Just happened to be thumbing through an April 2007 NatGeo and came across a few stats about our fisheries that caught my eye:
- Estimated 40 million sharks killed annually for their fins
- Global fish catch ~100 million tons (as of 2004)
- Bluefin tuna fished at 4x sustainable rate in the Mediterranean for sushi markets
- In longline fishing, discarded bycatch makes up nearly 30% of the take
- 12 species of shark are commercially extinct in the Mediterranean
- Catches in the northwest Pacific have been declining by more than 3% per year since 1998
- Closed since the early 1990s, the Grand Banks cod fishery shows few signs of recovery
- More than 33% of the world’s fish stocks are overfished
- World tuna catch in 2004 reached 6 million metric tons
