11 ms·

In the Philippines, Dynamite Fishing Decimates Entire Ocean Food Chains

134 points by Osiris30 8y ago

rdm_blackhole 8y ago
When I think the human race cannot sink any lower, then I am brought back to reality.
- l5870uoo9y 8y ago
  Well, at least in the European waters fish are recovering beyond expectation.
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    Europeans now sail to Somalia to fish. They are doing terrific damage there, and the local human and animal populations there are suffering food shortages as a result.
    - Pica_soO 8y ago
      Somalis dont eat fish. So yes, here it is a tradition that prefers starvation to using "poor mans" food. https://www.somalispot.com/threads/why-do-somalis-hate-fish-so-much.41520/ https://www.somalispot.com/threads/why-do-somalis-hate-fish-...
      - Pica_soO 8y ago
        In retrospect should have gone into depth here. There are fish dishes, traditional ones in coastal towns. But as the cooling chain is often none-existant, the parts of the country more far away from the coast only eat canned fish or salt-fish. Its general either to expensive, or in danger of being rotten. So if you have a surplus of cattle/sheep/goat, anyone would prefer steak to the health hazard. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiHvrbu7N_bAhUjGZoKHd3-ANgQFgg3MAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fsnau.org%2Fdownloads%2FKAP-Study-Fish-Consumption-in-Somalia.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2kivcwI2HOsUK3kSVHzhYW https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... (Page 5) >wealthy groups in all the areas opt for fresh fish with soft texture contrary to the poor such as those in Afgoye and Adale who consume fish with rough texture and smell because they cost less than other types of fish. Common low quality fish mostly consumed by the poor are Gacoore (Alestes affinis) and Koronto or electric fish in Afgoye. Some respondents in Bardera and Shinile in Hiran admitted dislike for fish due to associated smell therefore do not consume it at all. The quality of fish consumed also depends on preservation and storage methods employed. Generally, the preservation and storage techniques are poor thus most of the fish is consumed immediately after buying. Poor preservation methods and facilities are very often the cause of spoilage.
    - pas 8y ago
      Could you elaborate on this please?
      - jackvalentine 8y ago
        Somalian pirates are the result of international fishing fleets depleting the fish in the area giving the local fishermen few other options. (It’s more complicated than that, but so is everything)
        pas 8y ago
        Sorry, but that explains nothing for me. OP said: Europeans now sail to Somalia to fish. Why would Europeans go so South into the Gulf of Arden? Why would Norwegian fishers go South? What's going on? Where's the data? What are the incentives? Does Somalia have fishing quotas? Is there any anti-overfishing agreement system for that region?
        jackvalentine 8y ago
        Oh you want someone to explain something specific about European nations motivations? I suggest that you then be more specific with your own request. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.html http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00... > Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government in 1991, the country's 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. > High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says. They do it because there were a lot of fish there and no functional government to stop them or enforce quotas.
        8y ago
  - titzer 8y ago
    Select fish species. The cycle of bust/boom inevitably leaves many species behind. Ecosystems are often very finely balanced and the loss of biodiversity is an inevitable result of this. Who knows how much was lost in each cycle; we really don't know.
- candiodari 8y ago
  This is what they're trying to avoid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJL_oLG10dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJL_oLG10dU Do you have a solution ? Note: these people exist, so "don't have kids" is not an answer, obviously, in fact it would make things worse.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
In a world where 8 people have more money than the bottom 3 BILLION people combined. You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.
- lopmotr 8y ago
  Can you explain the causal link between those rich people's greed and this fishing technique? Is it because rich people enabled dynamite to be produced cheaply enough for them?
  - andkon 8y ago
    Exactly. Rich people literally put the dynamite in these people’s hands. That is the only plausible and widely accepted explanation for inequality, and kudos to you for advancing it.
  - bshepard 8y ago
    It's because "richness" creates a pathologically competitive social system that encourages this sort of destruction activity in order to get the token that conveys value.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      I’m going to argue pathologically competitive people are the causative factor rather than richness itself.
      - nickthemagicman 8y ago
        I'm going to argue that lack of resources(caused by inequality) makes people pathologically competitive.
    - lopmotr 8y ago
      You mean rich people are to blame for poor people destroying their environment because the rich people set an example for poor people to aspire to? Have you got a suggestion for a way to solve that problem other than what the Khmer Rouge did? I have. Forbid poor people from becoming rich. By keeping them in fixed economic classes, they won't have the motivation to compete so hard and then the fish will be saved. There are obvious bad side effects of this. Can you improve on it?
bshepard 8y ago
