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

Many of the world’s fish stocks are currently over-exploited and some, such as Canada’s Atlantic cod, have collapsed completely without much hope for renewal. There are many reasons why these stocks are in decline, however, there is one major factor that we have direct control over, yet fail to take action — government subsidies.

The harmful effects of subsidizing fishing fleets is most apparent in deep sea fisheries, such as for the orange roughy pictured above. Deep sea fishing is costly and, therefore, the profit margins are often quite narrow. In fact, if it weren’t for…

A recent United Nations food summit in Rome alerts the world that the number of under-fed people is now more than 15% the world’s estimated 6 billion population. It is now believed that the number of under-nourished people around the globe exceeds 1 billion for the first time in history.

Just weeks after preliminary results from the Global Ocean Economics project were made available on this site indicating that overfishing has exacerbated problems of undernourishment (PDF), this news from the UN food summit seems to highlight the importance of addressing…

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…