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Fish stocks in the world's seas are now so low that even
politicians are worried. So is it still okay to eat them?
Becky Hogge went to meet Nicky Rohl, director of Moshi
Moshi, one of Britain's top Japanese restaurants, and
a keen environmentalist, to find out.
It's
a fact: fish-eating cultures live-longer. The Japanese,
for example, have the lowest level of heart disease in
the industrialised world, and their fish consumption is
one of the highest. Apparently, it's the high levels of
Omega-3 fatty acids (that's a polyunsaturated fat) which
help prevent heart-disease and strokes. But whilst you're
chewing on those highly digestible proteins, here's a
few more facts that could make you choke:
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70% of the world's commercially important marine stocks
are fully fished, overexploited, depleted or slowly recovering.
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Worldwide, governments pay an estimated $54 billion per
year in fisheries' subsidies to an industry that catches
only $70 billion worth of fish.
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Contemporary fishing practices kill and waste 18-40 million
tonnes of unwanted fish, seabirds, sea turtles, marine
mammals and other ocean life annually - one-third of the
total world catch.
It
was facts like these which Nicky Rohl, director of Japanese
fish restaurant Moshi Moshi, stumbled upon when he started
to dig deeper into the environmental issues behind the
fish industry. "I was hearing these impossibly apocryphal
stories, that I'm sure were quite accurate, that $150,000
was being paid for one blue-fin tuna by the Japanese."
The population of blue-fin, the largest in the tuna family
is, like many of the world's fish, well below biologically
safe limits. As a result of over-fishing, these fish have
no chance of getting themselves back to a safe level,
and in some areas of the world, have disappeared entirely.
It is the first exit onto the highway to extinction.
Blue-fin
tuna has been taken off the menu at Moshi Moshi; Nicky
intends to make his fish policy an environmentally safe
one. "It has instigated us to look at what we, as
one of the prime fish purveyors in this country, can do
to try and educate people and other restaurants about
fish. We want to try to come to a working arrangement
with our fish suppliers so that we don't feel that we
are contributing to the decrease in stocks. We're conducting
an environmental audit as we speak and, for example, we're
going to choose the fish supplier that is leading the
gang in terms of environmental concerns." They are
also hoping to sponsor the WWF to come up with a project
which will help contribute to a more sustainable sea.
Moshi
Moshi is not the only high profile fish restaurant to
be taking environmental advice. Luxury fish restaurant
Fish! have hired their own consultant, William Black,
who says in his book Fish (written jointly with Sophie
Griegson): "It is a complex and highly politicised
debate, but there are some fundamental principles to bear
in mind. However fish are caught it is important that
a viable population is left in order to reproduce and
maintain the ecosystem. It is, for example, technically
possible to make fishing more selective. Nets can be fitted
with special panels to allow juvenile fish to escape.
Long lines can be made less destructive to sea birds.
Turtle Excluding Devices (TEDs), whale and dolphin warning
devices all exist, but must be combined with an overall
policy that is effective, relevant and applicable."
But after all this, is the best policy just to stop eating
fish? Though possibly not the best question to ask a fish
restaurateur, I put it to Nicky. "Well, the WWF thinks
that the solution is not to stop eating fish. And I think,
in very simple terms, what they are promoting is the eating
of fish caught in local waters. As much as possible people
should be eating fish that is caught by your local fisherman,"
he says. That means frozen cod wrapped in breadcrumbs
from the supermarket is out. But all too often local fishermen
are too busy collecting their dole cheques to sell you
any fish, thanks to a heady mix of 1998's Common Fisheries
Policy (CFP) and the ever stricter fishing quotas dictated
by the EC.
Whilst
big-business can afford to stay afloat and to keep its
voice heard above the swell, when faced with a restricted
catch, not to mention frugal early retirement packages
courtesy of the EC, many local fishermen have hung up
their nets. And, as Nicky points out, "It's the big
multi-national companies that are doing the damage. These
huge trawlers are going out there, huge drift-nets, and
they're harvesting the sea. With these nets, all of the
smaller fish and the different species that you can't
sell, are thrown out, especially if they don't conform
to the quota. And just to put things into context, it's
thought that up to 30% of the fish catch is thrown away.
So 30% of the catch is dead meat."
As
The Insight went to press, the EC fisheries commission,
headed by Franz Fischler (I kid you not), was announcing
its toughest cuts in fishing quotas yet, with some areas
having their quotas reduced by 55%. However, thanks to
Mr Fischler's World Trade Organisation-friendly outlook,
there's still no discrimination made between multi-national
fishing operations and local fishing enterprise. That
will have to wait until the CFP is reviewed in 2002, when
organisations like WWF will be rallying for radical change,
including the raising of some fishing sites in the UK
and abroad to conservation status.
Still,
there's plenty more fish in... oh sugar!
copyright New Insight 2001
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