Persuasive Essay On Overfishing

Ask yourself, worldwide, what type of food production recently overtook the longtime leader in revenue of food production? Why, that would be aquaculture or farmed fish. It’s hard for many to imagine, but as the “Earth Policy Institutes Plan B Updates for Farmed Fish Production” puts it, “the world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011” (Larsen and Roney). That is quite the remarkable milestone when put in perspective. It out produced BEEF! According to Paul Greenberg, a wildlife author, “Aquaculture is the fastest growing food system in the world and is continuing to grow at seven percent a year”. That is a fitting accolade to go along with its new title as leading feed, however, with

If so, then how? The original reason behind developing methods for fish farming was to give the worldwide, “flatlining fisheries a bit of a breather as that is when its use really took off” (Larsen and Roney ). Around the 70s and 80s is when several governments really started to take notice on the travesty that overfishing had become. The other vital area of importance on the issue of overfishing and how to undo the damage we’ve done is, of course, the political side of it; especially with oceanic species which populations span over whole oceans. The only way anyone is going to stop the overharvest of wild fish is for multiple governments’ wildlife divisions to agree and work together on how to regulate them as that is what any good state government does best… regulation. The concept of and perhaps greatest example of the

Don’t take it in error, there are some very large scale fish farming operations like the one from southern Spain that will be brought up later, but almost the entirety of the North Atlantic Bluefin Tuna population travels to the Mediterranean Sea or Gulf of Mexico just to spawn. That leaves the management of this severely overfished beast solely in the hands of Europe and the United States’ ability to cooperate enough to put limits and restrictions on the harvest of them in international and domestic waters. Collectively, any country with a bluefin population (Atlantic and Pacific) have made waves in the art of diplomacy meshing with conservation. Unfortunately, not even that level of teamwork has produced the results many conservationists on both sides were hoping for In the article, “Something Fishy? Bluefin Tuna Not Recovered”, written by frequent marine life author, Matthew O. Burger of News Deeply, the North Atlantic Bluefin stocks baffled scientists as they are unable to classify the “eastern mediterranean stocks as recovered” (Burger par. 2). They being unable to do so was partly because of the lack of sufficient data models of a fish whose populations are very hard to keep track of likely due to their highly migratory behavior. According to Mike Velings of Mission Blue Two, the startling fact