commercial fishing

COMMERCIAL FISHING
Commercial fishing is a worldwide enterprise that involves the capture of marine and freshwater fish and shellfish and their preparation for market. Fishing equipment ranges from small boats whose nets are cast and hauled in by hand to factory ships equipped with the most advanced technologies for finding, harvesting, and preparing huge amounts of fish. These large catches are very costly, however, not only in the price of their equipment and fuel, but also in the depletion of fishery resources their use brings about.

The major portion of the total fish harvest consists of few fish species, which are divided into two primary groups. Pelagic species - those which live in the near-surface layers of the oceans, this include several species of herring, tuna, salmon, anchovies, pilchard, sardines, menhaden, and mackerel. Demersal species - fish that live in the near-bottom layers of the ocean, this includes cod, sole, halibut, haddock, hake, and flounder. Large catches are also made of a group of fish classed commercially as SHELLFISH - shrimp, lobster, scallops, oysters, clams, crabs, mussels, and squid. WHALING was once a major part of the fishing industry. Overfishing has endangered many whale numbers, however, and the field has lessened in importance.

Almost all large pelagic and demersal fish catches are made over or near the continental shelf, the underwater plateau around the continents and large islands. In these waters temperatures, water depths, and the currents that influence the amounts of available food create an environment that is highly favourable to the existence of large schools of fish.

The animals living in and on the bottom of the continental shelf serve as additional food sources for demersal fish. Also, most species spawn on continental shelves, and the main nursery grounds of many species are also in coastal regions. The main fishing grounds are located on the wider continental shelves of the mid and high latitudes. The single most important area is the North Pacific, where as much as one-quarter of the world's fish catch is taken.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FISHING INDUSTRY

Prehistoric people were hunters and food collectors, and they found much of their food in lakes, rivers, and shallow coastal ocean waters. Shellfish were the most accessible food , and the large shell heaps found around the first fishing technique, the use of bare hands.

During 10,000-6000 BC, certain cultures that depended almost entirely on a diet of fish developed primitive fishing technologies. The Scandinavian Maglemosian culture used stone-pointed fishing spears, antler and bone harpoons and fishhooks, and lines and nets woven of bark fiber. Improved equipment increased the size of catches, and preservation techniques were developed for drying, smoking, salting, and pickling fish. As larger boats were built, fishing craft adventured farther into the oceans, and sea fishing developed into a well-defined business, with settlements whose main occupation was catching fish.

Early ocean fisheries were confined to the coastal regions of settled areas and to the Mediterranean Sea, which had been the traditional fishing grounds for large numbers of fish species, especially tuna. Slowly, the rich fishing regions of the Atlantic Ocean and the North and Baltic seas began to be exploited. The opening of these new fishing grounds had a significant influence on the spread of trade during the Middle Ages and on the establishment of new trade routes - for example, the herring fisheries in the southern Baltic and North seas that helped to establish the HANSEATIC LEAGUE.

The opening of the fishing areas around Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had a serious effect on European history. First fished by the French in the early 1500s, by the beginning of the 17th century the North Atlantic fisheries had become the main source of New World wealth for England.

PRINCIPAL FISHERIES

The most important world fisheries are located in waters less than 400 m in depth. Major fishing grounds are in the North Atlantic including the GRAND BANKS and the Georges Banks off the New England coast, the North Sea, the waters over the continental shelves of Iceland and Norway, and the Barents Sea; in the North Pacific, specifically the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the coastal areas around Japan; and off the coasts of China and Malaysia. Other important fishing grounds are found off the coasts of the southeastern United States, Chile, Peru, Argentina, and the Falkland Islands, and off the coasts of Namibia and South Africa.

More than one-half of the marine fish catch in the United States is taken in the Northeast Pacific and in Alaskan coastal waters. In 1993 the total of all the Atlantic fisheries given slightly more than 18 percent, with the Gulf of Mexico fishery adding another 16 percent. Pollock, shrimp, sockeye salmon, and snow crab are the most valuable catches - and these, with the exception of shrimp, are all Northeast Pacific fish. Haddock landings off the New England coast decreased in the 1980s because of overfishing. The cod fishery in the Northeast Atlantic collapsed in the early 1990s for the same reason.

