Daniel Pauly Quotes

One fifth of human kind depend on fish to live. Today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited. According to FAO if we don't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050. We don't want to believe what we know.

The concept of 'peak oil' has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. 'Peak fish' occurred around the end of the 1980s.

When the fish price is too low, the fishermen starve.

European fisheries are a disaster. The American fisheries are well-kept.

The end of commercial fishing is predicted long before the middle of the 21st century.

I think that the Japanese - and I do love Japanese cuisine and adore Japanese food culture - I think that they're going to plow through the entire world's fishing. They're going to eat everything anyways.

There is no sustainable future for fisheries as long as human populations continue to increase.

Fish are a renewable resource, and one of the problems we've had is people feel obliged to catch the limit, then throw 'em in the garbage can.

Without sound conservation and management measures, fisheries will quickly become depleted and a basic component of global food security will be lost.

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish.

We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine.

It's mainly the high-end luxury market now that drives much of the fishing in the sea. It's not feeding the starving millions. It's feeding a luxury market.

Anybody who spends time off of Louisiana's shores can recognize that these oysters are not endangered. To classify them as such risks great harm to not only fishermen who make their living collecting oysters in the Gulf, but also to Louisiana's economy in total.

The crisis of the fisheries is similar to our economy. This is not one fishery failing, but the whole system.

80 percent of our global fish stocks are fully exploited, overly exploited or have collapsed. Two billion people rely on the oceans for their primary source of protein.

Sustainable fishing is a fraud. It's a marketing term that really means 'business as usual.'

There are very few fishermen left today.

The Polynesians used to have a system where they proclaimed a fishing area as 'taboo.' If any fisherman was caught fishing in a taboo area, they would be killed. The Polynesians understand that the fish had to be given a chance to recover.

Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.

By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population.

The common fisheries policy essentially gave other European Union nations unfettered access to our fish stocks and - I would hope - that if we leave the European Union, we can once more see the ports of Peterborough and Fraserhead and Grimsby flourishing, because we will take back control of our territorial waters.

Fishing in sustainable ways means fewer fish, higher quality, better price at the market. That is a formula that is good for the environment and the fisherman but bad for the consumer.

Environmentalists aren't nearly sensitive enough to the fact that they are messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods. They forget that the fishermen are the people with the most immediate vested interest in having a healthy sea.

If commercial fishing were excluded from large areas of the sea, the total catch would be likely, paradoxically, to rise, due to what biologists call the spillover effect.