I listened to Costing the Earth, a BBC Radio 4 program two weeks ago about the state of the English fishing industry. One aspect of the program that I found astonishing was the amount of discards involved in the process of commercial fishing.
Discards are the fish that the commercial fishing industry have to throw back into the sea – in most cases as near or already dead fish – as they are above any of their specific quotas.
To give you some idea of how much these discards amount to, it is estimated that 0ver 24,000 tons (approx. 60,000) of fish were discarded between 2002 and 2005. See this Telegraph article for more details.
That’s a lot dead fish! When I hear so much spoken about fish conservation, why are first catching them, then throwing them back dead when they could easily be landed.
It seems a very crazy situation and if you run a Google on “commercial fishing in the UK discards“ it seems that many other people think the same.
Something must be done about this awful waste of a fast running out resource.
Beasley's Place 