY impossible. So quotas of fish that can be harvested should, according to the Precautionary Principle, be set below the theoretical MSY. However, so strong are the economic and political pressures to set quotas at the maximum levels that what is set often exceeds the theoretical MSY, so stocks are constantly being over-exploited. Juvenile fish should not be caught until they have had a chance to spawn, which is achieved by regulating the minimum size of the mesh that can be used in the construction of trawls and purse seines. However, since in many fisheries several species of fish are caught, some undersized fish are taken and these have to be discarded.

The majority of commercial fish are caught in the shallow waters of the continental shelves, within the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of coastal states. While these states have exclusive rights to the fish in their EEZ, they also have the obligation to exploit these stocks in a sustainable way, but many do not have sufficient resources to do so. Another major management problem arises with stocks that migrate between the EEZs of different countries: national boundaries have no environmental relevance as fish abundance is related to the productivity of the ocean waters, which is highest in regions where there are abundant nutrients in the surface waters. These areas are either in temperate regions where there is a seasonal cycle in the thermal stratification of the upper ocean, or where upwelling brings nutrients up into the surface waters. The main upwelling regions mostly occur along the equator, particularly in the Pacific, along the eastern boundaries of the continents, off Peru, California, south-west Africa, and Mauritania, and the regions in the north-west Indian Ocean influenced by the monsoon.

In 2000 the fishes contributing most to the global harvest were anchovetta off Peru (11.3 million tonnes) and the Alaskan species of pollock (3 million tonnes) and herring (2.4 million tonnes).

See also drifter; trawler.

Bibliography

Merrett, N., and and Haedrich, R. , Deep-Sea Demersal Fish and Fisheries (1997).www.defra.gov.uk/fish/fishindx.htmwww.fao.org/fi/default_all.asp

M. V. Angel

fish·er·y / ˈfishərē/ • n. (pl. -er·ies) a place where fish are reared for commercial purposes. ∎  a fishing ground or area where fish are caught. ∎  the occupation or industry of catching or rearing fish.