Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and China have aggressively subsidized vessel and fuel costs to encourage their fleets to operate thousands of kilometers from their home ports.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/08/10
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons
- According to a recent study in the journal Science Advances, the average distance industrial fishing fleets travel from their home ports to fishing grounds is twice what it was in the 1950s, expanding the total area of the world’s oceans that are fished from 60 to 90 percent.
- Despite ranging farther afield and fishing in new waters, however, the fleets of the top 20 fishing countries — collectively responsible for 80 percent of the global industrial fishing catch — are hauling in far smaller amounts of fish.
- Today, about 7 metric tons of fish are caught per 1,000 kilometers (about 621 miles) traveled by those 20 countries’ fleets, less than a third of the more than 25 metric tons they caught per 1,000 kilometers traveled in the 1950s.
Industrial fishing fleets are traveling ever-farther across the globe in pursuit of a dwindling haul of fish, a new study finds.
Researchers with Sea Around Us, a research initiative spearheaded by the University of Western Australia (UWA) and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, produced high-resolution maps of fish catches between 1950 and 2014 in order to examine the geographic expansion of industrial fishing. Their results were detailed in the journal Science Advances last week.
According to the study, the average distance industrial fishing fleets travel from their home ports to fishing grounds is twice what it was in the 1950s, expanding the total area of the world’s oceans that are fished from 60 to 90 percent.
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