International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability 2009:
Global Food Security and Sustainability (Daniel Pauly cancelled this talk)
during 9:10-9:50, on 18 September 2009, Science Council of Japan, Tokyo
There are many warnings in marine ecosystems. The mean trophic level of
the world fisheries landings (MTL) has decreased from ca. 3.5 in 1950 to
ca. 3.3 in 1990. This implies overfishing because the fish being harvested
are increasingly coming from the less valuable lower trophic levels as
populations of higher trophic level species are depleted. Convention on
Biological Diversity chooses MTL as an indicator of marine ecosystem integrity
and ecosystem goods and services in Global Biodiversity Outlook. This decline
of MTL is called gfishing downh. The theory of gfishing downh is based
on the assumption that the major target species is high price and higher
trophic level fish. The proportion of low value fish of the total fish
consumption differs between developing countries and developed countries.
There is a mismatch between demand and supply of fisheries resources from
the food security viewpoints. In the case of Japanese fisheries, the total
allowable catch (TAC) exceeded the allowable biological catch (ABC) in
some fish including sardine and the actual catch exceeded ABC in some years.
In contrast, the actual catch is much smaller than the ABC in some species,
including Pacific saury and anchovy. It should be noted that the total
ABCs of these species is larger than 2 million tons. However, economic
demand of these species is short in Japan, while economic demand of overfished
species including tunas and chub mackerel is still large.
In conclusion, we made the following recommendations that could both increase
the food resources and reduce the chances of overexploitation: (1) Catch
more fish at lower trophic levels; (2) Do not use too much fish as fish
meal; (3) Reduce discards before and after landings; (4) Establish food
markets for temporally fluctuating fishes at lower trophic levels; (5)
Improve the food-processing technology used on small pelagic fishes; (6)
Switch the target fish to correspond to the temporally dominant species;
(7) Conserve immature fish especially when the species is at a low stock
level; (8) Develop technologies for selective fishing; (9) Conserve both
fish and fishers; (10) Say goodbye to traditional MSY theory; and (11)
Monitor not only the target stock level but also any other indicator of
the gentireh ecosystem.