This is a fairly big abstraction, but we live in a world system that's based on discounting unseen externalities; sweeping the hurt under the rug, so to speak. The world-system started with the theft of the American continent and perpetual genocide of the natives, continued with the mass industrialized kidnapping from Africa, and persists today in a cyberpunk, abstracted form that some call "capitalism." There isn't any real name for what we have, the name will come from the next world system, if there is one, a world system where the collective genius of humanity will be free from the constraints of nation, money, gender......
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- immad 8y ago
  This is ridiculous. We live in a generally improving world with declining global poverty, declining child mortality, declining war etc etc. There are still tons of problems but I don’t think such a pessimistic outlook is useful to solving them. We should look for concrete political and technological solutions.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
    >We live in a generally improving world (...) I thin you're unknowingly validating OP thesis. All the improvements you mention are directly affecting mankind. But at what costs did we get these immediate improvements? What are the externalities? At some points, they will have direct, dire consequences on human life. You're probably aware of climate change already (we talk a lot about this, but it's getting worse), but our focus will switch to ecological collapse. "We will see mass extinctions that undermine human well-being". https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03891-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03891-1 Here in Europe, we've already lost 30% of birds' populations, and 80% of insects in 30 years. The loss is accelerating fast. Now, is it possible that the effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity can exceed the improvements you've mentioned initially? Can you discard this hypothesis?
- lopmotr 8y ago
zeristor 8y ago
I take it David Attenborough didn’t cover this in Blue Earth II?
- zeristor 8y ago
  I perfectly valid point. Since he brought attention to astics in the oceans there’s been a consensus to solve this issue. Dynamite fishing is also very destructive, and if it were documented people would be focused on ways to stop it.
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chriselles 8y ago
I’ve seen the results of “fish bombs” in the Solomon Islands. From the use of Coke bottles filled with explosive filler from WWII unexplored ordinance(UXO). While that is pretty bad, the worst thing I saw was bleach used to scare out tropical fish from coral reefs. Seeing the dead white reefs is heart breaking.
vfc1 8y ago
Its by far time for we to leave the fishes of the hook. Dynamite fishing is bad but its just the tip of the iceberg in what concerns the global impact of fishing. What about: - the widespread use of human slaves in southeast Asia still in 2018? - Or the massive ocean dead zones that keep getting bigger? - Or the 25% of by-catch (fish caught unintentionally and discarded)? - or the estimates that certain oceans will be fishless before 2050? - or catching fish like sardines, and instead of eating it directly, to feed it to farmed fish like salmon, at a huge cost and waste All of that for a food that has the highest concentrations of toxins that humans consume, to the point that its no longer recommended to pregnant women. The toxicity of fish is due to bioaccumulation (big fish eats small fish, eats smaller fish etc.), and fish has in many cases the same or even more cholesterol than meat. Plus omega 3 have been shown to not be recommendable to the general population, I think its time we stop eating it its completely unsustainable. Seriously, what kind of planet are we leaving to our kids?
- jazoom 8y ago
  You've got some good points there but also a lot of claims that really should be backed up by solid references.
  - vfc1 8y ago
    You're right, here are some sources. Here is an article on the use of human slaves for fishing in Asia, they get kidnapped in villages in india and many other places, this is happening today, as we speak and at a large scale - http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2102498/tackling-slavery-thai-fishing-industry-one-victim http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/artic... Here is an article on how ocean dead zones quadrupled since 1950 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-suffocating-dead-zones-oxygen-starved https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-s... The fishing industry now impacts 55% of the world oceans - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222162124.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222162124.h... For the health consequences of fish - https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fish/ https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fish/ "Eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy, for example, can lead to more mercury in their infant’s body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines." And from the American Heart Association "Fish oil supplements may help prevent death after a heart attack but lack evidence of cardiovascular benefit for the general population" - https://newsroom.heart.org/news/fish-oil-supplements-may-help-prevent-death-after-a-heart-attack-but-lack-evidence-of-cardiovascular-benefit-for-the-general-population https://newsroom.heart.org/news/fish-oil-supplements-may-hel...
teekert 8y ago
I have the feeling that soon the fishermen will have nothing left to catch and will be forced to let nature recover. I see them just as out of balance predators, killing of their own supply and subsequently they shall die themselves (or be forced into other source of income). Will nature recover? I do think so.
- dayofthedaleks 8y ago
  It's nice to think the market would solve this but you're basically describing the Horn of Africa, where overfishing has led to piracy because no other viable options exist. Meanwhile depletion continues by the last desperate fishermen who didn't turn pirate.
drak0n1c 8y ago
Why is fish farming so controversial? Overfishing will stop once factory farming makes it unprofitable. Are the downsides really worth hamstringing the development of a potentially ocean-saving industry?

