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COMMERCIAL FISHING INDUSTRY

Is there a more sustainable way?

The impact of the commercial fishing industry on sea life and the oceans has been recently explored in the new Netflix documentary ‘’Seaspiracy’’.

Despite receiving critics for lacking scientific evidence, the documentary brings to light issues like overfishing, plastic pollution created by lost fishing gear and questioned advocacy of different environmental organizations which all together are considered to be destroying marine life at a rapid rate.

This leads to the question:

Sustainable fishing can be defined as fishing done in ways that allow the marine environment to grow and thrive. One of the options discussed in many dialogues related to sustainable fishing and also in the documentary itself is to stop fishing.

Although banning finishing would help the oceans to get cleaner, the marine ecosystem to recover and the pollution to reduce, it is a very unrealistic solution. Banning fishing would also mean that millions of people directly employed in the fishing industry would be out of job, which would result in a worldwide crisis.

Implementing no fish zones on the high seas sounds more feasible. It would create protected areas allowing fish stocks to rebuild and marine ecosystems to recover.

Banning fishing trawlers is another alternative. Trawlers use industrial-sized fishing nets to efficiently catch huge amount of fish, however it also catches other marine species that are not intended to be a part of the catch and results in destruction of marine ecosystems.

Another step to more sustainably fishing is making the fishing industry more accountable. Governments should demand more transparency from this industry to ensure that companies fish more responsibly and become more accountable for the problems they are causing in the worlds oceans.

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