World Fisheries Resources

James R. Coull

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415075787
• eBook ISBN: 9781134903665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

World Fisheries Resources provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of how this commodity is used. The author examines the various aspects of fishing resources from their biological basis through to marketing and consumption. The subject is set in context by tracing the historical development, from its archaeological origins to the industrial expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries. The work comes up-to-date to discuss the modern situation and current trends in both the developed and developing worlds and highlights how exploitation of the resource has increased in recent years.

1
INTRODUCTION

Modern global society has become increasingly aware of the dimensions of the stock of resources available to it, and of the various limits and constraints to their use. This is an obvious and understandable reaction of a still rapidly increasing population on a finite planet in circumstances where there are still many millions undersupplied with food and other essential materials and services. It is also enhanced by our modern situation of instantaneous communication within the ‘world village’, and by the accepted goal and orthodoxy of continued economic growth. However, at the same time there is mounting concern about environmental deterioration and environmental damage, as demands continue to increase not only on the earth’s resources but also on its various circulation systems.

While most of the resources required to satisfy the demands of the earth’s expanding population are of course land based, a significant number of them are water based; and it has become increasingly realised that the health of the planet, its plant and animal communities and its human populations depend on keeping in good order the hydrosphere (or water environment) as well as the land and the atmosphere. It has also become increasingly evident that there are important long-term issues involved, which entail that future centuries as well as the immediate future must be considered.

For the great part of history fish has been the most important resource that water has yielded for human society. Like other organic resources it is in principle self-sustaining or self-renewing, although its ability to be so in the modern period has been increasingly influenced by the demands human society makes upon it. Fishing has long been a distinctive occupation, and makes a contribution to the food supply of every country. Although in general limited in their importance for the food supply and for their contribution to employment, GNP and national trade balances, fisheries have in the modern period become better understood through the studies of a range of academic disciplines. These include marine biology, history, economics, sociology, law, politics and geography. Marine biology must be considered to have been first in the field in systematically clarifying issues relating to fisheries, and has made important advances from the late ninteenth century. Other disciplines have come into the field later, mainly in the second half of the twentieth century. While there is a longstanding measure of historical interest in fishing and fishing communities, much of this has been of a somewhat popular kind until relatively recent times.

Factors of marine biology essentially determine both the size of the resource and the speed with which it renews itself. In the study of fish as a resource, considerations of marine biology interact primarily with those of economics, which determine the cost of operating a fishery and whether it can be conducted profitably. The present writer approaches the study of fisheries from his professional viewpoint in the discipline of geography and also from the viewpoint of his family roots in a Scottish fishing community. The interests of geography overlap and interact with those of marine biology and economics as well as with those of a range of other disciplines. With marine biology, geography shares an interest in the environmental factors and effects which influence the character and dimensions of fish stocks and their exploitation. Geography covers issues of location and the spatial pattern of fishing grounds, ports and markets; and it also deals with the costs of operating on different grounds and with the costs of marketing and distribution to consumers in different locations; in such matters it has a broad overlap with economics. It has also a common interest with economics in issues of regional economics, and regions with a prominent fishing interest are not infrequently problem regions in the modern world. In addition the basic revision in the International Law of the Sea since the 1970s has involved an extension and redrawing of national fishing limits on the map, and has produced a situation in which the field of geography interacts with those of politics and law. The distinctive character of fishing communities in many parts of the world has also rendered them an attractive field of study for sociologists and social anthropologists. Even now fishing communities can be largely socially separate from their near neighbours in developed countries, and comparable separation has been widely noted in the Third World (Moerman 1984:52-4).

