The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports global fish production, from fishing and fish farming, is 142 million tonnes of fish, accounting for 44.9 million jobs.
Excluding aquaculture, approximately 80 million tonnes of fish are caught from marine waters and 10 million tonnes from inland waters. These record global catches have been kept up for over a decade.
The FAO now estimates that:
- 53% of wild marine fish stocks are fully exploited (=bad)
- 28% are overexploited (=worse)
- 3% are depleted (=really really bad, may never recover)
- 1% is recovering (=not good, but some hope)
- 12% are moderately exploited (=ok)
- so only 3% of the world's marine fish stocks are underexploited (=good; but then if it's only 3% maybe its never that good).
Nobody should really be taking fish from any stock that is classified as fully exploited, overexploited, depleted or recovering. Which means that you can only fish from 15% of global marine fish stocks, compared to 40% in the 1970's.
Still, the highest catches in our history are being maintained and 80 million tonnes of fish are still being removed from our oceans every year.
(for the full FAO report see http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i1820e/i1820e00.htm)
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