Fish

Fishery Protection Measures Marred By ‘Massive Conflicts Of Interest’

July 9, 2024 Brigitte Wear, Hazel Healy and Michaela Herrmann, DeSmog. Educate! Africa, Animals, Aquaculture, Environment, Fish, greenwashing, West Africa

Flagship initiatives to ensure “responsible sourcing” for the global aquafeed industry in West Africa are being undermined by systemic conflicts of interest, endangering efforts to safeguard critical fish stocks, DeSmog can reveal. The findings raise concerns at a time of growing evidence of the harms caused by the fishmeal industry in the region, prompting accusations of “greenwashing” from campaigners. In the last decade, factories producing fishmeal and fish oil – the engine of the carnivorous fish farming industry – have proliferated along the West African coastlines of Mauritania, Senegal and The Gambia.

DeSmog Launches Industrial Aquaculture Project

June 8, 2023 Hazel Healy, DeSmog. Educate! Environment, Fish, Sustainability, World Oceans Day

At first glance, fish might seem like a climate-friendly alternative to meat for a world that needs to shift away from carbon-intensive cattle. At least the seafood farming (or ‘aquaculture’) industry would have you see it that way. Right now the market for farmed fish like salmon is booming. In fact it’s the fastest-growing food sector in the world. This is thanks in no small part to excellent marketing that brands this fish as the ‘chicken of the sea’: low-carbon, easy to cook and sustainable. But there’s a hitch with this ‘sustainable protein’ spin. Like other intensive farming sectors, aquaculture has been dogged by controversy, and accused of varied ecological and social harms including animal welfare concerns, pollution and highly complex, extractive supply chains, which source the feed that farmed fish rely on.

Save The Columbia, Save The Salmon

November 17, 2017 Staff, lrinspire.com Resist! Environment, Fish, Rivers

By Staff of LRInspire - The Columbia Salmon and Trout were already struggling. Dams, overfishing and polluted waters are just three examples of human activity that have had a devastating impact on the rivers fish life. Dams, for instance, have prevented access to at least 55% of the natural spawning grounds for the River fish. The Columbia is also one of the most consistently overfished bodies of water in the United States according to the Pacific Fishery Management Council. In 2014 the Columbia River Keeper’s identified many of the major pollutants in the River. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) which are industrial products or chemicals that were banned as long ago as 1979 still contaminate our rivers. High levels of these were detected in the Columbia at a concentration 27,000% above levels the EPA considers safe for unrestricted consumption. Mercury levels were at a level over 300% EPA safe level. Also present were heavy metals such as chromium and lead as well as Endochrine disrupting toxic flame retardants. Raw Sewage. Moreover, we learned, it’s the wanton indifference to the cycle of life that hurts the most. This was never more true than with the events of the 5 and 25th of October which prompted this gathering. On the 5th half a million gallons of feces, urine and detergent-rich laundry waste was released into the Columbia River. 20 days later, another 100,000 gallons of raw sewage was released in a mere 15 minutes.

Hydropower Dams Threaten One-Third Of The World’s Freshwater Fish

January 13, 2016 Elizabeth Grossman, www.earthisland.org Educate! Dams, Environment, Fish, Hydropower

By Elizabeth Grossman for Earth Island Journal - Three of the world’s most important tropical river basins — the Amazon, the Congo and the Mekong — are experiencing an unprecedented boom in the construction of hydropower dams. According to a paper by more than three dozen scientists from universities, research institutions and conservation organizations around the world, which will be pubished tomorrow in Sciencemagazine, these projects pose a major threat to biodiversity, including to one-third of all the world’s freshwater fish species. The authors say long-term impacts of tropical hydropower projects are rarely assessed adequately and call for better — and more transparent — planning that more accurately evaluates the full costs of these dams.

World’s Oceans Face ‘Irreparable Damage’

July 9, 2014 The Real News, www.therealnews.com Educate! Environment, Fish, Oceans, pollution

There are a number of things happening to the ocean, and one of them is the fish in the ocean. And there has been and continues to be quite a lot of overfishing. And more and more we see that the catch we are getting from the ocean is stabilizing more even declining overall globally. But for some specific fisheries, there have been collapses in it, and the classical one is the cod stocks off Newfoundland in Eastern Canada. So there are some collapses and overall resistible stabilizing of global catches because there's no more place to go fishing in. We started fishing by the coasts, rather close to the coasts. And as those were depleted, we kept moving further into the ocean and deeper. And now there's no place to go. What this means is that the fishing effort, that is, the amount of people and machines we take out to catch fish, is increasing whiles we are getting less and less back in terms of returns. So that is on the fish side. And then, when you move into the marine pollution, there's a lot of debris, plastic being absorbed or taken in by the ocean. And this has huge consequences, right? Some of these things stay in the water forever almost, and they split and become very little pieces of plastic that the fish see and think is food, is algae, and then they eat them, and there are consequences all over.

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