Commercial Fishing

Do you wonder how much fish get caught from commercial boats? Do you wonder if there are enough fish to go around for everyone to eat? Well as Forbes states in their article “Two-Thirds Of The World's Seafood Is Overfished -- Here's How You Can Help” by Michael Pellman Rowland, that roughly 0.97 to 2.7 trillion fish are harvested and sold to different countries. These commercial fish industries overfish to make profit and distort the ecosystem. Most marine animals are drastically affected by this industry. Animals have issues finding food since these high industries are harvesting most of them and not allowing fishes to repopulate. Throughout our history commercial fishing keeps advancing due to new techniques and new technology. 

Before the Middle Ages most people caught fish in lakes, rivers, streams or tidal zones. Due to not having advanced fishing technology, fishing was a struggle. They would have the difficulty of catching fish so they would harvest other shellfish. Once the Middle Ages fisherman have started to advance their fishing techniques by starting to catch fish in massive numbers and using nets. The European first started to catch Herring in mass amounts and then started to aim toward cod. This started the Cod fisheries. Later on with the development of boats fisherman started to trawl and started to catch fishes in mass amounts. This changed the era into the commercial fishing industry. This causes a chain reaction throughout the world and fish has landed on the market for mass production. With mass production politics got involved.

Many third world countries got impacted by commercial fishing. To insist, Indonesia was majorly affected by the commercial fishing industry. They lost a major source of food and income. Indonesia has a program called  Indonesia Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries(MMPA). This program is to maintain the balance of the amount of fish reported in catch and the sizes  of boats are allowed in certain areas. Due to confined spots certain sizes of boats can go due to being too large. However they found corruption  within the program. A program that is runned by the government. Political economy has failed those Indonesian fishermen. With corruption within the system, commercial fishermen can harvest a mass amount of fish and overfish and not report the accurate catches. With no management strategy and false report of fish caught causes the Indonesian to struggle to maintain their lifestyle. With overfishing it has caused scientists to put regulations on certain species of fish. 

Tuna is one of those fisheries that have strict regulations due to overfishing them. Due to the tuna life cycles it takes a while for the fish to mature. So they put a regulation on the sizes. With overfishing occurring the maximum sustainable yield will decrease which causes fisherman to catch less. With the decline of 24.1% in commercial fishing it causes a concern. Not only the massive catching is affecting the industry but also all the carbon emission. The amount of boat leaving port causes a larger amount of carbon emission. In the show Wicked Tuna, shows the struggle in the Bluefin Tuna fisheries. With a limit of catching 3 fish per day goes down throughout the years  to 1 fish per day. Roughly about 5 boats in the show go out to catch some tuna. With those boats it causes more carbon emissions in the air. We all now know what carbon emissions do to our world. It causes global warming.With commercial fishing do see any harm they are causing. They just see the money coming in from all parts of the world. . 

We need to start lowering the amount of commercial boats from overfishing, we need to put stricter regulations. We need to stop those corrupt programs and start regulating the fish population in each nation. We need to start taking care of the world or else we will end up with nothing.We need to stop overfishing and stop mass production. We can make the economy better if we have higher corporations taking all the jobs. If we let local fishermen gather the fish we can regulate the fish but we also help those small businesses to grow. This can help the economy and I would assume politics would be pleasant with that. 





Citation .
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