The World Bank’s Sunken Billions Report: Progress and Challenges in Global Marine Fisheries was revisited this month and it concluded that moving towards a more sustainable management of fishery resources—mostly by restricting discards—could generate up to $83 billion annual profit.
An update on the 2009 study argues that reducing pressure on global fishing is a necessary move primarily for the reconstitution of fish stocks and for their growth in weight and size – which is estimated to boost the profitability from $3 billion a year to $86 billion.
“The proportion of fisheries that are fully fished, overfished, depleted, or recovering from overfishing increased from just over 60 percent in the mid-1970s to about 75 percent in 2005 and to almost 90 percent in 2013,” underlined the World Bank. The report stressed the inefficiency of the current fishing industry; as stocks are depleted, fishing zones move further away from consumption areas, hence more energy and resources are spent for the logistics of fishing activities each time.