Investing in large-scale industrial fishing, building bigger boats, and giving subsidies for pursuing deep sea fishing would be a waste of resources for India (or any other country for that matter) as the global fish catch is on the decline, said French-born marine biologist Daniel Pauly.
He was in the capital the other day to attend the on-going threeday international conference Ecosystem Conservation, Climate Change and Sustainable Development (ECOCASD 2013).
The idea that the high seas hold fish wealth waiting to be exploited is “all absolute nonsense”, according to Pauly, well-known for his candid criticisms of the world’s fisheries for “ransacking the world’s oceans”.
“This is a recurring theme in India and other developing countries that there are lots of fish in deep water, but the truth is they are simply not there,” Pauly said.
“The age of large trawlers and geographical expansion of fishing is slowly coming to an end,” he said.
Subsidies in industrial fishing also do more harm than good, according to Pauly, who has been working on re-estimating the world’s fish catch country-by-country because he finds that all the countries (except China which overstates the figures) largely under-report their catch.
“If you fish too much, naturally the catch decreases,” he explained.
“What stops you is the cost of fishing. Subsidies help get started but beyond a certain point, the more you subsidise, the less fish you get.
Unlike agriculture or manufacturing, fisheries sector involves fish harvesting and not production.”
Fishing down, that is, catching smaller fish at the lower tropic levels, is already a reality for India as for many other countries.
“India is an example of where the large fish are disappearing leaving behind ecosystems dominated by smaller prey fish,” said Pauly, who co-authored the seminal paper on ‘Fishing Down Marine Food Webs’ in 1998.
“We end up with smaller sized catch, we overfish these as well, and in the end only jellyfish remain,” he said. “What India needs to do instead is focus on its smallscale fishing industry,” he said.
“Small-scale doesn’t necessarily mean traditional,” he clarified.
“They can be mechanised fishing boats. It is just that they should focus on staying local and not go in for ‘dragging’ (bottom trawling).”
Kerala, too, whose fishing sector reflects the story of India as a whole, needs to pick between its industrial fishing sector and the small fishermen as they cannot coexist, “because the large boats always take away from the small ones,” said Pauly, presently a professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
