Measuring the Success of Seafood Ecolabelling - SEAFOOD Ecolabelling: Principles and Practice - page 208

10.2 Producing seafood sustainably

Many recent government and technical reviews of the conditions and trends in
ocean ecosystems have concluded that large proportions of the world's marine liv-
ing resources are either currently overexploited or are showing dangerous signs of
heading towards over-exploitation (e.g. RCEP 2004, High Seas Task Force 2006).
These conclusions are based on technical analysis and reviews of the declines in
major predatory fish populations of open oceans (Myers & Worm 2003, 2005,
Worm et al . 2005), the well-known issues of coastal fish stocks (Pauly et al . 1998)
and the declining state of the world's fisheries (FAO 2007). Similarly, there are
serious worldwide problems with the degradation of marine ecosystems, habitats
and species, many of which aquaculture and fishing depend on in various ways.
Some of these problems are related to the impacts of fishing itself (Pew Oceans
Commission 2003, US Oceans Commission 2004, RCEP 2004) while others relate
to land-based sources of stress, such as the pollution of rivers and coastal wa-
ters with nutrients and sediments from poor waste and land management practices
(http://www.cep.unep.org/issues/lbsp.html; Reid et al. 2005). These problems are
not confined to developing countries, and in developed nations they are now being
increasingly publicly recognised and management responses are being deployed
(O'Boyle et al. 2005). These recent expert analyses, reviews and overviews have
different perspectives, assess widely divergent data and consider a range of sit-
uations from highly stressed inshore marine ecosystems to remote and deep sea
ecosystems. However, they call for major reforms to marine governance and man-
agement systems, both within national jurisdictions and on the high seas.
For marine capture fisheries, the reform agenda now principally revolves around
the introduction of ecosystem-based management systems that are specifically de-
signed to resolve issues of sustainability of the fishing industries (e.g. Ward et al .
2002, Pikitch et al . 2004, US Oceans Commission 2004). However, introducing
the 'ecosystem approach' to fishing is not likely to resolve the many major issues
affecting global marine ecosystems and their fish stocks in the short term (Sinclair
et al . 2002). Amongst many other problems, there are as yet no clear and meaningful
expressions of what the 'ecosystem approach' actually means for fisheries manage-
ment, nor what it means at the practical level of everyday fishing activity, for fishing
communities, fisheries managers or a fishing industry. Furthermore, the concept of
the 'ecosystem approach' offers very little scope for reform of small-scale fisheries,
which are the source of many major impacts on coastal tropical marine ecosystems,
because of the imperatives of wealth generation and food security that typically
prevail in such developing country situations.
Recovery of the world's oceans and their living resources from their present de-
graded condition is likely to be a complex and long-term problem that depends on a
mixed basket of management measures. A single comprehensive system that oper-
ates at all scales from global to local is probably unachievable within the diversity
of governance systems operating in the modern world. The closest such mechanism