How far fish have been utilised as a resource in various parts of the world has been related to cultural appraisals. It is characteristic that in tribal cultures, fish (like other living things) have been seen as subject to supernatural control, and fishing has been associated with much ritual. In aboriginal North America, fish characteristically had a lord or guardian spirit who protected them or provided good luck in fishing and had to be propitiated (Hultkrantz 1984:865-72). In Hindu mythology fish from the sea and from big rivers with strong currents were ritually pure and given according preference (Sarkar 1984:710). On the other hand when Buddhism and Jainism arose in India they were opposed to destroying animal life in any way, and peoples and groups eating fish were looked down on, while even in Hindu society they were relegated to lower castes (Sarkar 1984:707). At a less formal level there are frequently preferred or prized fish species in different communities and societies, while other species may show a degree of abundance and yet be little used if at all.

Organised information relating to fisheries varies widely in amount, type and quality over the globe. At the largest scale the material and data which have been collected since the Second World War under United Nations auspices by FAO have over time become increasingly comprehensive and give in general a good basis for comparison. A main source is the annualYearbook of Fisheries Statistics, and FAO have also issued many special publications. In addition to giving data at the world and national levels, the yearbooks have data at the level of continents and of ocean divisions, and also allow the tracing of many trends over time. In general the data are more complete for tonnages than for values. They are also in general more complete for developed than for Third World countries, reflecting more sophisticated systems of data compilation. The FAO yearbooks concentrate very much on the production and trade in fish and fish products. For information on such essential matters as numbers of boats and fishermen it is generally necessary to consult other sources: these are generally at the national level and often lack a common basis for comparison, although in the Economic Community now there is an increasing body of internationally comparable data. There are a number of other supranational bodies involved in research, monitoring and data compilation: these include such organisations as the OECD, which regularly reports on the fisheries situation for developed countries; they also include a series of bodies which co-ordinate work in marine biology such as theInternational Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), which co-ordinates scientific research and monitoring for the north-east Atlantic. At the national level information and data are generally best for developed countries for which fishing is economically important; and the most complete and longest running data are generally for fish landings. Some West European countries which industrialised early, such as Britain and Norway, have coordinated data over periods of a century or more. However, the general decline in importance of fishing in developed economies has also been accompanied by cuts in the expenditure devoted to data compilation along with changes in its content. While a country like Iceland continues to compile very detailed data, the annual fisheries statistics published in countries like Britain and Denmark have been considerably curtailed compared with earlier in the century. Publications now tend to give considerably less areal data on such matters as landings and numbers of boats and fishermen, but give more attention to matters of environmental concern and to marketing.

Like all living resources, fish have a biological ceiling on yield. Also the ecological efficiency of fisheries is relatively low in that the fish are characteristically several steps along the food chain from the primary production in the plankton. In addition, fishing is still largely dependent on hunting and trapping techniques operating in little modified natural ecosystems. Yet a sophisticated modern armoury of equipment and techniques is now available for locating and catching fish: while these render fishing actually and potentially much more productive, they have also rendered more obvious the fragility of the resource base and the danger of damaging it by over-fishing. This has rendered resource conservation programmes necessary on a scale never seen before. Arguably this renders the study of fishery resources more important than their limited economic importance would indicate, as few of the world’s resources are now exploited so near to the global limit. As the limit in yield has been increasingly closely approached in recent decades, a situation has developed in which fish have acquired a degree of importance beyond that which would be justified by their importance to fishing communities and fish consumers in different countries, and which has given them a notable measure of importance in national and international politics. There have been far-reaching adjustments in organisation in fisheries, not a few of which have been painful to the fisheries’ interests involved. With a limited resource, rights of access to it along with conservation measures to maintain it have become issues on a rangeof scales from the local to the international. Related to this has been the development of hierarchical systems of decision making, which involve such groups as fishermen and merchants at the basic level but which embrace all levels of administration and government up to the international and the global levels. This has led both to enhanced public awareness and to greater political prominence.

While various institutional and legal restrictions are of long standing in small-scale fisheries, especially in inland waters, opensea fishing is an activity which has enjoyed essential freedom of operation until the recent past. Fish on the high seas were recognised as a resource which was common property and subject to unrestricted open entry; and from the economic viewpoint these characteristics have been sources of weakness. One very important consequence is that there has often been a lack or deficiency of restraints and discipline when the resource has come under pressure in modern times: institutional measures to contain or prevent over-fishing have been inadequate.

