[ad_1]
Quick Take:
- Fish is a vital resource Nutrition for more than 3 Billion People
- Climate change overfishing and other stressors threaten this vital resource
- As the world’s population grows, so does the need for more people.Artisanal fishers are adapting to an uncertain future and preparing for it.
Six days a week, hours before the first rays of sun brighten the pale cliffs above Cabo Blanco, Carlos Chapilliquén rows through the surf to his small wooden boat, climbs aboard and raises its sail. With a tug on his mainsheet and a flick of his tiller, he elicits wind into the cloth. The boat surges over the waves and into one of the most rich marine ecosystems in the world.
From the age of six, when his uncles taught him how to bait a hook and troll with the wind, Chapilliquén has worked the Pacific waters off his hometown in northern Peru, where the cold Humboldt Current sideswipes the warm equatorial current. The resulting upwelling water is rich in nutrients and has sustained a long line of rich marine life from plankton to anchovies to mackerel to shark and tuna. Ernest Hemingway captured a 700-pound black Marlin in these waters during 1956 filming of The Old Man and the Sea. It was here that a Texas oilman caught a 1,560-pounder, which is still the largest marlin ever caught.
“Nowadays, it’s rare to see a fish that’s even a third of that size,” says Chapilliquén, 44, who has watched the horizon change dramatically over his lifetime as oil rigs multiplied offshore. Spills — such as a 11,900-barrel release near Lima in mid-January that devastated wildlife and left hundreds of fishermen out of work — are just one of “a mountain of challenges” that Chapilliquén says the area’s small-scale fishers face. Catches continue to decline as climate change advances. And large, industrial fishing boats from elsewhere — some fishing illegally — crisscross the nearshore waters, decimating stocks and jeopardizing local livelihoods.
“We play by the rules because we want to preserve the resource for future generations,” says Chapilliquén, a father of three who leads Cabo Blanco’s artisanal fishing guild. “But these giant ships come in and drop their nets to the bottom, killing everything in their path. We don’t have a chance.”
The fishermen of northern Peru are not the only ones. As the United Nations names it, 2022 is the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture — in recognition of the contributions small-scale fishers, fish workers and aquaculturists make to their communities and nations — many of the estimated 820 million people who depend on marine foods for their livelihoods are seeing catches and incomes plummet. Combining destructive harvesting, pollution and climate change, coastal development is reducing fishery yields and stressing already stressed ocean ecosystems.
For the past three decades, the human demand for wild fish has far outpaced what the world’s waters can reproduce. Today, more than a third of fish stocks is below biologically sustainable levels. The tropics have been particularly hard hit by climate change, which has caused prized species to migrate northward to cooler waters. The remaining smaller, nutrient-rich fish are being increasingly taken by high-volume fishermen to be sold in faraway nations. Many tropical developing countries could see their catches drop another 40% without drastic measures.
WATCH: Watch artisanal fishers from around the world describe how the oceans change
By then, the planet’s population is projected to have grown by more than 25%, making declining catches a food-security concern as well as an economic and environmental one. More than 3 billion people rely on seafood as a vital source of protein in their diets, and billions more depend on it for essential nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids, calcium and iron.
“It spells a looming food crisis in the equatorial band where people are already at the threshold for inadequate nutrition and fisheries are most at risk from illegal fishing, weak governance and climate impacts,” says Christopher Golden, a Harvard professor who studies nutrition and environmental health.
Fish is not a commodity, it’s food
Despite the dire outlook, many experts believe that foods captured or cultivated from the ocean or other waterways — sometimes called blue foods — could be the most promising way to sustainably feed growing populations while adapting to, and even slowing, climate change.
EDF and partners around the world are working to elevate seafood’s role in addressing food insecurity, particularly in tropical developing nations, and to open new opportunities for sustainable and resilient marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. To be successful, governments, regulators, policy-makers and other stakeholders must make a fundamental shift in how they view fish.
In Peru and many other developing countries, cash-starved governments either underestimate the value of their fisheries or sell the rights to harvest relatively “low value” fish to foreign entities, which profit by meeting the exploding global demand for fish oil and fish meal used to feed farmed fish and other animals in North America, Europe and Asia. Peruvian anchovy is rich in iron, protein, and contains some of the highest levels of certain fatty acid of any fish species. But when it’s sold overseas these nutrients are unavailable to the 21% of Peruvian women who suffer from anemia. In West Africa, where one-third of children under five years of age are stunted due to malnutrition, the local catch could meet the nutritional needs of people living near the ocean — and yet the global demand for fish meal has pushed the price of locally caught fish beyond the reach of many families.
