Systematic distortions in world fisheries catch trends

By R. Watson, Daniel Pauly. Nature, 2001

752 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over 75% of the world marine fisheries catch (over 80 million tonnes per year) is sold on international markets, in contrast to other food commodities (such as rice). At present, only one institution, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) maintains global fisheries statistics. As an intergovernmental organization, however, FAO must generally rely on the statistics provided by member countries, even if it is doubtful that these correspond to reality. Here we show that misreporting by countries with large fisheries, combined with the large and widely fluctuating catch of species such as the Peruvian anchoveta, can cause globally spurious trends. Such trends influence unwise investment decisions by firms in the fishing sector and by banks, and prevent the effective management of international fisheries.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c302c8576df451a251ab26baf102c149e9a063be

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Citations in the corpus

Overfishing of Inland Waters (2005, result): “Watson and Pauly (2001) argued that increases in China's reported marine catch, beginning in the 1980s, were consistent neither with a careful examination of other catch statistics nor with a model based on oceanographic conditions, suggesting instead that catches had been exaggerated .”
The contribution of cephalopods to global marine fisheries: can we have our squid and eat them too? (2010, background): “Their commercial importance has risen dramatically in recent decades (Caddy and Rodhouse 1998; Watson and Pauly 2001), and it has been suggested that cephalopods are one of the last marine resources capable of withstanding substantial expansion in fishery landings (Voss 1973; Boyle and Boletzky…”
Estimating the Worldwide Extent of Illegal Fishing (2009, background): “The worst period for illegal and unreported fishing world wide appears to have been the mid-1990s, driven by a combination of factors: a growing world demand for fish and significant overcapacity of the world’s fishing fleet set against increasing limitation of access to distant water fishing nation”
Fishing down the deep (2006, background): “Not surprisingly, there has been a decline in global fisheries catches since the late 1980s ( Watson and Pauly 2001; Zeller and Pauly 2005) at an approximate rate of 0.4 million tonnes per year.”
Application of macroecological theory to predict effects of climate change on global fisheries potential (2008, neutral): “FAO fisheries statistics rely largely on countries' voluntary reports of their annual fisheries catches, which may not be accurate (see Watson & Pauly 2001, Zeller et al. 2007).”
Applications and needs of fish and shellfish cell culture for disease control in aquaculture (2003, background): “Fisheries have played such a role in many cases, but supply of food fish from capture fisheries is likely to decline with population increase (Rana, 1997; Watson and Pauly, 2001).”
Overfishing and the disappearance of short-beaked common dolphins from western Greece (2008, background): “Prior to this study it had been difficult to document fishing pressure in the study area due to (1) poor reliability of the landing data (Watson & Pauly 2001) — a well-known problem in the wider Mediterranean and in the Hellenic Seas in particular (Stergiou et al. 1997, 1998, Briand 2000) — and (2)…”