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Little Fish: Big Impact
A recent report by The Lenfest Ocean Program offers some important new insights into the role of forage fish species in marine ecosystems and the sustainability of the fisheries upon them. Stephen Hall comments on the report and its recommendations.
In my blog Expiscor I posted an article asking whether we could better use the 27 millions of tonnes of fish that go each year to feed animals. This is an important question and one that attracts considerable attention, particularly since many of these fish are used by the aquaculture industry to feed other fish - a practice that at first sight seems rather wasteful.
The main focus of my article was on whether reducing fish to fishmeal and fish oil and using this to manufacture animal feeds deprives hungry or malnourished people of fish that they might otherwise eat directly. But another important question that must be addressed is whether these fisheries are being exploited sustainably to ensure their long term future. It is this topic and the related question of the ecological impacts of reduction fisheries on predators higher in the food web that is the subject of a recent report by published by the Lenfest Ocean Program.
To address these questions the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, a group of 13 respected academics from around the world, used a combination of workshops, literature reviews, study visits, case studies, and quantitative modelling. A central conclusion from their study is that conventional fisheries management targets and limits are not conservative enough to protect forage fish populations from collapse or to prevent impacts on predator species. Building on this the authors offer some rules of thumb for management action conditioned on the information available for a particular fishery.
No doubt the author's conclusions and recommendations will be subject to scrutiny in the coming months, and I suspect that many of them will prove to be quite robust. If I have one criticism, however, it is the predominantly northern and developed country composition of the task force and the relatively low representation of developing country case studies. I suspect that obtaining a broader developing country perspective might have led to debate, for example, about what represents an appropriate share for large predators, and to more explicit and nuanced consideration of the implications of the reports findings for food security.
But notwithstanding such concerns, this is a useful and potentially influential report that offers some valuable recommendations. It is well worth a read. Stephen J. Hall, Director General, WorldFish.
In my blog Expiscor I posted an article asking whether we could better use the 27 millions of tonnes of fish that go each year to feed animals. This is an important question and one that attracts considerable attention, particularly since many of these fish are used by the aquaculture industry to feed other fish - a practice that at first sight seems rather wasteful.
The main focus of my article was on whether reducing fish to fishmeal and fish oil and using this to manufacture animal feeds deprives hungry or malnourished people of fish that they might otherwise eat directly. But another important question that must be addressed is whether these fisheries are being exploited sustainably to ensure their long term future. It is this topic and the related question of the ecological impacts of reduction fisheries on predators higher in the food web that is the subject of a recent report by published by the Lenfest Ocean Program.
To address these questions the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, a group of 13 respected academics from around the world, used a combination of workshops, literature reviews, study visits, case studies, and quantitative modelling. A central conclusion from their study is that conventional fisheries management targets and limits are not conservative enough to protect forage fish populations from collapse or to prevent impacts on predator species. Building on this the authors offer some rules of thumb for management action conditioned on the information available for a particular fishery.
No doubt the author's conclusions and recommendations will be subject to scrutiny in the coming months, and I suspect that many of them will prove to be quite robust. If I have one criticism, however, it is the predominantly northern and developed country composition of the task force and the relatively low representation of developing country case studies. I suspect that obtaining a broader developing country perspective might have led to debate, for example, about what represents an appropriate share for large predators, and to more explicit and nuanced consideration of the implications of the reports findings for food security.
But notwithstanding such concerns, this is a useful and potentially influential report that offers some valuable recommendations. It is well worth a read. Stephen J. Hall, Director General, WorldFish.
To read more on the Lenfest Ocean Program and its work go to http://www.lenfestocean.org/foragefish