It is only to a restricted degree that this modern problem has itself stimulated the development of husbandry methods of resource production in fish farming, with its general high overhead costs. The main reaction has been embodied in the revised regime of the International Law of the Sea, in which the general extension of national fishing limits to 200 miles has closed off the bulk of the world’s fishing grounds and extended national property rights over most of the fish stocks.

REFERENCES

Hultkrantz, A. (1984) ‘Supernatural Beings of Fish and Fishing in Aboriginal North America’, in Gunda, B. (ed.)The Fishing Culture of the World. Studies in Ethnology, Cultural Ecology and Folklore, Vol. II, Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, 865-85.

Moerman, D.E. (1984) ‘Common Property and the Common Good: Ecological Factors among Peasant and Tribal Fishermen’, in Gunda, B. (ed.)The Fishing Culture of the World. Studies in Ethnology, Cultural Ecology and Folklore, Vol.1, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 49-59.

Sarkar, S.R. (1984) ‘Significance of Fish in Bengalee Hindu Folk Culture’, in Gunda, B. (ed.)The Fishing Culture of the World. Studies in Ethnology, Cultural Ecology and Folklore, Vol.II, Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, 705-25.

2
BIOLOGICAL BASIS

Fish stocks constitute a group of self-renewing resources, and their distribution and abundance are governed by a series of environmental factors. Although the ecosystems of the sea are inevitably less well known than those of the land, marine biology has been established as a branch of science in its own right since the late nineteenth century, starting with the work of such pioneers as Frank Buckland in the UK and Einar Lea in Norway. It is also the case that the marine environment was the subject of one of the early examples of international cooperation in science with the founding of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in 1902 by a group of European nations around the North Sea. Although the seas occupy about 70 per cent of the surface area of the globe, only a small percentage (3 per cent—4 per cent) of the total organic production of the planet used by mankind comes from water bodies. In the oceans the production is remarkably concentrated in the relatively small parts of them that consist of continental shelves and deep upwelling areas. However, the yield from water is important to most human societies, and for some it is vital. The lesser variety of organic species in water than on land is due to the fact that water is a more uniform environmental medium than land. Life began in the sea and consequently the sea has a more complete representation of the major plant and animal families (phyla and genera) than the land.

While in the modern period there have been great developments in the science of marine biology, it is clear that in many sectors knowledge and understanding is much less than complete. This is particularly the case for the tropical world, which lacks adequate biological models for stock assessment and even adequate methods for estimating the parameters for the models which are available (Larkin 1982:3).

PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY

Of the big range of factors governing the distribution and abundance of resources in salt and fresh water, of fundamental importance is the rate of primary production, whereby the vegetable (phyto) plankton take in carbon dioxide in the course of the process of photosynthesis: this is the beginning of the marine food chain. Also of great importance is the structure of the food chains as there is a heavy loss in weight between the different trophic levels as primary production is effectively converted into fish.

In general terms, the level of primary production in water is considerably inferior to that on land. Primary productivity is usually measured by net rates of fixation of carbon during photosynthesis: information on this is still very partial for most of the oceans but the global average for the seas has been computed at approximately 60 g/ m² per year, as against 300 g/m² per year for the land (Tett 1977:18). While the marine environment is thus at a big disadvantage compared with the land in primary productivity, this is partly compensated by more rapid nutrient recycling.

