Global fisheries: a brief review

Global fisheries statistics exist since 1950, as part of the United Nations’ effort to generate statistics suitable for monitoring the development of the world economy (Ward, 2004). With some limitation to be discussed later, the statistics assembled and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) allow tracking the growth and expansion of fisheries by country and region of the world, and globally (Fig. 1). In the 1950s and 1960s, fisheries grew enormously in terms of effort whether number of boats, cumulative horsepower of fleets, or other measures. During these two decades, however, the growth of fishing effort led to catches increasing at a rapid rate (Fig. 1). Although the collapse of fisheries as a result of over-fishing had happened previously (e.g. California sardine in the 1950s, Peruvian anchovy in the early 1970s, several stocks of Scandinavian and North Sea herring), they did not alarm the public, as they seemed to be confined to small pelagic fishes, whose volatility was ascribed to environmental factors. Thus, these collapses did not change policy, e.g. in the North Atlantic, and neither did the fact that catches from this area, the birthplace of industrial fisheries, and of fisheries research, peaked in 1975 and have been declining ever since (Pauly & Maclean, 2003). Instead, effort intensified, particularly in deeper waters (Morato et al., 2006). Moreover, the fisheries of the industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere began to spill over into subtropical and tropical waters (see Alder & Sumaila, 2004) and then into the Southern Hemisphere (Pauly et al., 2005). Simultaneously, the countries of what was then called the Third World began to industrialize their fisheries, — INVITED REVIEW —