FISHERIES POLICY IS DESIGNED TO CAUSE A COLLAPSE IN FISH STOCKS. The use of net sizes to control fish stocks is catastrophic. At the moment the system forces you to throw small fish back and keep the big ones. This is absolutely disastrous. A full size Cod (6 feet long) can produce 100’s of millions of eggs, producing 100’s of millions of little fish. We should imitate the natural system and feed on the little fish and leave the big ones. We do the opposite. If this were policy and we had a system to enable it, our fish stocks could recover. To maintain fish stocks al you need is that one full size, fully mature adult survives to replace itself, the worlds fishing policy does not let this happen. Hence fish stocks collapse and sexual maturity and size lowers.
Many fishing fleets out in the open sea will dump catches illegally, so they can make room for a higher valued species if they find it. It happens every day - hundreds, maybe thousands of tonnes of dead fish get chucked back in the name of profit and our "economic model". Laws are mostly unenforceable, though there's at least one perpetrator who is in court here in NZ facing Fisheries and Management (i.e. resource consent) breach of contract charges, and probably stiff penalties. The evidence was collected remotely, by a crew member with a cellphone camera.
