To keep our nets full, we have turned to new species. Traditionally, most industrial fishers focused their efforts on a relatively small number of highly abundant and valuable species, such as Atlantic cod, flounder and haddock. Substitutes for these became deep-water fish such as orange roughy and Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass), both vulnerable to commercial exploitation themselves. In fact, they are already in trouble. When was the last time you saw orange roughy on a restaurant menu?

Deleterious practices will continue as long as demand increases, and there is every indication it will. In the 1950s, only a handful of countries had industrial fishing fleets. Today more than 20 countries regularly harvest at least 1 million metric tons of fish per year. In 1960, only three developing nations–Peru, China and India–were considered major commercial fishing powers. Today developing nations account for half of the top producers.

Where once fishing was simply a local source of food and regional trade, developing countries are depending more on fishing as a source of income. Fishery export revenues in developing countries increased by 80 percent between 1990 and 2000, to $18 billion. Left unchecked, the increasing demand for fish, accompanied by unsustainable fishing practices, will push more stocks already at their biological limit toward collapse. Eventually the cascade of damage to ecosystems will catch up to human economies and could even threaten political stability.

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Unless all parties involved in the enterprise–from consumers to political leaders and the fishers themselves–acknowledge the problem, efforts to manage fisheries will not be sustainable, and the consequences will affect us all. The time has come for serious efforts to manage the resources of the seas, just the way good companies and individuals manage their own capital stock and irreplaceable assets.

Recently, the international community has made attempts to achieve some level of sustainable fisheries management. One such effort is the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The U.S. has not ratified it, but both the U.S. and the United Kingdom adopted national laws based on its provisions. UNCLOS is a good start. It is limited, however, by keeping the responsibility to manage the sustainability of coastal fisheries squarely in the hands of coastal nations. In fact, UNCLOS extended the area in which a coastal nation can claim complete sovereignty over marine resources to 200 nautical miles off its coast. The previous limit was 12 nautical miles.

This new zone is the area wherein national governments may sell off or restrict fishing rights as they choose; each is responsible for managing its own resources. This approach seems sensible, however it overlooks a simple fact: Fish species are not fixed natural assets like forests, but move freely across territorial boundaries and thus have to be managed jointly by more than one country. Otherwise, we are no closer to addressing the underlying cause of the problem: the desire of fishers to catch more and higher-valued fish than their competitors. Rather than conventional management strategies that focus on individual stocks or individual nations, we need to focus on the value of entire marine and freshwater ecosystems–the basis for sustainable fish production.