134 points by Osiris30 8y ago

rdm_blackhole 8y ago

When I think the human race cannot sink any lower, then I am brought back to reality.

l5870uoo9y 8y ago
Well, at least in the European waters fish are recovering beyond expectation.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Europeans now sail to Somalia to fish. They are doing terrific damage there, and the local human and animal populations there are suffering food shortages as a result.
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    Somalis dont eat fish. So yes, here it is a tradition that prefers starvation to using "poor mans" food. https://www.somalispot.com/threads/why-do-somalis-hate-fish-so-much.41520/ https://www.somalispot.com/threads/why-do-somalis-hate-fish-...
    - Pica_soO 8y ago
      In retrospect should have gone into depth here. There are fish dishes, traditional ones in coastal towns. But as the cooling chain is often none-existant, the parts of the country more far away from the coast only eat canned fish or salt-fish. Its general either to expensive, or in danger of being rotten. So if you have a surplus of cattle/sheep/goat, anyone would prefer steak to the health hazard. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiHvrbu7N_bAhUjGZoKHd3-ANgQFgg3MAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fsnau.org%2Fdownloads%2FKAP-Study-Fish-Consumption-in-Somalia.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2kivcwI2HOsUK3kSVHzhYW https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... (Page 5) >wealthy groups in all the areas opt for fresh fish with soft texture contrary to the poor such as those in Afgoye and Adale who consume fish with rough texture and smell because they cost less than other types of fish. Common low quality fish mostly consumed by the poor are Gacoore (Alestes affinis) and Koronto or electric fish in Afgoye. Some respondents in Bardera and Shinile in Hiran admitted dislike for fish due to associated smell therefore do not consume it at all. The quality of fish consumed also depends on preservation and storage methods employed. Generally, the preservation and storage techniques are poor thus most of the fish is consumed immediately after buying. Poor preservation methods and facilities are very often the cause of spoilage.
  - pas 8y ago
    Could you elaborate on this please?
    - jackvalentine 8y ago
      Somalian pirates are the result of international fishing fleets depleting the fish in the area giving the local fishermen few other options. (It’s more complicated than that, but so is everything)
      - pas 8y ago
        Sorry, but that explains nothing for me. OP said: Europeans now sail to Somalia to fish. Why would Europeans go so South into the Gulf of Arden? Why would Norwegian fishers go South? What's going on? Where's the data? What are the incentives? Does Somalia have fishing quotas? Is there any anti-overfishing agreement system for that region?
        jackvalentine 8y ago
        Oh you want someone to explain something specific about European nations motivations? I suggest that you then be more specific with your own request. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.html http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00... > Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government in 1991, the country's 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. > High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says. They do it because there were a lot of fish there and no functional government to stop them or enforce quotas.
        8y ago
- titzer 8y ago
  Select fish species. The cycle of bust/boom inevitably leaves many species behind. Ecosystems are often very finely balanced and the loss of biodiversity is an inevitable result of this. Who knows how much was lost in each cycle; we really don't know.
candiodari 8y ago
This is what they're trying to avoid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJL_oLG10dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJL_oLG10dU Do you have a solution ? Note: these people exist, so "don't have kids" is not an answer, obviously, in fact it would make things worse.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

In a world where 8 people have more money than the bottom 3 BILLION people combined. You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.

lopmotr 8y ago
Can you explain the causal link between those rich people's greed and this fishing technique? Is it because rich people enabled dynamite to be produced cheaply enough for them?
- andkon 8y ago
  Exactly. Rich people literally put the dynamite in these people’s hands. That is the only plausible and widely accepted explanation for inequality, and kudos to you for advancing it.
- bshepard 8y ago
  It's because "richness" creates a pathologically competitive social system that encourages this sort of destruction activity in order to get the token that conveys value.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    I’m going to argue pathologically competitive people are the causative factor rather than richness itself.
    - nickthemagicman 8y ago
      I'm going to argue that lack of resources(caused by inequality) makes people pathologically competitive.
  - lopmotr 8y ago
    You mean rich people are to blame for poor people destroying their environment because the rich people set an example for poor people to aspire to? Have you got a suggestion for a way to solve that problem other than what the Khmer Rouge did? I have. Forbid poor people from becoming rich. By keeping them in fixed economic classes, they won't have the motivation to compete so hard and then the fish will be saved. There are obvious bad side effects of this. Can you improve on it?

bshepard 8y ago

This is a fairly big abstraction, but we live in a world system that's based on discounting unseen externalities; sweeping the hurt under the rug, so to speak. The world-system started with the theft of the American continent and perpetual genocide of the natives, continued with the mass industrialized kidnapping from Africa, and persists today in a cyberpunk, abstracted form that some call "capitalism." There isn't any real name for what we have, the name will come from the next world system, if there is one, a world system where the collective genius of humanity will be free from the constraints of nation, money, gender......

