From renowned marine biologist Daniel Pauly, a fascinating analysis of our collapsed global fisheries and a revolutionary vision for their future

Daniel Pauly

This is an excerpt adapted with permission of the publisher from the book Vanishing Fish by Daniel Pauly, published May 28, 2019 by Greystone Books.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly industrialized, with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later geographic positioning systems, or GPS, the fishing fleets first depleted populations of cod, hake, flounder, sole, and halibut in the Northern Hemisphere. As the abundance of those fish declined, the fleets moved southward, to the coasts of developing countries, and, ultimately, all the way to the shores of Antarctica, searching for icefishes and rock cods, and finally for the small, shrimp-like krill.

As the bounty of coastal waters dropped, fisheries moved farther offshore, to deeper waters. And, finally, as the larger fish began to disappear, boats began to catch smaller, uglier fish that had never before been considered fit for human consumption. Many were renamed so that they could be more easily marketed. The suspicious slimehead became the delicious orange roughy, while the worrisome Patagonian toothfish became the wholesome Chilean seabass. Others, like the homely hoki, were cut up so that they could be sold sight unseen as fish sticks and filets in fast-food restaurants and the frozen-food aisle.

The scheme was carried out by nothing less than a fishing-industrial complex — an alliance of corporate fishing fleets, lobbyists, parliamentary representatives and fisheries economists. By hiding behind the romantic image of the small-scale, independent fisher, they secured political influence and government subsidies far in excess of what would be expected, given their minuscule contribution to the GDP of advanced economies — in the United States, even less than that of the hair salon industry. In Japan today, huge, vertically integrated conglomerates, such as Taiyo or the better-known Mitsubishi, lobby their friends in the Japanese Fisheries Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them gain access to the few remaining plentiful tuna populations, such as those in the waters surrounding South Pacific countries. Beginning in the early 1980s, the United States, which had not traditionally been much of a fishing country, began heavily subsidizing U.S. fleets, producing its own fishing-industrial complex, dominated by large processors and retail chains. Click here to read more