Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2005) 360, 5���12 doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1574 Published online 29 January 2005 Global trends in world fisheries: impacts on marine ecosystems and food security Daniel Pauly , Reg Watson and Jackie Alder Sea Around Us Project, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4 This contribution, which reviews some broad trends in human history and in the history of fishing, argues that sustainability, however defined, rarely if ever occurred as a result of an explicit policy, but as result of our inability to access a major part of exploited stocks. With the development of industrial fishing, and the result- ing invasion of the refuges previously provided by distance and depth, our interactions with fisheries resour- ces have come to resemble the wars of extermination that newly arrived hunters conducted 40 000��� 50 000 years ago in Australia, and 12 000���13 000 years ago against large terrestrial mammals in North America. These broad trends are documented here through a map of change in fish sizes, which displays characteristic declines, first in the nearshore waters of industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere, then spread offshore and to the Southern Hemisphere. This geographical extension met its natural limit in the late 1980s, when the catches from newly accessed stocks ceased to compensate for the collapse in areas accessed earlier, hence leading to a gradual decline of global landing. These trends affect developing coun- tries more than the developed world, which have been able to meet the shortfall by increasing imports from developing countries. These trends, however, together with the rapid growth of farming of carnivorous fishes, which consumes other fishes suited for human consumption, have led to serious food security issues. This promotes urgency to the implementation of the remedies traditionally proposed to alleviate overfishing (reduction of overcapacity, enforcement of conservative total allowable catches, etc.), and to the implemen- tation of non-conventional approaches, notably the re-establishment of the refuges (also known as marine reserves), which made possible the apparent sustainability of pre-industrial fisheries. Keywords: overfishing overcapacity trophic levels food web 1. INTRODUCTION Many lay people believe that widespread ���pollution��� endan- gers ocean life, perhaps a lingering impact of books such as ���The sea around us��� (Carson 1951), and the pronounce- ments of Jacques Cousteau. Fisheries, by contrast, have long been seen as benign, and their growth not related to the decline of their target species, which is usually attrib- uted to ���environmental change��� or some form of ���pol- lution���. Why is it that commercial fishing, which, after all, is devoted to killing fishes and removing them from their habitat so we can eat them, has so generally been perceived as having little, if any, impact on the populations that were being fished? We suspect that this has to do with notions from another age, when fishing was indeed a matter of wrestling one���s sustenance from a foreign, hostile sea, and from tiny boats, close to one���s village, using equipment barely capable of making a dent in the huge populations of fish known to inhabit the ocean���s unfathomable depths (Pauly & Maclean 2003). This perception is still present, and it is time to realize how ill conceived it is. One of the effects of the perception of fisheries as local folklore, featuring self-reliant fishers as stewards of local resources, is that we fail to even see the giant enterprise now feeding the tightly integrated, global market that sup- plies the fish that we order in restaurants or purchase in supermarkets. The problem with this is that the giant enter- prise in question is having so severe an impact on its own resources base that, if present trends continue, it will col- lapse in the next decades, and drag down with it, into obliv- ion, many of the fishes it exploits (Parrish 1995, 1998), together with their supporting ecosystems (Pauly et al. 2003). This is probably one reason why at least one among the major fish distributors in the world, Unilever, partnered a conservation NGO, the WWF, in creating the Marine Stewardship Council, designed to bring market pressure to bear on what is perceived as underperforming management regimes (see contributions in Phillips et al. 2003). Unsustainable fisheries have been with us for a long time. The earliest fishing implements so far identified are sophisticated bone harpoons, recovered from 90 000-year- old old middens by archaeologists working a site in present- day Congo (formerly Zaire). The main species that was targeted is a now-extinct, 2 m long, freshwater catfish most probably the fishers in question moved on to other species (Yellen et al. 1995). This pattern of fisheries exter- minating the population upon which they originally relied, and then moving on to other species, has continued ever since (Cushing 1988 Ludwig et al. 1993 Jackson et al. 2001), with periods of ���sustainability��� occurring as a result of certain species being exploited in only part of their range, Author for correspondence (d.pauly@fisheries.ubc.ca). One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue ���Fisheries: a future?���. 5 # 2005 The Royal Society

owing to equipment or vessel limitations, or subsidies not yet secured (Pauly et al. 2002). 2. WARS OF EXTERMINATION This dynamic obviously mimics the successive wars of extermination humans conducted on land, against large mammals and other animals. The best studied of these was conducted 12 000���13 000 years ago by ���Clovis��� hunters in North America, so named after the site where their fluted arrow points were first found. Contrary to earlier conven- tional wisdom, the Clovis people were not the ���first Americans���, these probably having been coastal people, who may have relied on fishing for their subsistence (Erlandson 2002). The Clovis people, by contrast, were apparently the first to tackle the large mammals of the interior. Archaeology and model studies confirm that their decimation of 30 species of large and slow-reproducing mammals (mastodon, giant ground sloth, giant armadillo, western camels, etc.) proceeded in the form of a giant wave sweeping across North America over a period of 800 to 1600 years (Alroy 2001). Given the difficulty preliterate societies can be expected to have in conveying quantitative information on animal abundance across generations (Pauly 1995), this timespan was sufficient for the Clovis hunters living past the crest of this wave to fail to realize what their ancestors had done and lost (Alroy 2001), a problem still occurring now, in the form of ���shifting base- lines��� (Pauly 1995). Ironically, there are those who, despite the evidence pro- vided by numerous Clovis points embedded in the bones of fossil mammals, still argue that it is ���climate change��� that drove these 30 species to extinction. Here, environmental changes are supposed to have eliminated, in a few cen- turies, species that had endured millions of years of, yes, environmental change, including glaciations that covered the northern part of North America under 2 km of ice. There is good evidence of a similar mammalian heca- tomb 40 000���50 000 years ago in Australia, in this case associated with the very first arrival of Homo sapiens, who exterminated, over a short period, the larger representa- tives of the marsupial fauna that had evolved over millions of years on that continent (Roberts et al. 2001). Our last example is the extermination of the large, ostrich-like moa in what is now New Zealand, by the ances- tors of the present-day Maori, who arrived from Polynesia in the late thirteenth century, and who took only ca. 100 years to exterminate 11 species that had lived in the area for millions of years (Holdaway & Jacomb 2000). In the marine realm, the serial depletions of large coastal animals, documented, for example, in Jackson et al. (2001), accelerated with the development, during the Industrial Revolution, of vessels of unprecedented fishing power, such as stream trawlers. Added to the substantial, pre-existing fishing effort of the rowed and sailed craft that tended to operate inshore, these industrial vessels, target- ing stocks of larger fishes further offshore, quickly reduced populations that had previously been perceived as immune to the effects of fishing (Cushing 1988 Myers et al. 1997). Denial is, however, still rampant, sometimes taking absurd forms, as illustrated here by a representative of the French fishing industry recently asserting, for the demersal resour- ces around France, that ���the stocks are not declining, they are changing location��� (translation of the title of Bigot 2002). 3. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE 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). Unfortu- nately, the opportunity that this offered was lost by most countries. The international race for fish that had char- acterized 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-sanc- tioned, 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 pub- lishing 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 assess- ments 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 increas- ing 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 relation- ship 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 6 D. Pauly and others Global trends in world fisheries Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2005)