The profitable king crab fishery in the Bering Sea broke down in the 1980s, and much of the crab fleet was changed to trawlers, which yielded higher catches of Pacific cod and pollock in joint venture fisheries with foreign processors, who were mainly Japanese and Russian.

The local fisheries of the African coast, and many of those found elsewhere in the tropics, remain undeveloped. The main limiting factors are: first, the narrowness of the continental shelf, which doesn't allow the numbers of demersal fish, and the existence of a straight coastline that doesn't offer many possibilities for good harbors; second, the high temperatures, which affect the keeping quality of the fish catch; and third, limited access to the interior, making marketing difficult. Fish landings from these areas are usually dried, smoked, or salted immediately.

FISHING TECHNOLOGIES

In most modern, commercial fishing fleets the most common fishing vessel is the trawler, equipped with a diesel engine and outfitted with a variety of equipment for fish finding and capturing. Factory ships are huge, operated by crews of 500 to 650 and accompanied by their own fleets of smaller ships called catcher boats. Some factory ships can remain at sea for months at a time and can process and store huge amounts of catch. Nations engaged in large-scale, distant-water fishing operate factory ships. Some of these nations have invested heavily in many of the factory ships owned by U.S. firms. Coastal fleets commonly use smaller vessels that deliver their catch to processing plants on shore.

Sophisticated electronic equipment, such as sonar, is used to detect the presence of fish schools and to verify water depths and the roughness on the ocean bottom. Airplanes and helicopters scout scattered schools of pelagic fish.

Fish Harvesting

The standard methods of catching fish involve either nets, hooked lines, or traps. Pelagic fish are most often harvested using purse seine nets, which are set in a wide circle around the school of fish and then closed and drawn up. Straight drift or gill nets - whose mesh is just large enough to allow the heads of fish to pass through while trapping them at their gills - are used to catch salmon, tuna, cod, and other fish. Demersal fish may be caught in otter trawl nets pulled along the ocean bottom or netted with beam trawls that are used in more shallow waters, mainly for shrimp.

In halibut fishing, hooked groundlines, called long lines, may reach lengths of many miles, with baited hooks attached at intervals of 6 to 9 m. Floating long lines are used primarily in tuna and salmon fishing, and so are trolling lines, shorter lines towed behind a moving boat. Lights may be lowered into fresh waters to attract fish, which are then sucked up into the ship by vacuum pumps.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean fishing fleets began to use a new fishing technique to make large-scale squid catches in the North Pacific. Huge, 15m deep drift nets made of unbreakable nylon, each stretching 90 m, were lowered off the boats each evening. Together, the nets from a single boat formed a great wall just under the surface of the ocean. The nets drifted all night, catching any sea creatures that happened to swim into their meshes - not only the squid, but amounts of other fish and ocean mammals such as dolphins and seals. Drift-net assemblies began to be used to make catches of other commercial fish in addition to squid. The accidental catch, called "by-catch" in the trade, was thrown away. Large-scale drift-net fishing declined after a UN resolution that went into effect in 1993.

Fish Processing

Fishing vessels that make their catches close to port store fish in crushed ice or in refrigerated sea water. Large fishing vessels on long trips are equipped to keep their catch edible by storing it in refrigerated facilities or by quick-freezing it. A fully equipped factory ship will also have machinery on board for fish filleting and freezing or canning. Fish fillets are frozen at sea into large blocks weighing up to 45 kg, these are later reprocessed on shore into individual portions. Some ships may also have facilities for drying and grinding fish into fish meal.

MAJOR FISHING COUNTRIES

By the early 1990s, China had emerged as the nation with the largest fish catches, totalling 16.5 million US tons in 1992. The Chinese catch is largely from fish farming. Japan is second, with about 9.4 million US tons. Peru is next, with a catch of 7.5 million US tons. Chile, Russia, and the United States follow, in that order. India, with a catch of 4.6 million US tons, is the seventh-largest fishing nation. The Pacific countries of Indonesia, Thailand, and South Korea complete the list of the ten main fishing nations. Britain, once a major fishing country, is now only a minor player, having caught only 895,000 US tons in 1992.