“There’s nutritional gold in these countries’ waters, but they’re selling it as if it were fill dirt,” says Tom Grasso, who leads EDF’s work on climate-resilient food systems. The key to capturing that value, says Grasso, is for countries to align fisheries policies with nutrition and finance policies.
To establish the need for this shift, Harvard’s Golden and his collaborators created the Most comprehensive seafood nutritional database ever assembledIdentifying more than 3,700 edible aquatic animals, from seaweed to sharks, and analysing the nutritional content of each.
“We found some real surprises,” says Golden. Golden says that the team presented several categories of small fishes and shellfish with higher nutritional values than any type of cultivated terrestrial food such as beef and with a lower carbon footprint. For example, farm-grown oysters have less than 0.5% greenhouse-gas cost per kilogram of protein than beef.
According to Kristin Kleisner (EDF scientist), an analysis of the data revealed that blue foods production has a positive effect on nutritionally vulnerable people, such as pregnant and nursing women and children below five years of age.
Better data drives better decisionmaking
EDF and partners are working across the Pacific Rim to raise awareness of fisheries and support government policies. EDF partner H2Oceanos in Cabo Blanco, Peru helped the fishing community to be recognized as a National Cultural Heritage location and supports their efforts to get full tenure rights for their traditional fishing grounds. EDF facilitates communication between traditional fishing communities around the world to share information, strategies for management, and advocacy.
WATCH: EDF is involved in small-scale fisheries all over the world
One approach that has worked well is to allow fishers to measure their fish catches.
“When fishers back up their observations with data, they can influence the regulators to help set sustainable limits on catches,” says Chris Cusack who leads EDF’s oceans technology initiatives. In the economically important blue swimming crab fishery in Lampung province of Indonesia, Cusack’s team distributed a smartphone app that allows fishers to report the size of their catch to local monitors, who then compile the data for managers to use when setting policy.
Fishing communities in Chile are now also using the app to monitor the stocks of sierra, a staple fish that’s cooked daily in many households up and down the Chilean coast.
Other emerging technologies like GPS trackers and on-board video cameras offer the promise of better information, and better decision-making.
To get a broader picture and support data-informed policymaking, EDF recently created SAPO (Sistema de Alerta, Predicción y Observación), the Humboldt Current’s first early warning system for climate impacts on fisheries. Onshore and on the high seas, vast amounts of data are collected each day from hundreds of instruments in Chile, Ecuador and Peru.
This project will lead to more collaborative and collaborative fishery management in the three countries.
“Our goal is to put this climate science into the hands of governments, coastal communities and artisanal fishers so they can take climate-smart actions,” says Erica Cunningham, who leads EDF Oceans’ work in Latin America.
A sustainable aquaculture can feed the hungry world
Many environmentalists believe that sustainably farmed fish could help meet a growing population’s demand for protein.
“With capture fisheries so close to their limits there’s broad recognition that most of the growth in seafood production will need to come from well-managed aquaculture.” says Jim Leape, co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. “The problem is that aquaculture relies too much on wild fish for feed.”
That’s a big problem, with about 25% of the world’s wild-caught fish now being converted to meal for farmed fish and other animals. Researchers are currently looking at alternative food sources. But, it may be possible to reduce dependence on wild-caught seafood meal by farming species that are lower up the food chain.
Conservationists agree that industrial fish farms require better oversight, better waste management, new technologies for recirculating water, and improved oversight. Aquaculture can be a valuable contributor to local economies and diets if it is managed well. For example, in Bangladesh, researchers discovered that increasing the number of small, nutritious, native fish in household ponds could provide significant health benefits, as they would prevent vitamin A deficiencies.
Whether the subject is farmed or wild-caught seafood, there’s a palpable urgency to the conversation about the role of blue foods in sustainably feeding people and fighting climate impacts — a conversation that fishers like Carlos Chapilliquén say is essential and long overdue.
“God gave us this beautiful sea and filled it with life,” Chapilliquén says. “Now it’s up to us to defend her.”
This article appears in the Spring 2022 issue of EDF’s Solutions magazine. Register with EDF to receive the magazine free of charge!
