Fishing the oceans is a global enterprise that provides humankind with its last significant source of wild food. About 4.6 million fishing vessels ply the oceans, 2.9 million of which are motorized, and close to 40 million people work in the fishing primary sector. The landed value of wild-caught “fish” (finfish and marine invertebrates) is more than US150 billion annually.
Wild-caught fish is a highly sought-after part of the diet of billions of people worldwide. It provides high-quality animal protein and a source of healthy polyunsaturated fats and micronutrients. Since 1961 the annual global growth in fish consumption has been twice as high as population growth. As the human population edges towards 10 billion over the next 30 years, the demand for wild seafood will continue to grow at pace.
It is a moot point if this demand can be met from Anthropocene oceans where a third of all fish stocks are now facing collapse and global catches have been in decline since the mid-1990s. Arresting this decline and rebuilding fish stocks will be imperative if there is to be any hope of wild-caught fish playing a significant role in contributing to global food security and a world without hunger and malnutrition.
Official data on ocean fishing
Complete and accurate statistics on how much fish we take from the oceans are an essential starting point for much needed improvement in global governance and management of wild seafood resources. The preeminent repository for such information is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which maintains a global database of ocean fisheries statistics. These statistics go back to 1950 and are based mainly on official information reported by over 150 maritime member countries and territories. Hence, the quality of the FAO database depends in large measure on the accuracy and reliability of the data collected by these member entities and provided to the FAO. The FAO collates and analyzes these data and produces a major summary report every two years. The latest report was published in May 2020 for the period up to the end of 20181.
This is a hugely important data set that is accessed on the internet more than 1500 times a day and is widely used by regional, national and international agencies, policy makers, fisheries scientists, and scholars to infer the state of ocean fisheries. Clearly, it is vital that these fisheries statistics accurately reflect what is happening in the real world if we want to formulate better policies for governing the world’s ocean fisheries. To what extent is this the case?
A much-followed metric reported by the FAO is the annual total global marine fish catch. FAO reports show that in 1950 this was 18 million metric tonnes live weight. The catch then increased steadily and rapidly until the late 1980s when it began to stagnate and decline. The highest reported global catch on record was 86 million tonnes in 1996. Since then it has fluctuated below this level and the reported catch in 2018 was 84.4 million tonnes.
Limitations of the official database
A limitation of the FAO database is that the official reports provided to the FAO by most member countries provide data on large-scale, industrial fisheries but omit statistics from the other fishing “sectors”. These sectors include discards, often referred to as bycatch, which are catches discarded, usually dead, at sea; catches from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fisheries; and recreational fisheries. Unregulated fisheries include artisanal fisheries, which are smaller-scale commercial fisheries operating mainly in inshore waters; and non-commercial subsistence fisheries, where the catch is largely consumed by the fishers and their families. Furthermore, a significant proportion of countries, around 29% in 2018, do not report any fisheries data to the FAO, which then has to fill in the gaps with estimates, which would not generally include the non-industrial fisheries sectors, for which data are hard to come by or estimate. Thus, the data reported by the FAO underestimate the actual global marine fish catch. Many fisheries scientists are aware of this issue and the FAO acknowledges it and is working to address it, but it was not until a paper by Pauly and Zeller2 , published in 2016 as part of the Sea Around Us project (http://www.seaaroundus.org/), revealed the magnitude of this underestimation.
Reconstructing ocean fish catches
Pauly and Zeller reported catch data over the period 1950 to 2010 that combined the official data reported to the FAO with “reconstructed” estimates of the size of catches from the various fishing sectors that were not comprehensively reported to the FAO during that period. It took them more than a decade of detailed work in association with a global network of local, multilingual collaborators to assemble the information, which covered fisheries in the Exclusive Economic Zones of the world’s maritime countries, plus the catches of tuna and other large pelagic fish in the High Seas. They obtained their data from a broad range of sources, including government websites and publications, regional fisheries management organizations, colonial archives, and searches of the academic literature facilitated by Google Scholar. Data were collected from many language sources, not just English. Since the publication of their 2016 paper, the Sea Around Us project has continued to reconstruct catch data and combine it with the FAO data. The results up to 2014 are presented in an interactive format on the project’s website (http://www.seaaroundus.org/).
The work of Sea Around Us reveals that global marine fish catches have been much higher than officially reported throughout 1950 to 2014 (Figure 1). It shows that catches were overall 53% higher than the FAO reported data, and the global catch at its peak in 1996 was about 126 million tonnes, about 46% higher than the 86 million tonnes reported. Sea Around Us data also suggest that catches have declined from their peak faster than reported, to about 109 million tonnes in 2014, as opposed to the 79.9 million tonnes reported by the FAO for that year. Figure 1 also shows the relative contributions from the industrial, artisanal, subsistence and recreational fishing sectors to the total global catch. Note that much of the decline in the global catch since 1996 is driven by decreasing industrial catches, despite increasing fishing effort within this sector.
Show larger graphic for Figure 1 – Global marine fish catches 1950 to 2014 showing relative contributions from the industrial, artisanal, subsistence and recreational fishing sectors
Figure 2 presents the same overall data as in Figure 1 but shows the relative contributions of landed fish and bycatch discarded at sea. In 2014, about 8% of all fish caught were discarded.
Show larger graphic for Figure 2 – Global marine fish catches 1950 to 2014 showing relative contributions of landed fish and bycatch discarded at sea.
What the Sea Around Us project and other related studies reveal is that humankind, the apex marine predator in Anthropocene oceans, has been taking considerably more fish from the oceans than officially reported for at least 70 years. Also, the decline in fish catch that has been taking place since 1996 has started from a higher peak than reported, so humankind has more to lose in terms of the amount of wild-caught food obtained from the oceans if this decline continues. On the upside, humankind has more to gain than expected by rebuilding ocean fish stocks.
Improving the ocean fisheries database
So, what needs to be done to improve the overall quality of the global ocean fisheries database? The obvious place to start is to ensure that all member countries have the commitment and ability to submit accurate and comprehensive marine fisheries statistics to the FAO that include all fishing sectors, not just the landed industrial catches. Unfortunately, the relevant departments in many countries have limited human and financial resources and will need assistance to improve their data collection and reporting systems. One way to achieve this would be for wealthier member countries to provide the FAO with funds to better assist poorer members to upgrade their systems. Also, fisheries departments in wealthier countries could partner with poorer countries in their regions to share data collection and reporting systems as part of their foreign aid budget.
If steps such as these are implemented decisively then official reporting of global ocean fish catches will become much more representative of real-world catches. This will help the global community make better informed decisions around the governance of the world’s ocean fisheries. This is vital if we are to launch a major programme of ocean fish stock rebuilding to ensure future generations have access to a supply of healthy wild caught food and to help protect future global food supply and security.
References
1 FAO. 2020. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020. Sustainability in action. Rome.
https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9229en. A readily accessible summary of the major points in this report is available on the FAO website (http://www.fao.org/state-of-fisheries-aquaculture/en/)
2 Pauly, D. & Zeller, D. Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining. Nat. Commun. 7:10244 doi: 10.1038/ncomms10244 (2016)
3 See for instance: Watson, R. A. & Tidd, A. Mapping nearly a century and a half of global marine fishing: 1869-2015. Marine Policy 93 (2018), 271-177 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2018.04.023
