The Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting this year was in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and sustainable fisheries were hot on the agenda.

The Fisheries Economics Research Unit’s Dr. Rashid Sumaila was in attendance to speak about the importance of overfishing to Asia, which, consumes more than two thirds of the landings from the world’s marine environments.

Dr. Sumaila was also among others concerned with fisheries at the meeting such as Henk Brus, who believes that wider tuna nets that allow younger fish through will not only make tuna fisheries more sustainable but profitable as well.

via Chem.info

The star of the Ellen DeGeneres show has recently plugged the documentary film End of Line in which Dr. Sumaila is featured.

Photo via: Wikimedia Commons

From Ellen’s Twitter stream recently:

“Have you heard of this documentary “End of the Line?” I just heard about it. If you care about the planet, please watch it.”

and again appealing to her fans to go out and watch the film:

“Get more info here: http://endoftheline.com RT @nevergiveup2010 Where can I find this documentary? Is

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Dr. Sumaila appears in a video with several notable celebrities including Leonardo Dicaprio and Prince Charles. In this video concerning the health of the earth’s oceans and climate change Dr. Sumaila says:

Scientists have predicted: every second breath of humans depends on the oceans. So the oceans are central to our livelihoods and our survival on the planet.

For more information about this video with transcription, see the full post at sumprememastertv.com.

The Vancouver Sun reports yesterday on a paper by the Sea Around Us project’s Jennifer Jacquet and co-authored by Rashid Sumaila of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit. Coverage by that news organization is just one of several who have picked up on the story that consumer awareness programs, such as the Marine Stewardship Council’s product certification program, haven’t been effective in curbing the increasing rate of overfishing around the globe.

The central issue in this article is that of the fishmeal trade, where…

Nancy Macdonald of MacLean’s magazine uses some information from Catching more bait: a bottom-up re-estimation of global fisheries subsidies in a recent article available on-line. She references our estimate of more than $US 30 billion in subsidies to global fishing fleets annually.

Photo by: Grantsviews (via Flickr)

Macdonald accurately suggests that low food prices are a direct result of subsidies to agriculture and fisheries, which, distort the consumer choices. The author aptly summarizes the problem of subsidies in Canada saying:

[t]oo often, subsidies shield Canadians from the true

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Although this is an older (2007) video, it is worthy of mention since Dr. Sumaila expands a little further on the impact of subsidies in the high seas, difficulties associated with removing subsidies, and mentions an estimate of total subsidies to the world’s fisheries from Sumaila et al. (2006) — more than USD $30 billion.

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Source: YouTube Video

Dr. Sumaila has long been a vocal critic of the established practice of subsidizing fisheries around the globe. This video focuses on the Ghanaian economy, however, the idea that fishery subsidies negatively affect global fish stocks can be extrapolated to many, if not all, other regions.

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Source: YouTube Video