Overfishing depleting world's stock

Is anyone not aware that wild fish are in deep trouble? That three-quarters of commercially caught species are over-exploited or exploited to their maximum? Do they not know that industrial fishing is so inefficient that a third of the catch, some 32 million tonnes a year, is thrown away? For every ocean prawn you eat, fish weighing 10-20 times as much have been thrown overboard. These figures all come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which also claims that, of all the world's natural resources, fish are being depleted the fastest. With even the most abundant commercial species, we eat smaller and smaller fish every year - we eat the babies before they can breed.

Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at York University, predicts that by 2050 we will only be able to meet the fish protein needs of half the world population: all that will be left for the unlucky half may be, as he puts it, 'jellyfish and slime'. Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has, he and most scientists agree, led to 'ecological meltdown'. Whole biological food chains have been destroyed.

Many of those fish you can see in such glorious abundance in Spanish markets - and on our own supermarket shelves - come not from European seas but from the coasts of the continents of the poor: Africa, South America and parts of Asia. Fishermen have always roamed far afield - the Basques began fishing the great cod populations off Newfoundland at least 500 years ago. And when serious shortages in traditional stocks around Europe began to be commercially apparent 30 years ago, the trawler fleets began to move south.