“I think that if a product on the supermarket shelf has a label, ‘Proudly brought to you by the international pirates plundering the toothfish of the Southern Ocean’, it wouldn’t sell terribly well. Conversely, if the label said, ‘This comes from a sustainable fishery’, that does have an impact.”
More than a decade ago Dr Keith Sainsbury recognised for the first time the destructive impact of trawling, in this case on the seabed of the North-West Shelf. His work, described in the 2004 Japan Prize citation as “the most scientifically rigorous demonstration”, was central to controls on trawling the shelf. Nets were not forbidden, but held to a level that was sustainable for the seabed.
Many of the world’s wild fisheries have reached their upper limits, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The journal Nature reported that the world had lost more than 90 per cent of all large predator fish – cod, marlin, bluefin tuna and others – to fishing. “We learned from our mistakes on land that managing human uses one at a time is not the way to develop a sustainable marine ecosystem,” Sainsbury said. Instead his prize came for work on using feedback from an ecosystem itself to decide how it should be managed as a whole. It is this problem-solving that has won Dr Sainsbury the 2004 Japan Prize, worth $625,000, for food production based on ecosystem concepts. The prize is considered the highest in the field of ecology and sustainable development.
Point Source