Marine Biodiversity, Fisheries, and Food Security Time to Deal with the Elephant (Seal) in the Living Room

No abstracts are to be cited without prior reference to the author.

This talk will first review the major commitments that have been made in international agreements, with regard marine biodiversity. It will highlight the changes in objectives for management and the areas where traditional objectives of fisheries management need to be reconsidered and in some cases adjusted. In general meeting the biodiversity conservations commitments are likely require reductions in harvests by capture fisheries in at least the short term, and possibly medium term, for far more fisheries that it will lead to increased opportunities for harvesting. In the long run as status of exploited stocks improve catches may increase to some extent. However, it is unlikely that in the longer term all biodiversity objectives can be achieved with harvest levels observed in the 1990s and early 2000s. It will then review current projections for future human requirements for food security, and forecasts of the expected trends in food production from traditional crop and livestock sources. The potential impacts of global climate change are also discussed. There are major discrepancies between projected needs for food security and expected productivity from traditional sources. Many planners are looking to fisheries to full an major part of this gap. However harvests available from sustainable fisheries in the setting of current biodiversity objectives will fall far short of those needs. Information on opportunities to substantially increase food production from capture fisheries and aquaculture will be summarized, but the opportunities exist only by shifting capture harvests to lower trophic levels, and greatly increasing intensive aquaculture in coastal areas and freshwater sites. These changes move us further from the biodiversity conservation objectives. The paper offers no clever solution to these issues, but is intended to open a dialogue on where society wants to go in addressing these urgent but incompatible challenges.