Swimming with Tuna: Human-Ocean Entanglements

Abstract

According to Greenpeace,8 by the end of the 1970s 'overfishing had depleted the stocks to 2.5% of the original population'. According to World Fishing & Aquaculture, a UK based site for commercial fishing, OPRT has managed to bring on board 90% of the world's large scale tuna long liners over 24 metres in length in 12 countries. Over the last two decades there has been a seismic shiftfrom fishing to farming, and while the basis for farming does sound strange-feed one fish to another-is it less disgusting and less devastating than feeding one animal to another, which has led to spectacular diseases in humans and animals, such as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or 'Mad Cow' disease? Suffice to say that there are heated arguments on both sides, and also that aquaculture covers an immense variety of practices, and also spans history: small scale pond aquaculture has been used in Asia for millennia and in the work, for instance, of the WorldFish Centre headquartered in Malaysia, continues to promote aquaculture as the best means to feed the poor in developing countries, see http://www.worldfishcenter.org/wfcms/HQ/article.aspx?ID=827.