Predictions of future global trends were made by the International Food Policy Research Institute in collaboration with the WorldFish Center (IFPR/ WFC) - "Fish to 2020".1 The study predicted that production and consumption will continue to increase in developing States, but slow down in developed States resulting in an increase in the price of fish, especially fish meal and fish oil, wild fish, and high-value fish (assuming that consumers will not greatly shift their preferences to other commodities such as poultry as fish prices increase).
A Joint WorldFish Center/FAO study has further examined supply and demand for fisheries in five Asian countries, based on a model derived from the WorldFish Asia-Fish model which has been previously used to develop scenarios related to supply and demand of fish in the Asian region. The model has been expanded to incorporate trade in fish and fish products from capture fisheries for feeds in aquaculture. The following scenarios were analysed:
The results of the modelling have shown that, under all scenarios, there will be differential impacts on poor consumers who will be hit by the lower availability of fish and higher prices. A second conclusion was that impacts of the scenarios differed depending on the stage of a country's aquaculture development. When aquaculture is in an early phase of development and the dependency on trash fish and fishmeal is relatively small, simple import substitutions compensate for changes in the supply of fishmeal or trash fish. In contrast, with intermediate development there is likely to be a shift to culture of lower value species or lower intensity production that is less dependent on feed. With highly developed aquaculture, there will be no escape from fishmeal and trash fish price increases. These increases will result not only in impacts on fish prices and production, but will also have wider ripple effects on national economies leading to falls in incomes and consumption. Impacts will be much bigger for China but the scenario in China is very likely to be a problem for other countries in the region as their aquaculture sectors develop.
The study highlighted the importance of management of wild capture fisheries that include greater consideration of low value fish. The development of plant based substitutes for fish based feeds should also be a top priority.
In response to declining inshore resources, many governments in the APFIC region are advocating a policy of moving the fishing effort away from these coastal resources to potentially less exploited ones. However, this represents a continuation of past practices where, globally, a steady expansion of fishing from inshore local regions to further offshore fishing grounds as the local stocks became depleted.
This move may have delayed the inevitable reduction in fishing capacity that the situation dictated as necessary, but it did not solve the problem. As the offshore resources also became more depleted, these fleets either had to move back inshore, thus aggravating the original problem, or move to some other part of the world to fish. Increasing demand from the world to move towards more responsible fisheries has resulted.
Despite this warning many States believe that there is still room to move outwards within the Asia-Pacific region and many States in the region include further expansion into offshore fisheries as part of their future fishery plans. Although the potential is relatively unknown, especially in demersal stocks, it is dangerous to assume that the offshore regions will supply fish in quantities that we are familiar with in inshore regions. It is well known that biological productivity declines exponentially as one moves away from the coast.
Of the 363 million km2 of ocean, in less than seven percent are waters with a depth of less than 200 m, and this continental shelf area accounts for 90 percent of the global fish catch. The rest comes from deep-water demersal fish and highly migratory fish such as tuna that roam the vast desert-like expanse of the open ocean. It is unlikely that this percentage will change dramatically over the next 10-20 years.
There have been some resource surveys for deep-water demersal fish in the region, in particular, those done by India. The Fishery Survey of India (FSI) is responsible for survey and assessment of marine fishery resources of the Indian EEZ. With its headquarters at Mumbai, the Institute has seven operational bases at Porbandar, Mumbai, Mormugao and Cochin along the west coast; Madras and Visakhapatnam along the east coast and Port Blair in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. A total of 12 ocean-going survey vessels have been deployed for fisheries resources survey and monitoring. At the time of writing, FAO did not have access to these results. Experience from other parts of the world, however, has shown that many of the scarce deep water demersal stocks are long-lived (over 100 years) species of low productivity and many have already been overexploited in many temperate waters. FAO's Fishery Committee of the Eastern Central Atlantic (CECAF) has just concluded that "Any exploitation of these (deep water) species should be carefully designed, taking into account the very low level of sustainable yield of these fish populations and the isolation of sea-mount benthic ecosystems."
In terms of the highly migratory tuna species, purse-seine fishery in the Western and Central Pacific (WCPO) has accounted for around 55-60 percent of total catch in the area since the early 1990s, with annual catches in the range of 790 000-1 200 000 tonnes. The majority of the WCPO purse-seine catch (>70 percent) is taken by the four main distant-water fishing fleets (Japan, Republic of Korea, Taiwan Province of China and United States of America), which currently number around 140 vessels.
There has been an increasing contribution from the growing number of Pacific Island domestic vessels in recent years (40 vessels in 2000), with the balance from Philippines fisheries and a variety of other fleets, including a small seasonally active Spanish fleet.
As shown in Chapter 3 (Table 17), the tuna stocks in both the WCPO and in the Indian Ocean, with the exception of skipjack, are all fully or overexploited. Recent studies have also shown that there is considerable overcapacity in the tuna fleets in both these oceans.2 Assessments of the stocks in both the WCPO and the Indian Ocean also highlight the variability in recruitment in the faster growing more productive tuna species (skipjack and yellowf in), driven to a large extent by climatic changes such as El Niño. Scientists warn that because of the multi-species nature of the purse seine and longline fishery, the impacts of fishing on skipjack could have a negative impact on more vulnerable species. In this respect, they advise that the Tuna Commissions should consider how to implement management measures to address over-fishing and alleviate over-fished stock conditions in the future. For APFIC Members this will mean increased competition for the total allowable catch limits that are being imposed.
