Our assessments of fisheries are based on the 1995 UN FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing,  a wide ranging global agreement for sustainable fishing which – following global government agreement at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 – is supposed to be fully implement, with a goal of restoring global fish stocks by 2015. If this is done, it will make a huge difference so it is important that fisheries and governments are held to account.

So that’s why we use the Code, along with the Code’s Technical Guidelines. Taken together, a key part of the Code (para 7.5.3)  is the requirement to not only set ‘negative’ limit reference points for fish stocks – i.e. the levels beneath which stock collapse is a real danger; what you want to avoid at all costs – but also ‘positive’ target reference points, of abundant stocks, from which better catches can be taken while still leaving plenty for other fish, and wildlife in general: i.e where we should want to get to.

If these positive goals are missing, the global fisheries crisis cannot be solved. The UK government has endorsed this view in Fisheries 2027: a long term vision for sustainable fisheries. Yet  currently most fish, including those around the UK, continue to be managed – if at all – simply for the negative target of trying to avoid stock collapse. This has even been promoted by some as ‘sustainable fishing’ – a miserable state of affairs where crisis management has becomes the norm. Indeed, some fisheries that have only negative limit reference points, without positive targets being set consistent with the Code of Conduct, claim that they are compliant with the Code, which they are not.