From Tony Maskell
I was interested by your article about human overexploitation of marine
species. I agree that refuges are needed where fishing is banned, to maintain
core breeding stocks and nurseries for their young to get a good start in life
(4 August, p 14).
The problem with this scenario is that small local fishing
vessels, which do less damage anyway, would lose their most profitable
grounds.
This difficulty could be partly addressed if environmentally benign husbandry
were allowed in the protected fallow zones. For example, sedentary
filter-feeders which convert phytoplankton directly into human food could be
grown in seabed cages.
Those of us who pioneered commercial shellfish hatcheries in the 1960s
envisioned such a system. But we were overtaken by several catastrophic events,
including the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy, which encouraged
everyone to take what they could before supposedly less responsible foreigners
could get to it. This left no possibility for experimentation with offshore
husbandry. Also, total bans are blunt instruments and wasteful of responsible
fishing opportunities, which, with the fishing industry in such a parlous state,
are desperately needed.
Fisheries will probably never be properly run until fishermen, like most
farmers, get proper title to the grounds they exploit, because the exploitation
of common land is always wasteful, inefficient, over-regulated and fraught with
potential conflict.
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