Feasting on Ecocide!

Over the past decade, countries across the world have been discussing the profound damage that has been occurring through deep-sea fishing. The Pew Environmental Group has been tracking the situation:

Since 2004, the international community, through the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly, has called on fishing countries and regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) to urgently act to protect deep-sea life. Beginning in 2006, U.N. resolutions that outlined a plan to safeguard this fragile biodiversity passed. Many governments supported an outright moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling, but countries operating deep-sea vessels instead promised to take action to make fisheries more sustainable and protect vulnerable marine ecosystems. Ultimately, they agreed to conduct a formal assessment after a few years to determine how well the resolutions had been implemented.

Preliminary findings released in June 2011 by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), "highlight serious failures by countries and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) in efforts to protect vulnerable deep-sea biodiversity and high seas fish species."

Research conducted by scientists and published in the journal Marine Policy are recommending a complete halt to all deep sea fishing.  Instead of permitting industrial fleets from disrupting these extremely delicate aquatic ecosystems, scientists are further recommending that fishing be confined to more productive coastal fisheries nearer to consumers.

The following summary from Eurekalert outlines the problem:

Life is mostly sparse in the oceans' cold depths, far from the sunlight that fuels photosynthesis. Food is scarce and life processes happen at a slower pace than near the sea surface. Some deep-sea fishes live more than a century; some deep-sea corals can live more than 4,000 years. When bottom trawlers rip life from the depths, animals adapted to life in deep-sea time can't repopulate on human time scales. Powerful fishing technologies are overwhelming them. 

"The deep sea is the world's worst place to catch fish" says marine ecologist Dr. Elliott Norse, the study's lead author and President of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Washington USA. "Deep-sea fishes are especially vulnerable because they can't repopulate quickly after being overfished." 

The deep sea provides less than 1% of the world's seafood. But fishing there, especially bottom trawling, causes profound, lasting damage to fishes and life on the seafloor, such as deep-sea corals, these experts say. 

Since the 1970s, when coastal fisheries were overexploited, commercial fishing fleets have moved further offshore and into deeper waters. Some now fish more than a mile deep. 

"Because these fish grow slowly and live a long time, they can only sustain a very low rate of fishing," says author Dr. Selina Heppell, a marine fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University. "On the high seas, it is impossible to control or even monitor the amount of fishing that is occurring. The effects on local populations can be devastating."

The Washington Post has a good article discussing the topic and revealing the moral cowardice of the Europeans in reigning in their colleagues in Portugal, Spain, France, and Denmark from destroying these ecosystems.