Years of global fisheries decline masked by bad Chinese data.

• Author: Runyan, Curtis
• Position: Environmental Intelligence - Numbers falsely inflated disguising decline in fish harvest around world - Brief Article

Inflated fish catch reports from China--the world's largest producer of fish--have hidden a decade-long decline in the amount of fish being harvested around the world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Scientists tracking the health of fisheries had long expected global fish catch to taper off around 80 million tons, but the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's annual compilation of government data reported harvests growing to 86 million tons by the late 1990s--driven largely by reports of steadily increasing yields from China.

"This study reconciles what we see at the local level--failing fisheries--with what is happening at the global level--falling catches," said one of the authors, Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia. The fishing industry has long cited increasing harvests as a basis for continued fleet expansion and minimal restrictions on fish catch. "The message here is that our overfishing problems are far more urgent than we even realized," said the University of New Hampshire's Andy Rosenberg, former deputy director of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. "Overfishing is...