Europe’s Appetite For Seafood and Overfishing Threatening Domestic Industry Sustainability

Decades of European overfishing is now reaching crisis levels. Without new sustainability regulations in place, the European Union’s fishing industry continues to overexploit its waters, and now needs to increasingly depend on imported fish to meet domestic consumer demands.

Overfishing in European Union waters. Cartoon from the World Wildlife Fund.

“EU catches have steadily declined since 1993 at an average rate of two percent per year,” according to the new report, Fish Dependence - 2011 Update: Increasing reliance of the EU on fish from elsewhere, by the nef and the OCEAN2012 alliance.

The report finds that as the EU’s domestic fish populations continue to decline, “fish consumption in the EU continues to increase and remains at levels beyond what EU waters can produce.” It estimates that Europeans eat about 29 percent more seafood that the global average.

This trend is having both a devastating effect on the ecology of the EU’s domestic waters and on the ability of EU states to maintain profitability in their fishing industries.

If this trend continues, it means less fish for European consumers, and higher prices for the fish. For decades, the EU has had to import a portion of its fish supplies to meet consumer demands, and every year that number has grown.

In the most recent available figures, “the EU imported $23 billion worth of fish and fisheries products from non-EU suppliers in 2007, an increase of 11 percent of 2006.”

These are the most recently available number, because as the authors explain within the report, “there is a delay of around three years for data reporting. As a consequence, most of our datasets are from 2007/08. We therefore make the assumption in this report that similar conditions hold for 2011.”

The report shows a long and continued decline in the EU’s ability to maintain self-sufficiency in supplying its own domestic consumers with their seafood needs. Overall, the EU has gone from about 67 percent self-sufficiency in 1990 to about 50 percent self-sufficiency in 2007 – a 25 percent drop in 17 years.

It’s also important to mention where the EU is getting its imported fish from, and what’s the impact on those countries.  “A significant portion of EU fish imports come from developing countries,” said the report.

At the global level, more than half of the $57.7 billion worth of fish products traded in 2004 came from developing countries. The report finds that besides the challenges to developing countries in getting good returns on their products, it also contributes to the malnutrition of their poorest people. Fish is a major source of protein in developing counties.

“There is evidence that in some cases fish supply is being diverted away from vulnerable people in developing counties,” said the report, adding that, “Moreover, there is worrying evidence that this decline (in fish protein) is not being offset by any other forms of animal protein, despite the region potentially benefiting economically from trade.”

The poor in developing countries though are not the only ones being hurt.

The report recommended that for the sake of its own food security, employment, and ecological health, that the EU put regulations in place to “replenish its own fish stocks,” with any excess demands to be satisfied by well-regulated and mutually beneficial trade with developing countries.

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