September 24, 2105 — “The report states that 61% of commercial fish stocks are fully exploited misleadingly implying that these stocks are overfished and not sustainably exploited,” said Europêche Managing Director Kathryn Stack. “In fact, if we look at the FAO report in question, it clearly states that over 70% of global fish stocks are within biologically sustainable levels (below or at MSY levels i.e. full exploitation, which incidentally is the objective of the CFP and many RFMOs by 2020)**. It is unacceptable that an organisation such as WWF can be allowed to distort information which has a huge impact on the fishing sector’s reputation.”
The report has also been widely criticised for its inaccuracies with Australian Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture Richard Colbeck labelling it as ‘one of a string of misleading campaigns aimed at scaring people into making donations, rather than educating the public.’
The statistics used change spectacularly when the changes are unweighted.
“It has been previously pointed out this week that the apparent huge declines are in fact linked to other species,” Kathryn Stack explained. “So the combination of a huge drop in one particular species of bird and a healthy fish population would result in a huge drop in both species, which is not necessarily the case.”
Read the full report at Fishing News International