World Fisheries Day

World Fisheries Day is celebrated every year on November 21 (tomorrow) around the globe by fisherfolk communities. Rallies, workshops, public meetings, cultural programs, dramas, exhibition, music shows, and demonstrations of various kinds are intended to highlight the importance of maintaining the world's fisheries.

A recent United Nations study reported that more than two-thirds of the world's fisheries have been overfished or are fully harvested and more than one third are in a state of decline because of factors such as the loss of essential fish habitats, pollution, and global warming.

World Fisheries Day helps in highlighting the critical importance to human lives, of water and the lives it sustains in the sea and on land. Water forms a continuum, whether it's contained in rivers, lakes, or ocean.

Of course, fish forms an important part of the diets of people around the world, particularly those who live near rivers, coasts and other water bodies. A number of traditional societies and communities are rallied around the occupation of fishing.

This is why a majority of human settlements, whether small villages or mega cities, are situated in close proximity to water bodies. Besides the importance of water for survival and as a means of transportation, it is also an important source of fish and aquatic protein.

But this proximity has also led to severe ocean and coastal pollution from run-off and from domestic and industrial activities carried out nearby. The result is a depletion of fish stocks in the immediate vicinity of heavily populated areas, requiring fishers to voyage farther afield from their traditional grounds.

Overfishing and mechanisation has also resulted in crisis in some cases. Fish stocks are being depleted through factory vessels, bottom trawling, and other means of unsustainable fishing methods.

Unless we address these issues collectively, the crisis will deepen. The World Fisheries Day helps to highlight these problems, and moves towards finding solutions to the increasingly interconnected problems we are facing with many fisheries. Sustainability is the key with maintaining fish stocks and everyone from the trawlermen to anglers, co-ops to retail chains and consumers must work together.

A movie titled Drawing the Line, which embraces commercial fishing in Australia and aims to shed light on the facts as that industry sees them, will be screened at Sydney Fish Market on World Fisheries Day (Thursday, November 21).

Photo: Greenpeace