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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-04-21
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8c1CDP80fE
hi everyone saving the oceans is more than an ecological desire it's more than the thing we're doing you want to create jobs for fishermen or preserve fisherman's jobs it's more than an economic pursuit saving the oceans can feed the world let me show you how as you know there is already more than a billion hungry people on this planet we're expecting that problem to get worse
as world population grows to nine billion or ten billion by mid century and we can expect to have greater pressure on our food resources and this is a big concern especially considering where we are now now we know that our arable land per capita is already on the decline in both developed and developing countries we know that we're headed for climate change which is gonna change
rainfall patterns %HESITATION making some areas %HESITATION drier as you can see an orange and others wetter in blue causing droughts in our bread baskets in places like the Midwest and central Europe in floods in others it's gonna make it harder for the land to help us solve the hunger problem and that's why the oceans need to be their most abundant so that the oceans can provide
us as much food as possible and that's something the oceans have been doing for us for a long time as far back as we can go we've seen an increase in the amount of food we've been able to harvest from our oceans it just seemed like it was continuing to increase until about nineteen eighty when we start to see a decline you've heard of peak oil
maybe this is peak fish I hope not I'm gonna come back to that but you can see about an eighteen percent decline in the amount of fish we've gotten in our world catch since nineteen eighty and this is a big problem is continuing this redline is continuing to go down but we know how to turn it around and that's what I'm to talk about today we
know how to turn that curve back upwards this doesn't have to be peak fish if we do a few simple things in targeted places we can bring our fisheries back and use them to feed people first we want to know where the fish are so let's look where the fish are turns out the fish conveniently are located for the most part in our coastal areas of
the of the countries in coastal zones and these are areas that national jurisdictions have control over and they can manage their fisheries in these coastal areas coastal countries tend to have jurisdictions that go out about two hundred nautical miles in areas that are called exclusive economic zones and this is a good thing if they can control their fisheries in these areas because the high seas which
were the darker areas on this this map the high seas it's a lot harder to control things because it has to be done internationally you get into international agreements if any of your tracking the climate change agreement you know this can be a very slow frustrating tedious process and so chilling things nationally is a great thing to be able to do how many fish are actually
in these coastal areas compared to the high seas well you can see here about seven times as many fish in the coastal areas than there are in the high seas so this is a perfect place for us to be focusing because we can actually get a lot done we can restore a lot of our fisheries if we focus in these coastal areas book how many of
these countries do we have to work into something like eighty coastal countries we have to fix fisheries management all of those countries so we asked ourselves how many countries doing need focus on keeping in mind that new European Union conveniently manages its fisheries through a common fisheries policy so if we not good fisheries management and the European Union and say nine other countries how much of
our fisheries would be we become Frank turns out European Union plus nine countries covers about two thirds of the world's fish catch if we took it up to twenty four countries plus the European Union we would be up to ninety percent almost all of the world's fish catch so we think we can work in a limited number of places to make the fisheries comeback but what
we have to do in these places well based on our work in the United States and elsewhere we know that there are three key things we have to do to bring fisheries back and they are we need to set quotas or limits on how much we take we need to reduce bi catch which is the accidental catching in killing a fish that were not targeting in
its very wasteful and three we need to protect habitats the nursery areas the spawning areas that these fish need to grow and reproduce successfully so that they can rebuild their populations if we do those three things we know the fisheries will come back how do we know we know because we've seen it happening in a lot of different places this is a slide that shows %HESITATION
though the herring population in Norway that was crashing since the nineteen fifties was coming down when Norway set limits are quotas on its fishery what happens the fishery comes back this is another example also happens to be from Norway of the Norway Norwegian arctic cod same deal the fisheries crashing they set limits on Descartes discards are these fish they weren't targeting the get thrown overboard waist
fully when they set the discard limit the fishery came back and it's not just in Norway we've seen this happening in countries all around the world time and time again when these countries stepped in and they put in sustainable fisheries management policies the fisheries which always crashing it seems are starting to come back so there's a lot of promise here what does this mean for the
world fish catch this means that we could increase take that fishery catch it on the decline and we could turn it upwards we could increase it up to a hundred million metric tons per year so we didn't have peak fish yet we still have an opportunity to not only bring the fish back but to actually get more fish that can feed more people than we currently
are now how many more right about now where we can feed about four hundred and fifty million people a fish meal a day based on the current world fish catch which of course you know is going down so that's going at that number will go down over time if we don't fix it but if we put fishery management practices like the ones I've described in place
in ten to twenty five countries we could bring that number up and feed as many as seven hundred million people a year unhealthy fish meal we should obviously do this just because it's a good thing took deal with a hunger problem but it's also cost effective it turns out fish is the most cost effective protein on the planet if you look at how many how much
fish protein you get per dollar invested compared to all the other animal proteins obviously fish is is a good business decision it also doesn't need a lot of land something that's in short supply compared to other protein sources doesn't need any land you know %HESITATION it doesn't need a lot of fresh water he is a lot less fresh water then for example cattle where you have
to irrigated fields that you can grow the food to grace the cattle it also has a very low carbon footprint it has a little bit of a carbon footprint because we do have to get out and catch the fish takes a little bit of fuel but as you know agriculture can have a carbon footprint and and fish has a much smaller one so it's less polluting
it's already a big part of our diet %HESITATION but it can be a bigger part of our diet which is a good thing because we know that it's healthy for us it can reduce our risk of cancer heart disease and obesity are pushing conservation movement really grew out of the land conservation movement in in land conservation we have this problem where bio diversity is at war
with food production you have to cut down the biodiversity forest if you want to get the field to grow the corn to feed people with considers a constant push pull there there's a constant tough decision that has to be made between two very important things maintaining biodiversity and feeding people but in the oceans we don't have that war in the oceans biodiversity is not at war
with abundance in fact they're aligned when we do things that produce biodiversity we actually get more abundance and that's important so that we can feed people now there's a catch then they will get that you go fishing undermines the type of sustainable fisheries management I'm talking about it can be you catch %HESITATION fish using gears at have been prohibited when you fish in places where you're
not suppose to fish you catch fish that are the wrong size of the wrong species I'm illegal fishing cheats the consumer and it also cheats honest fishermen and it needs to stop the way you legal fish get into our market is through seafood fried you might hurt about this %HESITATION it's when fish are labeled as something they're not think but the last time you had fish
what were you eating are you sure that's what it was because we tested thirteen hundred different fish samples in about a third of them were not what they were label to be snappers nine out of ten snappers were not snapper fifty nine percent of the tuna we tested was mislabelled and red snapper we tested a hundred and twenty samples and only seven of them are really
red snapper so good luck finding a red snapper it's hard seafood has a really complex supply chain it every step in the supply chain there's an opportunity for seafood fried in less we have traceability traceability is away where the seafood industry can track the seafood from the boat to the plate to make sure that the consumer can then find out where their seafood came from this
is a really important thing it's being done by some in the industry but not enough so we're pushing a law in Congress called the safe seafood act and I'm very excited today to announce the release of a chef's petition where four hundred and fifty chefs including Jose Andres have signed a petition calling on Congress to support the safe seafood act and they've signed it because they
believe that people have a right to know about what they're eating fishermen like it too so there's a good chance we can get the kind of support we need to get this bill through and it comes at a critical time because this is the way we stopped the food fraud this is the way we curb illegal fishing and this is the way we make sure the
quotas habitat protection of bycatch reductions can do the job they do it can do we know that we can manage our fisheries sustainably we know that we can produce healthy meals for hundreds of millions of people don't use that land that don't use much water have a low carbon footprint and are cost effective we know that saving the oceans can feed the world and we need
