History of Fishing and Fishing in Our Time
Food-gathering cultures first collected fish and shellfish from the coastal waters of the reservoirs, around the seashore, tiny wetlands left in floodplains, tidal areas and minor waterways. Some experts claim that fish were scarcely captured in the earliest periods owing to the insufficiency of fishing equipment. However, shellfish could be harvested easily by hand, and the ancient middens in the kitchen suggest their significance as a source of food.
In the early days, most foods were consumed at once and not processed. Still, as growing populations raised nutritional demands, methods were established to preserve fish by drying, smoking, salting and fermentation. It has become advantageous to catch large quantities, and specialised equipment has been designed. Personal fishing was substituted by joint activities requiring immense, more powerful equipment.
Fishing machinery and techniques evolved through the centuries before large-scale fisheries were developed in Europe. Herring was harvested in large quantities in the Middle Ages in northern Europe. Cod farming flourished in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland even before the Italian explorer John Cabot made his journey there in 1497. Whaling with massive armadas started in the seventeenth century, both in the Atlantic and in the South Pacific.
Before the mechanisation of the fishing industry at the end of the nineteenth century, sailing vessels evolved to match the circumstances and fisheries in various locations. The Grand Banks schooners have been at the peak of these advancements. The Grand Banks boats were the pinnacle of such turns of events. Cruising from New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, they fished cod during trips enduring as long as half a year, salting the catch for exporting to Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Individuals fished from little wooden dories, setting and pulling longlines by hand. Portuguese ships often sailed annually to the Grand Banks, and a lot of them were even serving alongside new steel vessels in the late twentieth century. Smaller cutters and yawls operated across Europe utilising drift gillnets and set nets. Beam trawls were utilised broadly in the North Sea and the English Channel, especially in the case of flatfish, it was towed downwind under the sail and then moved back to the side of the vessel.
As steam-driven winches came into utilisation, fishing equipment grew in size and weight. Steam steadily swapped sail for thrust in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and gradually the internal-combustion engine replaced steam, even though steam fishing boats kept working as late as the 1950s. Smaller ships were motorised in the early 20th century, and the inboard diesel engine was widely accepted except for the most miniature boats on which gasoline-powered outboard motors continued to exist.
The number or the scale of fishing equipment or both could be enhanced for bigger catches. Longline with thousands of hooks substituted basic ones fitted with one or a few hooks. Simple tiny traps were incorporated into hundreds of systems, and vast numbers of pots were set up. Nets were being multiplied enormously; net making machines that generate netting in wide sheets have been developed. Mechanical netting has substituted old traditional netting fabrics (linen and hemp) with cotton and strong materials. However, all-natural fibres, especially cellulose ones, begin to rot in a reasonable time; hence the advent of rot-proof nets of synthetic fibres after the Second World War was a significant move forward. For the most part, machinery net making stayed intact although for some fishing equipment the standard knotted netting was substituted by knotless netting.
The mechanisation of purse seining took a significant move forward in the early 1950s when the power block for hauling the gear was developed. A power-driven drum to transport and store seine nets, gill nets, purse seines, and even the large trawl nets was another significant hauling tool. In the longline tuna fishing, the Japanese added drums. A more critical invention was the stern chute for stern trawlers, which became feasible by coordination with the naval architects and the fishing gear specialists, enabling considerable mechanisation of gear handling.
The British factory trawlers project began in the late 1940s, which began an era of rapid technological progress concerning ship design which showed the great advantage of large stern trawlers processing their catch onboard. Countries trying to fish far-flung reserves were able to establish this concept. By the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Poland, East Germany, and Spain operated these larger vessels (up to 100 metres long).
The same advancement took place in the harvesting of the vast resources of small pelagic fish, primarily for conversion into fish meal. In the late 1940s, small boats supplied shore-based canning and fish meal plants with the aid of hand-operated natural fibre nets. By the end of the 1960s, large vessels of 25-metre purse seiner were delivering factory mother ships capable of carrying up to 3,000 tonnes a day.
Around the same period, developing countries have pursued more advanced fishing technologies to improve the availability of protein for their citizens. They often relied on canoes and small boats with essential equipment and mostly operated off open beaches. The invention of outboard engines, bigger vessels and synthetic nets has made it possible for many countries to increase their catches significantly.
The annual world fishing catch quadrupled in the 40 years after World War 2. However, it became evident in the early 1970s that these advances were not unrestricted. Several of the most extensive stocks of pelagic fish harvested by purse seiners experienced declines that were commonly blamed on overfishing. These included the herring in the North Atlantic, the pilchard in the South Atlantic, the West African sardines and related species. Significant reductions in catches of stocks fished by fleets of factory trawlers have created such alarm that coastal states have called for the security of assets off their coastline.
