Introduction

Fishing has always been seen as a sustainable source of food in the world. In many country’s it has played as one of the greatest factors to bring in financial revenue, feeding people and jobs. Due to the nearly impossible task of counting fish people have always believed that fish was an endless supply of food, it was like a crop field where you can take as much as you like and next season here will be more. In South Africa whole communities have been formed from fishing. Over the past few years fish has become ever growing in popularity. With things like sushi and eastern cuisine becoming ever popular and sort after in South Africa, this means more and more fish are to be caught to meet the demand. But in reality the supply is nowhere near the demand.

An interesting case study is that of the cod in Canada: “In north America in the early eighteen hundreds when people were still going over to America from Europe, in Canada a small fishing community arose and the caught cod, there was endless amounts of it. In the late 80’s the government realised that there was almost no cod left so they ordered that it was illegal to catch cod, in less than twenty-four hours thousands of people lost their jobs. This was one of the first time that the world had noticed that the ocean was not an endless pot of fish and that was the first time a government had issued some form of fishing law to stop the complete depletion of a breed of fish.” (End of the line, Directed by Rupert Murry, national geographic, 2010)

In this academic essay, I will be looking at what types of fishing is being practiced and which ones are harming the environment, I will look at who are the main players when it comes to over fishing and how they are getting away with it, I will take a look at what fish are endangered according to the South African sustainable seafood initiative (sassi) list of fish and which ones are local in south Africa, I will look at how over fishing affects ecosystems and communities around the world, I will look how the media has tried to bring this to peoples attention and how it has been received, Finally I will look at methods that are on a small scale but are trying to solve this environmental issue, this will tie into my conclusion of my findings.