Fisheries production potential of the oceans has been fully exploited, leaving little scope for increasing marine catches any further. The growth in fisheries output in future will come largely from aquaculture (fish rearing).
This will have significant implications on livelihood of fishing communities as well as on the nutrition pattern of people, especially those living in small island nations, which depend on marine produce for both livelihood and food.
This has been indicated in the latest edition of the ‘State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture’ released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome last week.
The report points to over-exploitation of marine fisheries resources in several regions, jeopardising sustainability of capture fisheries. More than half (52 per cent) of the wild fish stocks are fully exploited and are producing fish catches that are close to their maximum sustainable limits.
“Nearly 19 per cent of the major commercial marine fish stocks monitored by the FAO are overexploited, 8 per cent are depleted and 1 per cent is ranked as recovering from depletion,” said the report.
Areas with the highest proportions of fully-exploited stocks are the Western Indian Ocean, the Northeast Atlantic and the Northwest Pacific.
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The report attributes this to over capacity in the capture fishing sector due to deployment of too many fishing boats and highly effective fishing technologies, besides illegal fishing. There are around 2.1 million motorised fishing fleet in the world. Of them, some 23,000 are large-tonnage industrialised vessels.
These operators, many of whose nationality are ‘unknown’, are believed to be indulging in fish poaching and illegal fishing.
“This ‘unknown’ category has expanded in recent years in spite of global efforts to eliminate illegal fishing,” the report maintains.
It also states that the climate change has already begun to modify the distribution of both marine and freshwater fish species. This may adversely affect the availability of fish in the regions inhabited by the traditional fishing communities.
“Urgent efforts are needed to help fisheries and aquaculture dependent communities to strengthen their resilience to climate change, especially those most vulnerable,” the report commends.
An estimated 43.5 million people in the world are directly involved, either full or part time, in fisheries and aquaculture. Nearly 86 per cent of them live in Asia. An additional 4 million are engaged in this sector on an occasional basis. Factoring in employment in fish processing, marketing and service industries and including the families of all these people, over half a million people depend on this sector.
In terms of nutrition, fish provides more than 2.9 billion people with at least 15 per cent of their average per capita animal protein intake. It contributes at least 50 per cent of total animal protein intake in many small developing island states.
The report points out that rearing of fish has been growing fast, registering the highest growth rate in the animal food producing sector in recent years.
In India, too, the aquaculture sector has been growing faster than the marine sector where the production has, in fact, tended to stagnate for past many years. The agriculture ministry’s estimates show that while the output of marine fisheries has been more or less static at around 2.85 million tonnes since 1999-2000, that of inland fisheries has swelled from 2.8 million tonnes to 3.8 million tonnes during the same period.
Globally, the aquaculture sector now accounts for 47 per cent of all the fish consumed in the world. This level is poised to rise to 50 per cent in near future, the FAO report indicates.