A-Infos (en) France, Alternative Libertair #222 - Biodiversity: The damage of industrial fishing (fr) [machine translation]

The huge factory vessels and freezer tuna fish are able to transform and in a few days 
that fleets of thousands of artisanal boats could make in a year. They are a major cause 
of destruction of marine ecosystems and help prepare the food crisis by destroying 
biodiversity. ---- Industrial fishing has increased the market for seafood from a few 
million tonnes in the early twentieth century, it had reached 70 million in 1970 and $ 145 
million today. States, governments, shipowners have behaved as if the marine resources 
were inexhaustible. Today, according to the FAO - UN organization for food and agriculture 
- 8% of the fish species sought are exhausted, 17% are overexploited, 52% are exploited to 
their maximum. Fish caught are less fat and more young people. "At least three quarters of 
the main fishing areas of the world" are or will soon be affected by overfishing.

Not content to exhaust the resources of the sea, the fishing industry [ 1 ] is the subject 
of enormous waste. About 30 million tonnes, nearly 30% of everything that is caught is 
death rejected overboard as non-compliant.

Hardship increased labor
In addition, trawling nets do not detail the seabed and buy up all forms of life. The huge 
metal rollers for hauling nets each year affect an area of ââseabed twice that of the 
United States! And another thirty million tons of fish caught are to be transformed into 
oil and meal for poultry feed, cattle, pigs, farmed fish, destroying more protein than 
livestock provides not for human consumption. To maintain the level of catch, the policies 
are the headlong: boat launching gear and more powerful, more efficient, resulting in a 
continual increase in operating costs of vessels. Hence the inexorable decline in 
profitability of fishing enterprises that governments offset by aid for the construction, 
equipment, stabilization of fuel prices, demolition of dilapidated boat ... In social 
terms, elongation and multiplication of trips, the speedup on the boats are all factors 
that have the effect of rendering more difficult the work of the fishermen.

Industrial plunder resources
Today in France, the fishing industry provides the bulk of the catch of fish and other 
marine resources. A difference should be noted between the offshore fishing, trawlers 
often performed on 30 to 50 meters for oil 10 to 15 days and the great fishing, practiced 
on the high seas for campaigns lasting several months on boats up 110 meters long. It is 
the latter that contributes the most, by far, the plundering of the resources of the 
planet since the 1960s there has been a rush of European fleets, Russian, Japanese, Korean 
and Chinese on the fish stocks in the country south. Local fishermen are seeing a 
continuing decline in their catch, while the industrial fishery products are intended for 
consumers in the North. As for artisanal fisheries, it is more diverse and employs the 
vast majority of workers. As in the South, the little sinners suffer damage from the 
industrialization of fishing.

Jacques Dubart (AL Agen)

[ 1 ] According to Greenpeace, the industrial fleet, armed ships of 35,000 represents only 
1% of the world fleet, but more than 50% of the global fishing capacity.
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