Final Essay

In between 1970 and 2012, the global marine population of fish dropped by 49 percent (World Wildlife Fund, 2015). This means that within the last 40 years we have harvested half of the entire oceans fish population. The world’s fish supply has already dropped substantially, and our consumption of it has only risen. The only way for us to meet this increased demand is for us to find a substitute to fishing, one which doesn’t have the drawbacks that commercial fishing does and that can meet the increasing population’s increasing demands. We must find an alternative to commercial marine fishing because of the massive amount of damage that the fishing industry causes. Marine fish population have dropped by half over the last 40 years, and it

It is more efficient, requires less fossil fuels, and provides a steady and reliable source of food (Biel, 2016). A consistent food supply will solve any population problems we might face, and because the output is predictable we have an idea of how much food we will be producing and using. This would make food shortages based on uncontrollable elements a thing of the past. Farms producing fish at a high output, if there were more of them, could ship food to starving areas and provide the protein that the people there need. Eventually world hunger could be solved through efficient farming. Fish are great sources of protein because they are more efficient converters of feed. They are six times better at converting feed into usable meat than cattle, and four times better than pork (Kinver, 2016). This means that more people could be fed for far cheaper if we further developed the industry. Fish farms can be in many places that large scale industrial fishing cannot happen, such as on rivers and in lakes. We could change areas that are unused into some of the quickest and most efficient food production sites. If more were implemented, the large amount of the ocean that is overfished could be given a rest, as the farms could supply the demand. Scientists have asked for a third of the oceans to be closed to fishing for a few years to let the ocean repair the damage that the industry has wrought (Purvis, 2009). If there were enough farms to continue to supply the world without a need for destructive fishing, then the oceans could heal and fish populations could return to normal. Then, instead of trying to fix the problem of a decreasing population, fisheries could be regulated to maintain the levels of fish in the