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
immad 8y ago
This is ridiculous. We live in a generally improving world with declining global poverty, declining child mortality, declining war etc etc. There are still tons of problems but I don’t think such a pessimistic outlook is useful to solving them. We should look for concrete political and technological solutions.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  >We live in a generally improving world (...) I thin you're unknowingly validating OP thesis. All the improvements you mention are directly affecting mankind. But at what costs did we get these immediate improvements? What are the externalities? At some points, they will have direct, dire consequences on human life. You're probably aware of climate change already (we talk a lot about this, but it's getting worse), but our focus will switch to ecological collapse. "We will see mass extinctions that undermine human well-being". https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03891-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03891-1 Here in Europe, we've already lost 30% of birds' populations, and 80% of insects in 30 years. The loss is accelerating fast. Now, is it possible that the effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity can exceed the improvements you've mentioned initially? Can you discard this hypothesis?
lopmotr 8y ago

zeristor 8y ago

I take it David Attenborough didn’t cover this in Blue Earth II?

zeristor 8y ago
I perfectly valid point. Since he brought attention to astics in the oceans there’s been a consensus to solve this issue. Dynamite fishing is also very destructive, and if it were documented people would be focused on ways to stop it.

ericnyamu 8y ago

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plmkijnhyt 8y ago

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54646463 8y ago

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chriselles 8y ago

I’ve seen the results of “fish bombs” in the Solomon Islands. From the use of Coke bottles filled with explosive filler from WWII unexplored ordinance(UXO). While that is pretty bad, the worst thing I saw was bleach used to scare out tropical fish from coral reefs. Seeing the dead white reefs is heart breaking.

vfc1 8y ago

Its by far time for we to leave the fishes of the hook. Dynamite fishing is bad but its just the tip of the iceberg in what concerns the global impact of fishing. What about: - the widespread use of human slaves in southeast Asia still in 2018? - Or the massive ocean dead zones that keep getting bigger? - Or the 25% of by-catch (fish caught unintentionally and discarded)? - or the estimates that certain oceans will be fishless before 2050? - or catching fish like sardines, and instead of eating it directly, to feed it to farmed fish like salmon, at a huge cost and waste All of that for a food that has the highest concentrations of toxins that humans consume, to the point that its no longer recommended to pregnant women. The toxicity of fish is due to bioaccumulation (big fish eats small fish, eats smaller fish etc.), and fish has in many cases the same or even more cholesterol than meat. Plus omega 3 have been shown to not be recommendable to the general population, I think its time we stop eating it its completely unsustainable. Seriously, what kind of planet are we leaving to our kids?

jazoom 8y ago
You've got some good points there but also a lot of claims that really should be backed up by solid references.
- vfc1 8y ago
  You're right, here are some sources. Here is an article on the use of human slaves for fishing in Asia, they get kidnapped in villages in india and many other places, this is happening today, as we speak and at a large scale - http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2102498/tackling-slavery-thai-fishing-industry-one-victim http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/artic... Here is an article on how ocean dead zones quadrupled since 1950 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-suffocating-dead-zones-oxygen-starved https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-s... The fishing industry now impacts 55% of the world oceans - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222162124.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222162124.h... For the health consequences of fish - https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fish/ https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fish/ "Eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy, for example, can lead to more mercury in their infant’s body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines." And from the American Heart Association "Fish oil supplements may help prevent death after a heart attack but lack evidence of cardiovascular benefit for the general population" - https://newsroom.heart.org/news/fish-oil-supplements-may-help-prevent-death-after-a-heart-attack-but-lack-evidence-of-cardiovascular-benefit-for-the-general-population https://newsroom.heart.org/news/fish-oil-supplements-may-hel...

teekert 8y ago

I have the feeling that soon the fishermen will have nothing left to catch and will be forced to let nature recover. I see them just as out of balance predators, killing of their own supply and subsequently they shall die themselves (or be forced into other source of income). Will nature recover? I do think so.

dayofthedaleks 8y ago
It's nice to think the market would solve this but you're basically describing the Horn of Africa, where overfishing has led to piracy because no other viable options exist. Meanwhile depletion continues by the last desperate fishermen who didn't turn pirate.

drak0n1c 8y ago

Why is fish farming so controversial? Overfishing will stop once factory farming makes it unprofitable. Are the downsides really worth hamstringing the development of a potentially ocean-saving industry?