Where's the Fish?

Fish are a critical part of the human diet because they have a great deal of protein. However you might have realized that the amount of fish in fisheries across the world has been on a steady decline. Currently there are about 80 million metric tons of fish made availible across the world per year. According to http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8385. This might seem like a very large number to the point of there being plenty of fish to eat but it is not. In reality this has been on a slow decline over the past few years while the global population has been on the steady incline. So with one going upward and the other going down eventually there will be a shortage of fish to eat. This shprtage would affect the developing weak countries before it will bother any established one because the weaker countries need the fish in the ocean to survive while the stronger ones have many other options to eat and get their protein.

This relates to our course because we had an entire case study on how the Atlantic Cod is being overfished and run to extinction. To control this they put on a limit on the size of the fish they can keep along with the amount of fish each boat can catch over a set period of time. In the long run limiting the number of fish they can catch will help repopulate the Atlantic Cod population it is also limiting the number of fish that can be eaten by the humans on this planet.

My view on this subject is that people just need to be smarter in how they live. For example 80 million metric tons of fish are made available each year but i doubt that every last fish is eaten. I feel like there are a lot of people over buying fish when they go to the store. This causes the fishermen to try to catch more fish because in business you never want to run out of your product. So by people buying more than they will eat it forces the companies to catch more fish than they want to catch. And that is the cause of overfishing across the world.

Andrew Whyte