Who’s Eating All the Fish? The Food Security Rationale for Culling Cetaceans

In response to the global fisheries crisis, characterized by falling abundances of resource species, falling catches, increasing habitat destruction, and extremely high subsidies, the advocates of whaling have been advancing a new rationale for hunting of marine cetaceans. They claim that marine mammals, particularly the great whales, compete with humans for fish resources; that efforts to protect these whales from extinction have led marine ecosystems to be " out of balance; " and that such balance can only be re-established by large-scale culling. This argument flies in the face of numerous observations on the widely different ecological impacts of fisheries (which tend at first to concentrate on large fishes wherever these can be caught) and marine mammals (which, if they feed on fish, tend to consume smaller individuals). Thus, the decline of the mean trophic levels of fisheries catch over the past 50 years (which is largely similar to mean sizes, as big fish eat smaller ones), is a signature of " fishing down marine food webs " and leaves marine mammals exonerated. Although scientific support for the claims that whales are causing the decline of the world's fisheries is nonexistent, these claims may appeal to officials in various developing countries, where the difficulty and cost of addressing the real causes of the declines of their fisheries resources and fisheries may appear overwhelming. Hence, the reframing of the long-running whaling debate as a global food security issue has proven to be a powerful lobbying tool in enlisting the support of developing countries, although most have no direct interest in whaling. Here, we present another framework for understanding why developing countries experience diminishing supplies of fish: competition from the international market. The rapid economic integration of the world fisheries market over the later half of the 20th century, combined with the expansion of the distant-water fisheries of the developed countries, fuelled by government subsidies, has resulted in the acceleration of the trend wherein fish caught along the coast of developing countries gravitate toward the markets of affluent developed countries. Indeed, one can speak of fish migrating from " the more needy to the less needy. " Our analysis, which identified the final destinations of the fish caught within the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of the coastal countries in the South Pacific, Caribbean, andWest Africa, shows that in all three regions, domestic markets accounted for less than half of the catch, with …