February 11, 2009 5:21 PM
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Europe Losing Battle To Save Its Fish
The catch of the day brings up a squirming pandemonium of creatures from the deep: sea bream and red snapper, miniature lobsters, an electric ray packing 150 volts, a baby octopus watching with one unblinking eye.
But skipper Mariano Lopez, gazing at this mound of exuberance on his trawler's deck, is disappointed. Like many patches of the Mediterranean, this overworked fishing ground is not yielding the bounty it once did.
"There should be twice as much," Lopez says, shaking his head.
Fishermen were long seen as Europe's last true hunters, but the romance that comes with the struggle against nature has dwindled as fast as the once-bountiful fish. The European Union has desperately implemented fishing curbs and other measures to keep Mediterranean and Atlantic waters alive — policies fishermen complain are destroying their traditions and livelihoods.
But Europe's campaign to save fishing stocks could be a losing battle.
North Sea stocks of cod, the emblematic fish in the Atlantic, have dropped by three quarters in 30 years, according to EU figures, and special EU campaigns to revive the species over the past three years have failed. Bluefin tuna, once the pride of the Mediterranean, has seen stocks drop by 80 percent over the same time.
The situation is no different in the rest of the world. The journal Science warned recently that already 29 percent of seafood species had collapsed — meaning stocks were down 90 percent or more from peak levels — and all commercial species would follow suit by 2048 if current trends continue.
European fishery's precipitous decline has created a bitter cycle of recrimination.
The fishermen are angry at the bureaucrats and environmentalists. EU bureaucrats point the finger at fishermen. Environmentalists criticize both fishermen and bureaucrats.
"Now they look at us like criminals. ... They want to massacre us," said 56-year-old fisherman Jean-Marie Wacogne, some 1,350 miles to the north of Adra in Boulogne, France's biggest fishing port.
But at the Nausicaa national sea center just across from Boulogne's port, marine biologist Philippe Vallette says fishermen like Wacogne — a grizzled veteran with a crooked walk that attests to more than four decades at sea — are simply not in tune with reality.
With swift moves, he turned the statistics into a graph on a blackboard, with the lines inevitably gravitating downward. "This is something the fishermen do not want to see," Nausicaa's general director said.
Vallette's demonstration drew parallels between the current state of Europe's cod stocks to what happened off Canada's Newfoundland over the past two decades.
The Grand Banks off Newfoundland had been plentiful since fishermen first set sail there looking for the staple which has fed millions in Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. In the 1980s, Canadian fishermen scoffed at scientific warnings that stocks were diminishing even though they could see for themselves that the fish were getting smaller — a key indicator of overfishing.
"All of a sudden they had to say: 'Oh no, there are none left,"' said Vallette.
© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. But skipper Mariano Lopez, gazing at this mound of exuberance on his trawler's deck, is disappointed. Like many patches of the Mediterranean, this overworked fishing ground is not yielding the bounty it once did.
"There should be twice as much," Lopez says, shaking his head.
Fishermen were long seen as Europe's last true hunters, but the romance that comes with the struggle against nature has dwindled as fast as the once-bountiful fish. The European Union has desperately implemented fishing curbs and other measures to keep Mediterranean and Atlantic waters alive — policies fishermen complain are destroying their traditions and livelihoods.
But Europe's campaign to save fishing stocks could be a losing battle.
North Sea stocks of cod, the emblematic fish in the Atlantic, have dropped by three quarters in 30 years, according to EU figures, and special EU campaigns to revive the species over the past three years have failed. Bluefin tuna, once the pride of the Mediterranean, has seen stocks drop by 80 percent over the same time.
The situation is no different in the rest of the world. The journal Science warned recently that already 29 percent of seafood species had collapsed — meaning stocks were down 90 percent or more from peak levels — and all commercial species would follow suit by 2048 if current trends continue.
European fishery's precipitous decline has created a bitter cycle of recrimination.
The fishermen are angry at the bureaucrats and environmentalists. EU bureaucrats point the finger at fishermen. Environmentalists criticize both fishermen and bureaucrats.
"Now they look at us like criminals. ... They want to massacre us," said 56-year-old fisherman Jean-Marie Wacogne, some 1,350 miles to the north of Adra in Boulogne, France's biggest fishing port.
But at the Nausicaa national sea center just across from Boulogne's port, marine biologist Philippe Vallette says fishermen like Wacogne — a grizzled veteran with a crooked walk that attests to more than four decades at sea — are simply not in tune with reality.
With swift moves, he turned the statistics into a graph on a blackboard, with the lines inevitably gravitating downward. "This is something the fishermen do not want to see," Nausicaa's general director said.
Vallette's demonstration drew parallels between the current state of Europe's cod stocks to what happened off Canada's Newfoundland over the past two decades.
The Grand Banks off Newfoundland had been plentiful since fishermen first set sail there looking for the staple which has fed millions in Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. In the 1980s, Canadian fishermen scoffed at scientific warnings that stocks were diminishing even though they could see for themselves that the fish were getting smaller — a key indicator of overfishing.
"All of a sudden they had to say: 'Oh no, there are none left,"' said Vallette.
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