OVER-FISHED FISHERIES

In 1948 the total world fish catch was about 19 million metric tons. The total catch rose to over 60 million metric tons by 1970, almost 77 million metric tons in 1972, and in 1989 - a record year - over 110.2 million US tons. The 1992 total was 108 million US tons. Despite the huge size of total world catches, fisheries scientists believe that the sustainable limits to the landings of many important commercial species of marine fish were reached long ago. Decreasing catches of valuable fish, such as cod and haddock, were payed for by capturing less desirable species that would have been thrown out in the past - pollock, pilchard, whiting.

In 1994 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) announced that 13 of the world's 17 major ocean fisheries are overfished. Overfishing, the harvesting of a species to a point where it can't reproduce itself in serious numbers, is in large part responsible for the decline of cod, haddock, halibut, herring, several species of tuna, and whale. Not enough of these fish remain in the seas to maintain spawning stocks; the fishing industry has been consuming its capital.

Technology is one reason for the huge increase in fish landings since the 1960s. Catches were so rich that private industry and governments both poured money into higher quality fishing fleets. Since the 1980s, for example, the European Union quadrupled its support for fishing, subsidizing the building of new boats and arranging for member countries to exploit fishing grounds in other members' jurisdictions. Since 1975, the number of trawlers on the high seas has increased by 30 percent, and the major fishing nations now suffer from overcapacity: the European Union could land its present catches with only half its present fleet.

In addition to overfishing, other factors play a part in the diminishing stocks of commercial fish species. Some are beyond human control. Most are traceable to human activity. For example, developing human populations along the world's coasts have added to the pollution of inland rivers and streams; estuaries and lagoons that previously sheltered and fed juvenile fish have been filled in and developed. Almost three-quarters of the species in the US fisheries must live in estuaries at some stage in their growth.

By-catch, the netting and killing of unwanted fish, is another factor in the shrinkage of fish stocks. The dolphin and porpoise kill in tuna fishing became well known to canned-tunafish buyers in the 1980s, and the methods in which purse seine nets are used in the tuna fisheries were changed as a result. However, in the US shrimp fishery alone, an estimated 172,000 US tons of juvenile fish are thrown out each year, contributing to a noticeable decreases in the populations of snappers and groupers in the Gulf of Mexico. The estimated by-catch in Alaskan fisheries amounts to over one-half million US tons a year. Worldwide, as much as 30 percent of the fish caught may be wasted as by-catch.

FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

As early as the 1890s it was acknowledged that fishery resources are limited and that they must be managed through international agreements. In 1902 the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES) was formed by the major European fishing countries. The founding of ICES led to many conventions for the regulation of fisheries by quotas and by mesh size of nets, in order to obtain "maximum sustainable yields" - the highest yields consistent with the maintenance of fish stocks. Until recent years, such conventions were effective in the Northeast Atlantic, although they did not operate as well in other regions. The extension of national jurisdictions over fisheries resources to a 200-naut-mi (370-km/230-mi) zone, beginning in the 1970s, further limited the effectiveness of many international conventions.

In the United States the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 placed all marine resources from three to 200 naut mi offshore under US jurisdiction. Management is effected through eight regional fisheries councils whose members come mainly from the industry. Each council has the power to set quotas for the commercial fish species living within its jurisdiction in order "to achieve optimum yield from each fishery on a continuing basis," and to prepare recovery plans when they have decided that overfishing is depleting stocks. In addition, the councils have granted permits to foreign countries to harvest specified quantities of certain fish species in return for a fee. Countries that have fished under US license included Japan, South Korea, the former USSR, and Poland. In their desire to maintain the prosperity of the fleets within their regions, however, the councils have not been harsh in their recognition of depleted stocks, the quotas they set, or their preparations for stock recoveries. In 1994, however, the New England Fisheries Management Council began a process that will lead to closing commercial fishing in the Georges Bank for a number of years.

Fishing in international waters has also proved difficult to control. While it is believed, for example, that most nations have obeyed the UN moratorium on drift-net fishing, monitoring compliance remains an unsolved problem. The US Navy's Sound Surveillance System, a 48,000-km network of undersea cable, is capable of tracking drift-net operations, but budget considerations may eventually force the sound surveillance system shutdown.