The oil crisis of the 1970s raised fuel rates by as much as 400 per cent, although fish prices surged by as little as 80 per cent. This has driven several fuel-inefficient ships, including those in the U.S. Gulf shrimp trawlers, to be tied up or moved to other fisheries. The production of fuel-efficient vessels, turbines, fishing practices and machinery, including the usage of present-day sailing technologies, relied consequently on the price of oil.
Until the beginning of the 1980s, the critical goal of fisheries advancement, and therefore of a significant proportion of fisheries programmes, was to capture additional fish. Policymakers and decision-makers, concerned with the need to feed expanding populations and ensuring food protection, have focused on finding new fisheries resources and technological advancements for their exploitation, as well as on ways to fund emerging fisheries ventures. This focus on productivity was consistent with the general belief that both marine and freshwater fisheries reserves, especially in the less developed countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, were abundant and largely under-exploited at this period. Increased production of fisheries has also been an essential part of interventions for solving persistent protein deficiencies in many countries. Besides, higher-value fish species could be exported and produce lucrative foreign exchange earnings for countries which sometimes had little other exportable goods to sell on international markets.
In the past four decades of fisheries management focused on this strategy, the state of world fisheries has drastically changed. Fishing vessels of all kinds-artisanal, semi-industrial and large-scale industrial have expanded steadily and are fitted with equipment that has dramatically improved their capturing capacity and performance. The size and reach of these vessels, and the ability of global markets to consume the fish they generate, has grown to the extent that most of the world's fisheries stocks are almost wholly, if not entirely, used. Still, despite the best attempts of fisheries biologists and others responsible for maintaining fisheries stocks, large fisheries stocks in the world have been caught one after the other outside their sustainable limits. This has contributed towards the deterioration of the whole fishery and the populations that rely on it, and to a gradual depletion of the oceans' capacity to provide a reliable food supply for the growing community in the planet.
The deterioration of the state of fishery resources is somehow a result of the feeble policy. Few fishing vessels have been extensively financed, contributing to overproduction and overcapitalisation. This, besides, has facilitated cases of misuse of the resource to an acceptable and thus sustainable point.
Such flaws in fisheries management are aggravated by demand for resources as a consequence of a growth in the population. Especially in coastal areas, the number of individuals employed in artisanal and small-scale fishing has also increased significantly, either because of a change in the general population or because of competition on other means of jobs, which has forced people to engage in fishing either on a permanent or seasonal basis. The condition in such waters, mostly already highly exploited, has deteriorated with modern semi-industrial or commercial fisheries using the same coastal assets as the small-scale industry, contributing to disputes and the destruction of fish stocks.
In the open sea, whether in territorial or international waters, management of fisheries by vast offshore vessels has always been problematic owing to a lack of knowledge of the ecology and habitat patterns of fish stocks. Even where resources have been well recognised, guidance from fisheries scientists has always been invalidated by official prerogatives that have promoted higher levels of production, the growth of fishing vessels (mostly subsidised) to sustain jobs in the industry and the resulting over-fishing of resources.
As a consequence, there are relatively few regions or fish stocks left where fishing activity can be substantially improved, or new fishing fleets can be introduced. Currently, the goal of fisheries development has been, almost unanimously, the conservation of fisheries production by enhanced management of the resource.
The demand for global supplies of fish is at an all-time high. Fleets can now target and harvest fish in nearly any section of the world's waters, leading in too many fishing boats pursuing a diminishing amount of fish. Overfished reserves result in smaller catch and reduced earnings. In reaction, certain producers switch to illegal fishing without appropriate licences or authorisations, or in conservation areas to increase income.
Commercial fishing, in particular those vessels that operate unlawfully, frequently causes unsafe environments and dangerous working conditions. Unauthorised fishers may spend less in upkeep, repairs and safety facilities to further improve their earnings, rendering vessels dangerous and ill-equipped. Crews would be required to operate excessive hours under higher pressure, contributing to heightened tension and exhaustion, and operators may take more significant risks, such as fishing in adverse weather conditions. Such aspects raise the risk that members of the crew may be wounded or killed. There have been well-documented instances of inhumane abuse of seafarers by some captains.
Evidence suggests that fishing vessels on the high seas are primarily made up of immigrant labour whose position puts them at risk of exploitation by operators. They can be at sea for months on end and can often be alone as they do not know the language of other crewmates or skippers. In these conditions, fishers frequently lack the means to disclose breaches of safety requirements on their vessels. International probes have revealed that a number of migrant workers pursuing jobs abroad have been exploited by misleading claims of jobs on land, then wind up employed in deplorable workplace conditions on dangerous fishing vessels operating in the high seas.
