Can you imangine that you would be unable to find any fish on your dish from someday? Can You imagine oneday an announcer would speak on the news that a particular kind of fish that many people enjoy eating is banned for food? Even if you can not believe it, it might come true in the near future.
Professor Bapst delivered the very well summarized presentation about the current issue, “overfishing.” I had not even thought of overfishing as that serious before his presentation though I had heard about it somewhere. The concept of overfishing does not mean just fishing much. As the global population grows up rapidly, there are more and more requirements for food supply. One of the main dishes for man is ‘fish.’ So, as the natural result of the rapid growth of global population, people can not help fishing more and more.
It is not the main reason that makes situations worse, however, though it makes a difference to some extent. It is also true that there are much more requirements for fish than ever before. But, there are still enough fish about four times more than the entire human population. What has made things worse and will do the same as well is the ways of fishing which were designed to catch fish as much as possible at once.
There are several kinds of harmful way of fishing: bycatching that fishermen throws fish away if they are not what they seek for, use of poison which will last long and makes serious effects on Ocean ecosystem, blast fishing which is also too destructive and harmful to just catch fish. Countless number of fish are just thrown away and wasted because of these.
One of the other main reasons is indiscriminate capture resulting from the preference for a certain species. For example, “Tuna” is said to be extinct within three to six years if it is captured endlessly in this pace. The problem here is this: the balance in the ocean ecosystem and the ocean food chain is threatened to be broken.
But these problems will not be solved by individual efforts. I believe they could not be solved as well by even the international organizations like NGO. What I think is that there should be stronger regulations enacted by governments on these problems by the ways such as any regulation on capture rate, regulation on the ways of fishing, and making more protected areas for certain species.
As long as the governments of each country make some agreement on this issue and put the specific policies into practice, I believe there is still hope. If they keep just watching what is going on as they have already done, however, it would be hard to say it turns out well in the end, anyway.
