World fish stocks declining faster than feared

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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/73d14032-088e-11e2-b37e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz27sQ0GpVX

"By Denise Roland
Fish stocks across the world are declining faster than feared, with the smallest fisheries faring worst, a comprehensive study shows – but there is still time to turn the situation around.
More than half of fisheries worldwide face shrinking stocks, with most of these in worse condition than previously thought, leading to yearly economic losses of $50bn.

This more worrying picture emerged from the most wide-ranging and detailed analysis to date, led by scientists at the University of California Santa Barbara and published online by the journal Science. It applied stock patterns from the few hundred big fisheries for which abundant data are available to analyse thousands of fisheries which have never been formally assessed and about which much less is known.
Prior studies produced skewed results by omitting these ‘data-poor’ or ‘unassessed’ fisheries – which account for 80 per cent of the global catch – and only focusing on the few hundred largest, ‘data-rich’ stocks.

These earlier investigations tended to overestimate the global fish population since the most severe decline is found at smaller fisheries, where management is generally less scrupulous.

The latest study showed that data-poor fisheries operate with an average of 64 per cent of the fish required to yield the largest sustainable catch, much less than data-rich fisheries where the average fish population was 94 per cent of this optimum."


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