Why Did the California Sardine Disappear?
and Other Mysteries of the Deep
By Giulio Pontecorvo

The end of one century and the beginning of the next provide us a vantage point to look back and see how fisheries policy and practice have evolved over the last 50 years and to articulate what is likely to happen in the proximate future. This discussion will focus on the role played by the United Nations and its agency, FAO. Space does not permit more than a passing reference to such unique contributions made by the United Nations in the crafting of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, ratified as an international law and accepted as customary international law by the United States and a few other non-signatory nations.

Today, we are bombarded by reminders of the crises-real and imagined-involving the deteriorating condition of the world’s oceans: increasing levels of pollution, destruction of habitat in coastal zones, and the vanishing fish. No one can deny that a number of key fisheries are in a desperate state, e.g. the Northwest Atlantic cod. But how they got that way and what to do about it is a complex story. The United Nations has been involved in the management of commercial fisheries in three major ways: developing the articles on fisheries contained in the Law of the Sea Convention; ongoing negotiations involving numerous fisheries treaties; and through the work of the FAO Fisheries Division. The evolution of FAO since it became part of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War gives us a key to understanding some of the problems of fisheries today.

Its first major contribution was the development of a worldwide statistical reporting system. For the first time, it was possible to know the physical volume of fish caught, what fish and other organisms made up the catch, where it was caught and who were the major fishing nations.

Over the years, this system has been improved and refined. Now it is available electronically and is the principal aggregate measure of the status of the world's fish resources. However, looking forward, there is still a pressing need to expand the data set primarily to include more economic information, which is needed for management and the modelling of the economies of fisheries. Unfortunately, FAO is dependent upon the fishing nations to supply this economic and all other data, so that it can only compile what the nations are willing to supply.

FAO has made progress in other areas as well. Initially, its mission was primarily to assist developing nations improve their fisheries. This activity continues and has helped many nations expand their fishing effort. However, with the growing recognition of the need to conserve fish stock, the agency has expanded its research activity in order to better understand the complexity of the fishery problem. Some of the research work has focussed on explaining the limits between the size of particular stocks of fish (small pelagils, sardines, anchovettas) and climatic change, especially the well-known southern oscillation, the El Niño. This helps account for the great changes in the catch of these fish, e.g. the disappearance of the California sardine, and for the enormous fluctuations in the landings of anchovettas on the west coast of South America.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the United Nations was involved in negotiating the Law of the Sea Convention. Since then, it has followed two lines in the area of fisheries: the treaties which involved conservation agreements, and transboundary and straddling stocks. Keeping in mind that the Convention allows for extended fishing zones of up to 200 miles, this left many stocks divided among several nations. It also lift certain areas, among them the so-called “donut” note in the North Pacific, where important fisheries were beyond any national jurisdiction. The work in treaties has been aimed at adjudicating these claims. A parallel development is the concept of “responsible fishing”, more specifically the International Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing, developed by FAO and adopted in 1995. The purpose of the Code is to reduce fishing pressure by making all fishing nations cognizant of the need to conserve fish.

The last 50 years has seen the United Nations and FAO move from where the emphasis was on fishery development to a strong commitment to conservation. This has been implemented through treaty negotiation and by reaching agreements among the fishing nations. Further, there has been increased recognition of the need for research into the causes, both economic (overfishing) and biological (regime shifts), of the reduction and collapse of fish stocks.

Given the current situation, with excessive numbers of fishermen and vessels pursuing the declining number of fish, it is likely that the next 25 years will see increased research into the causes of the decline in the stocks of ocean fish and the need to conserve them through treaties and other types of international negotiations.