In summary, it would appear that any expansion into offshore waters will be limited for both pelagic and demersal fisheries, unless more selective fishing gears for tunas can be developed. Overall, therefore, even to maintain the status quo in capture fisheries in the region, especially in terms of providing food security and poverty alleviation for the region's poor, the many issues highlighted in this review will need to be addressed. It is unlikely that any State can do this unilaterally, and a concerted and collaborative effort will be required.
All analyses point to the fact that excess fishing capacity and fishing effort needs to be greatly reduced.
The obvious dilemma in relation to reducing capacity and fishing effort in the Asia-Pacific region is that a large part of the production comes from small-scale operators, and they are often totally dependent on fishery resources for their livelihood. Despite efforts to "modernize" small-scale fisheries in the region, the level of small-scale fishing activity has not decreased. Given the significant contribution that small-scale fisheries make to food security and poverty alleviation, the role of small-scale fisheries and how they fit into the multiple activities of rural economies should be carefully re-examined. Unlike large-scale industrial fisheries, they have low visibility and receive little attention from policy-makers. They are often open access enterprises that contribute little to the national GDP and command little political attention and support through research, subsidies etc. As such, they tend to be dealt with through project work funded by donors.
Small-scale fisheries, however, have a very large potential to improve the contribution that fisheries as a whole make to sustainable development. Policies that support and foster small-scale fisheries, at the expense of more industrialized fisheries, have the advantage of providing both social and economic benefits to a large number of stakeholders in the APFIC region as well as providing an important engine for wealth creation. Including these stakeholders in fisheries co-management is a positive step in this direction and APFIC has been providing considerable support in this endeavour.
The APFIC Regional Workshop on "Mainstreaming fisheries co-management"3 acknowledged that co-management of fisheries is widely practiced in most Asian and Pacific countries, but noted that these were mostly undertaken either through traditional arrangements or on a pilot/ demonstration scale implemented through projects. These pilot/demonstration schemes have shown that economic, social and environmental benefits can be achieved. Countries in Asia and the Pacific are urged to move towards more organized implementation of co-management at local, provincial and national levels, i.e. they should mainstream fisheries co-management. This should build on existing co-management and community-based arrangements where available.
A number of challenges to successful main- streaming of co-management were highlighted which include poverty levels of fishers in the region; limited communication of the benefits of co-management; resource constraints; weak governance frameworks and poor institutional linkages and, importantly, the lack of integration of fisheries management with other policy developments such as decentralization and poverty reduction.
The workshop agreed on a number of strategies and actions to facilitate the mainstreaming of fishery co-management. These were:
Since the yield from capture fisheries is not expected to increase greatly, there is an emphasis being placed on the aquaculture sector's ability to provide increasing quantities of fish to satisfy increasing demand in all regions.
Several conditions must be satisfied in order for aquaculture be able to achieve this expectation. The massive expansion of aquaculture required will need increased production area, as well as greatly increased intensity of production. Obtaining the land and water may be possible if the value of fishery products increases so that aquaculture can challenge other production systems for the use of the feeds, land and water required to effect this production. Alternatively, increased efficiency in the use of water and intensified production will reduce land requirements. The current intensity of production in many States of Asia is such that there is considerable scope for increased production per unit area. However, this will result in increased feed usage and probable increased water requirements.
Strengthening of environmental regulations is also driving aquaculture to limit its effluent outputs and the improved environmental profile of parts of the sub-sector is also being driven by consumer demands. Supermarkets are beginning to impact the way aquaculture operates by requiring a range of ethical, environmental and food safety standards to be met. This tends to focus on the export part of the sector, but domestic supermarkets are also becoming more particular, especially in terms of food safety and product quality.
The current reliance on fish meal as a protein source for aquaculture feeds is a major potential constraint. In looking at the increasing use of low value/trash fish to feed the growth in aquaculture, APFIC convened a regional consultative workshop on "Low value and trash fish in the Asia-Pacific region".4 The main outcome of workshop was an action plan that included:
Aquaculture also currently competes with the livestock sector for fish meal for feeds and we are likely to see different outcomes of this competition depended on price of fish and the ability to become less reliant on fish as a feed input. This puts even more pressure on aquaculture to reduce its reliance on fish meals and increase the efficiency of their utilization. Whilst more efficient use of fish meal is possible, reduced reliance may be more difficult to achieve. In the face of increasing purchasing power of aquaculture feeds, it may be the livestock sector which makes the greater progress towards reducing reliance on fish meals.
The efficient culture of herbivorous/omnivorous fish is already a reality; however, it is apparent that current trends indicate that aquaculture is moving towards higher value species that present greater profit margins. This trend is even being seen in species that are traditionally considered to be relatively low input species such as tilapia. The production of tilapia in several States is moving away from greenwater fertilized systems towards pellet-fed intensified systems.
It is inevitable that as fish prices rise, there will be a tendency for poorer parts of national populations to shift towards cheaper forms of meat such as chicken and pork. The question is whether fish in the Asia-Pacific region will remain a common (and even central) part of the diet of most people or increasingly become a luxury food item.
1 WorldFish Centre (IFPR/WFC) - "Fish to 2020" http://www.worldfishcenter.org/Pubs/fish-to-2020/fish-to- 2020.htm
2 Bayliff W.H, Moreno, Juan Ignacio de Leiva & Majkowski, J. (2005); Management of tuna fishing capacity: conservation and socio-economics. FAO Fisheries Proceedings 2.
3 APFIC, 2005. APFIC Regional consultative workshop on mainstreaming fisheries co-management, Siem Reap, Cambodia, 9-12 August 2005. RAP Publication 2005/23.
4 APFIC, 2005. APFIC Regional workshop on low value and "trash fish" in the Asia-Pacific region. Hanoi, Viet Nam, 7-9 June 2005. RAP Publication 2005/21.
