This report from Katherine Martinko at Treehugger caught me off-guard:
Did you know that one-third of all fish caught never makes it to a dinner plate? According to the latest report on the state of the world’s fisheries, released yesterday by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a shocking 35 percent of global catches gets thrown overboard or rots before eating. This is a sobering number, considering the detrimental environmental impact of much of the world’s fisheries, as well as the many people suffering from lack of food. The Guardian reports:
“About a quarter of these losses are bycatch or discards, mostly from trawlers, where unwanted fish are thrown back dead because they are too small or an unwanted species. But most of the losses are due to a lack of knowledge or equipment, such as refrigeration or ice-makers, needed to keep fish fresh.”
An example of the tragedy of the commons, as they say, and the importance of responsible regulation by governmental entities, at least so long as the world remains overpopulated by humans. When it’s just a few small fishing villages, that kind of waste would be unimportant to the prey species, but in today’s world of trawlers and too many mouths, this kind of waste does terrible damage to those species.