Behind these global averages there are wide differences between different parts of the ocean. On land the areas of highest productivity are as a general rule the warmest, although in the hot deserts levels are low because of low levels of moisture. High temperatures also promote high productivity in water, but here the main other factor governing productivity is nutrient availability, and in particular the presence in adequate concentration of the key nutrients of nitrates and phosphates. In most of the tropical oceans, intense heating of the surface layers has a warming effect which makes them less dense and results in them being separated from the cold deep water by a permanent thermocline. The consequence of this is that key nutrients cannot be renewed from below, and nutrient exchanges are limited to an internal circulation in the surface layers. As a result most of the tropical oceans are marine deserts in which the rate of carbon fixation can be as low as 10 mg/m² per day. This negative effect is at its greatest in the ‘Horse Latitudes’, which correspond to the same latitudes as the hot deserts and are under the atmospheric subtropical high pressure cells where there is little wind which could help to promote some mixing in depth to give some nutrient renewal. Around the equator itself the trade winds are associated with the equatorial and counter-equatorial currents. Here there is sufficient renewal from below, especially at divergences between the currents,to give levels of carbon fixation of over 100 mg/m² per day; and in the equatorial Atlantic and the eastern part of south-east Asia this effect can be further enhanced by strong ocean bottom topography, and levels of carbon fixation can reach mean values of over 250 mg/ m² per day. This illustrates the fact that the most productive waters are found where there are mechanisms in the warmer oceans which allow renewal of nutrients from below. This effect is at its maximum on the west side of South America and off south-west Africa, where there is an offshore movement of water as part of the main oceanic circulation and this results in a strong upwelling of deep water against the continental blocks and provides a rich supply of key nutrients. Similar though less-pronounced effects are seen elsewhere in the warm oceans and deep upwelling also occurs off north-west Africa, western Australia, the coast of California and western Mexico. Deep upwelling also occurs seasonally in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, as a result of the monsoons influencing the marine circulation (Chaussade and Corlay 1990:236-7). Carbon fixation rates of 15,000 mg/m² per day have been observed off south-west Africa in the Benguela Current (FAO 1971:153) and this corresponds to an annual rate of about 500 g per year. Off Peru peak levels of over 10,000 mg/ m² per day have been recorded (Paulik 1971:165), and annual levels are thought to be of the same order of magnitude as in the Benguela Current.

In the temperate and subpolar oceans average primary productivity is generally fairly high as there is a limited temperature gradient between the surface and deeper layers and also a high frequency of winds. As a result renewal of key nutrients from below is generally little impeded for much of the year, although there is a marked seasonal variation in production with a summer maximum. A thermocline develops in summer over considerable areas in temperate latitudes through the seasonal warming, and is a regular characteristic in the waters around the British Isles. In such circumstances the annual peak of production often occurs with an outburst of planktonic activity in spring. The most productive areas in high latitudes, such as the seas around Iceland and Kamchatka, have average annual levels of carbon fixation of over 200 g/m², and nearly all of both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific have levels of over 100 mg/m². Where oceanic circulation is particularly vigorous levels of productivity in the temperate oceans can also be spectacular, and this is probably best exemplified in the zones of mixing of warm and cold currents off Newfoundland in the Atlanticand off Hokkaido in the Pacific; in the latter case local levels of 5,000 mg/m² per day have been observed (FAO 1971:47). The Southern Oceans are much more poorly recorded but primary production is known to be restricted by the extent of ice cover and long winters, despite the vigorous water circulation induced by frequent gales: average production is thought to be between 50 and 100 g/m² per year. (FAO 1971:163).

FOOD CHAINS

While primary production is of basic importance for all life in the sea, it provides little of direct use to mankind as actual resources, except in the case of seaweeds which are considered in chapter 9. The material produced by primary production has to pass along the food chain through at least one, and more usually two or three, trophic levels before it can be harvested as useful fish. During this process the synthesis of amino-acids and protein takes place. Since the general...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• PLATES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: BIOLOGICAL BASIS
• 3: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
• 4: ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS
• 5: SPATIAL ORGANISATION
• 6: TRENDS IN PRODUCTION IN OCEANS, CONTINENTS AND COUNTRIES
• 7: RECREATIONAL FISHING
• 8: FISHERIES MANAGEMENT
• 9: AQUACULTURE
• 10: FISH LANDINGS, FIRST SALES AND PROCESSING
• 11: MARKETING AND CONSUMPTION OF FISH AND FISH COMMODITIES
• 12: CONCLUSION
• ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY