OSLO (Reuters) – Governments should set a five-year deadline to crack down on over-fishing and pollution or parts of the oceans may have to be declared off-limits to industrial fishing, an expert commission said today.
The Global Ocean Commission, a group of senior politicians formed in 2013, urged rescue measures including a phase-out of damaging subsidies for fishing fleets and tougher regulations on offshore oil and gas to limit pollution of the high seas.
“The oceans are a failed state,” David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary and a co-chair of the commission, told Reuters in a telephone interview. “A previously virgin area has been turned into a plundered part of the planet.”
The report said that many fish stocks in the high seas – an area outside national coastal zones that covers almost half the globe – were under pressure from illegal and unregulated catches.
About 10 million tonnes of fish worth $16 billion, from tuna to molluscs, are caught every year in the high seas out of a global fish catch of 80 million tonnes, the commission said.
It called for a five-year rescue package to tackle threats from over-fishing to pollution. If that did not work, governments should “consider turning the high seas … into a regeneration zone where industrial fishing is prevented,” it said.
Management consultants McKinsey and Co have estimated that the economic cost of closing the high seas to fishing would be $2 per each person on the planet. But closure would be beneficial by causing a $4 rise in fish yields in coastal regions.
Professor Callum Roberts, a marine expert at York University in England, welcomed the commission’s recommendations as a spur for action but cautioned of many past failures to save the seas.
And he said it was disappointing that the Commission was recommending waiting five years before considering regeneration zones. “We need them right now … a call for a total ban on high seas fishing would be entirely justified,” he said.
As part of global efforts to protect the seas, US Secretary of State John Kerry called last week for a global regime to protect the ocean
