End of the line

The first large-scale television screening of a film by the environmental journalist Charles Clover could not have been more timely. The End of the Line, based on his book of the same title, was shown in the UK earlier this month, just ahead of the crucial meeting in Doha where conservationists are hoping to improve the status of several species, including the bluefin tuna. Clover documents the effects of industrial fishing on various wild species, with decimation of stocks of growing numbers of fish. He highlights the illusion that, at the beginning of the decade, data suggesting that wild stocks were rising relentlessly were wrong and had actually been in decline since 1988. " That was the moment the scientific world really woke up to the scale of the problem of overfishing, perhaps the most destructive human influence over 70 per cent of the planet's surface, " he says. " The state of the bluefin tuna today really is an absolute catastrophe, " said Wendy Elliott, species programme manager for the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Gland, Switzerland. " We are seeing an historic decline in the order of 85 to 90 per cent, which is huge, " she said. " And the driver of that decline has been severe overfishing, mostly for trade in particular to the lucrative markets in Japan. " Clover went to New York to show a version of the film to the UN General Assembly last month which he says was well attended. He was bombarded with questions such as 'What can the UN do about fishing?' He also used the screening to point out that the substantial imports of bluefin tuna to the US, mostly for the sushi trade, came from the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. " Scientists have worked out that if we go on fishing without being cleverer about it then all of the world's main commercial fish stocks are likely to be hunted into a state of collapse by the middle decades of this century, " he says. Clover describes the collapse of the cod fishery off northeastern America — once so productive that it provided thousands of jobs. But it collapsed through overfishing and all the conservation measures since have failed to revive it. It is a lesson that appears to be little learned. But Clover's documentary may help sway some opinion in the meeting of the Convention on International …