Depleted fisheries sound alarm for Earth Summit

11.45am

JOHANNESBURG - A global agreement to salvage the world's depleted fisheries could be one of the main achievements of the Earth Summit, but environmentalists fear it could be a classic case of too little too late.

Environmentalists say the sorry state of the world's fish stocks should be a wake-up call to governments to heed warnings about global warming and other ecological concerns and act before further serious damage is done.

"We only react when it is too late, on this and other environmental issues," Yolanda Kakabadse, president of the World Conservation Union, told Reuters.

The 10-day World Summit on Sustainable Development opens in Johannesburg today.

Talks ahead of the summit resumed yesterday in the tightly guarded Sandton conference centre where rich and poor nations are trying to agree on a blueprint to safeguard the planet.

Despite pessimism about big breakthroughs after preparatory talks in Bali ended in deadlock, one key agreement in the draft action plan is a pledge to eliminate subsidies that contribute to overcapacity in the fishing industry.

"Overcapacity means that you have too many ships on the sea chasing too few fish and when this happens people are bound to bend the rules and harvest illegally," said Gordon Shepard, director of international policy for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

He estimated the number of commercial boats on the water was 2.5 times the maximum that could be allowed for sustainable fishing.

Fish stocks around the world are in decline, underscored by the dramatic collapse of the once abundant cod fishery off eastern Canada, where 16th century explorers claimed they could throw baskets overboard and haul them up laden with fish.

More than 70 per cent of the world's commercially important fish stocks are either over-exploited, depleted, slowly recovering or close to the maximum sustainable level of exploitation, according to the United Nations.

UN statistics show that consumption of fish worldwide has increased by 240 per cent since 1960.

"Governments blatantly ignored the scientific evidence that had been in front of them regarding falling fish stocks and it looks like they are making the same mistake regarding climate change and other issues," said WWF's Shepard.

Climate change has also had an impact on fish stocks. Many scientists say that greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels are linked to rising global temperatures. Warmer seas have damaged coral reefs that are vital habitats for tropical fish.

The world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases, the United States, has pulled out of the Kyoto agreement on reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Some environmentalists say scrapping subsidies that encourage overfishing may not be enough to save some fish stocks.

"The cod fishery off east Canada is finished and probably won't come back. Often when you remove one species from an ecosystem another rushes in to fill the void, preventing any recovery," said Helene Bours, a fisheries expert with Greenpeace.

- REUTERS

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