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.

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Global Warming’s Double Whammy: Reducing World Crop Yields and Increasing Food Prices

While many people still refuse to believe that global warming is real, the evidence for it continues to slowly grow, bringing frightening consequences – massive food shortages around the world, and skyrocketing prices for what food there is.

Stock photo.

This is especially true for staple crops, like wheat and corn. For most major agricultural countries, rising temperatures have had a damaging effected crop yields, resulting in below normal levels, especially of wheat and corn, said a new study by Stanford University.

David Lobell, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental Earth science at Stanford, said that he and his colleagues examined the temperature and rainfall records of major crop-growing countries over the last 30 years and did a comparative analysis of their crop yields.

The researchers found that global wheat production was 5.5 percent lower than what it would have been had climate remained stable. They also found that global corn production was lower by almost four percent.

Russia, India, and France suffered the greatest drops in wheat production relative to what they might have had without global warming. The largest comparative losses in corn production were seen in China and Brazil.

“Yields in most countries are still going up, but not as fast as we estimate they would be without [these] climate trends,” Mr. Lobell told the Stanford Report.

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