Fisheries in Decline

With the right choices, we can still enjoy abundant wild-caught seafood in the future

Our love of seafood has led to trouble for fisheries and fishing communities.

More In-Depth Information

• Report: Sustaining America's Fisheries and Fishing Communities
• Catch Shares: A Market-Based Tool to Aid Ailing Fisheries

Americans love seafood. From fish sandwiches to gourmet wild Alaskan salmon, we eat close to five billion pounds of seafood a year. Only consumption in Japan and China surpasses ours.

But our love of seafood has consequences.

In November 2006, newspapers across the country featured a cautionary tale.  According to a report in the journal Science, several of the world’s leading marine biologists concluded that, if bad fishing practices continued, in a worse-case scenario all fish and seafood species worldwide would crash by 2048. Whether this and similar conjectures come true depends on how we respond to the biological and economic decline of fisheries. The good news is that we can change course.

Many fisheries are in trouble. Worldwide, it is estimated that some 90 percent of species of large predatory fish are gone. Domestically, of 230 assessed U.S. fisheries, 54 stocks are classified as overfished, 45 are experiencing overfishing, and the status of just over half of the nation’s stocks are unknown. (See what Environmental Defense is doing to address the challenges.)

America's fishing communities are also suffering. The collapse of New England's cod fishery in the early 1990s cost an estimated 20,000 jobs. About 72,000 jobs have been lost because of dwindling salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest alone. 

Hallmarks of successful management

The decline of fisheries and fishing communities has come despite decades of effort to manage our fishery resources. But in the process, we have learned what is needed to manage fisheries sustainably. A fishery needs:

• A catch limit — a scientifically-determined, fully enforced limit on the total number of fish caught and landed,
• Controls on "bycatch" — the unintentional killing of fish and other ocean life, and
• Protection of important marine habitat.

Old way of managing fisheries as a common resource has not worked

The conventional fishery management system has proved unreliable in protecting fish or fishermen in the United States. This failure stems from managing fisheries as a commons, leading to a spiral of depletion and economic failure, as fishermen work harder to catch dwindling numbers of fish. The result is sometimes the collapse of entire fishing fleets (see A Brief History of Fishery Management for details).

But the tide is turning.

Catch shares (LAPPs): Aligning conservation and economic incentives

The key ingredient to successful sustainable fisheries is a tool that can align fishermen’s economic incentives with environmental goals: catch shares or Limited Access Privilege Programs (LAPPs). 

Catch shares dedicate a share of the catch to an individual fisherman, a group of fishermen or a community. Catch shares can also be area-based, such as a Territorial Use Right for Fishing, delineating and dedicating a specific area for management by an individual, group or community. (See LAPPs: A Promising 21st Century Solution.)

Posted: 19-Jul-2007; Updated: 11-Aug-2009