All fished out

Pakistan has a generally poor record when it comes to the abuse of natural resources and one has only to look at the disastrous deforestation in the north of the country for evidence of that. Now another natural resource, this time fish, is revealed as being over-exploited and in danger. It appears that around 10 per cent of species native to our marine and brackish waters have disappeared. Several species of fish that were common in the 1980s are no longer there according to fishermen and officials of the fisheries department in Sindh. The reasons for this are depressingly familiar. The fishermen themselves are a large part of the problem as they have been using nets of a mesh so fine that little can pass through it. This means that juvenile fish that were spawned in the rivers and creeks of Sindh are caught before maturity, with a consequent decline in stocks.

The other villain is the fisheries department whose job it is to regulate fishing and net-mesh sizes, but unsurprisingly they have been less than diligent to put it mildly. With significant food species going locally extinct and fishery production said to be reduced to 70 per cent of what it was 20 years ago, there are real fears about the long-term security of fishing communities. Fishing is their only source for both income and sustenance in many cases, there is no skills diversity and many thousands of families are going to be at risk in the coming years if urgent action is not taken now. That means halting the sale of illegally-meshed nets; and such laws as there are to regulate fishing actually enforced before this turns into a major human crisis. Fish stocks that have been depleted from overfishing can be restored as the British found when cod was overfished in the North Sea. Drastic conservation methods had to be enforced, and the cod recovered. It is going to be better to endure some short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain; our fish must not be allowed to suffer the same fate as our forests.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th,  2015.

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