Furthermore, few countries monitor anything but their largest or
economically most important fisheries with the rigour used in the United States and within the European Union. In most cases, officials
simply give their best guess. Even in the United States, where the federal
government allocates US$880 million to fisheries agencies each
year, reliable catch data for smaller stocks, such as spiny dogfish, are
hard to obtain.
Analyses based largely on catch data are fuelling a view held by numerous
non-governmental organizations and environmentalists that the
only solution to marine conservation is a ban on fishing in large areas.
Between 2007 and 2009, for instance, several non-governmental organizations
and US foundations spent $58 million each year on efforts to
create ‘marine protected areas’. This campaign has been spectacularly
successful in Australia, where 3.1 million square kilometres of ocean
are now closed to fishing.
This approach overlooks the enormous successes of many management
strategies. For example, on the east coast of the United States the
total abundance of bottom fish, such as redfish and haddock, increased
more than fivefold from 1995 to 2007 after
fishing restrictions were strengthened from the
mid-1990s.
If the FAO catch data were the only source of
fisheries data, fisheries science would be flying
blind. But scientific assessments of trends in fish
abundance spanning three or four decades are
now publicly available for the fisheries that constitute
40% of the total catch in the FAO global
database. These data come mostly from developed
countries (in North America, Europe and
Australasia) or from major international fisheries
such as those for tuna.