A tenth of the global fish population is overfished.
In Australia, 38 per cent of its assessed
fish stocks were classified as ‘overfished’, while 60 per cent of the total
catch in the country’s water could not be captured because there was
insufficient data to estimate stock health, in a paper published by the
Minderoo Flourishing Oceans Initiative.
Many countries in South east Asia do not
report any fishing catches at all. So the position is very hard to find out.
Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia, China,
Indonesia, Japan, Peru and Russia which are among the biggest fishing countries
in the world, were among 18 other countries that received an F grade for their
work, while the US, Chile and Norway received the highest mark but this was
only a C Grade.
The paper found that a tenth of fish stocks
globally are on the brink of collapse, reduced to just 10 per cent of their
original size. This was particularly concerning because fish populations could
take several decades to recover.
49 per cent of the 1465 assessed fish stocks
had been overfished, meaning they had less than 40 per cent of their unfished
population left. Previous estimates by the United Nations placed the
percentage of overfished fisheries about 34 per cent.
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