With decades of experience studying and documenting global overfishing, in a recent interview Daniel Pauly sets out the three main actions he believes are needed to renew globally depleted fisheries. The first of these would be to end government subsidies for industrial fishing fleets as reducing the size of the world’s industrial fleet would bring a wide range of benefits and few disadvantages. A second important step would be to create fishing reserves for small, local fisheries. His idea is to have a zone of 30-40km around every country reserved for small scale fisheries that do not drag nets over the seabed. The third element is to have no-go zones to protect fish. Large marine reserves where no fishing is allowed. Each of these things is feasible and will probably have to be done if we want a global fishery within 50 years, Pauly says and although it would not entirely solve the fishery problem it would provide the architecture for recovery.
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