TALCAHUANO, Chile – Eric Pineda, a dock agent in this old port south of Santiago, peered deep into the Achernar's hold at a measly 10 tonnes of jack mackerel – the catch after four days in waters once so rich they filled the 17-metre fishing boat in a few hours. Pineda, like everyone here, grew up with the bony, bronze-hued fish they call jurel, which roams in schools in the southern Pacific.
"It's going fast," he said. "We've got to fish harder before it's all gone." Asked what he would leave his son, he shrugged: "He'll have to find something else."
Jack mackerel, rich in oily protein, is manna to a hungry planet, a staple in Africa. Elsewhere, people eat it unaware that much of it is reduced to feed for aquaculture and pigs. It can take more than five kilograms of jack mackerel to raise a single kilogram of farmed salmon.
Stocks have dropped from an estimated 30 million tonnes to less than a tenth of that in two decades. The world's largest trawlers, after depleting other oceans, now head south towards the edge of Antarctica to compete for what is left.
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