A pessimistic look at a fishy problem.

I like fish.

I was most impressed recently when I saw coy carp as big as my forearm in one of the local mill ponds. Presumably somebody put some unwanted goldfish in the pond years ago and they have been growing ever since. In the pub garden next door to our house they have a fishpond with equally large fish in, much admired by our smallest grandchild.

I also like to eat fish.

One of the very good things about going to spend time in Galicia, in north west Spain, is the abundance of fresh fish in restaurants and in the supermarket next door to our block of flats. A nice fish or some good shellfish and a good bottle of Albariño wine. What more could you ask for?

We go to restaurants and I get new ideas for how to prepare fish dishes.

Here in the UK, I run to Uppermill, two or three miles away, on a Wednesday morning and buy fresh fish from the fish-man there. He usually has some good deals: two sea bream fillets for a fiver, a couple of river trout also for a fiver, a bag of fish pie mix which he chops for you there and then from the fish on his display. And no, you don’t have to make fish pie as such; it’s good for a fish chowder or a pasta dish. So I get to try out my new ideas.

But now George Monbiot, one of my heroes who writes about all kinds of ecological matters, is telling me I need to stop eating fish. He maintains that  the biggest threat to our seas and to our marine life is not plastic, for all that everyone and their grandmother is going on about how plastic is reaching and contaminating the deepest reaches of our oceans. No, the biggest threat is industrial scale fishing.

Enormous boats go out and catch vast amounts of fish at one go. We have been encouraged to eat more fish and want it at reasonable prices. Much of the catch gets thrown back in as the fish caught are too small to meet international regulations. What he didn’t say is that in some places the very littlest fish are not always thrown back in but are served up as “pescaditos fritos” little fried fish eaten whole - quite delicious but apparently often illegal!

Fish farms don’t help either as they tend to scoop up stuff from the seabed, mash it up into a pulp and feed it to the fish and shellfish they are “cultivating” - not a good process for the seabed!

What we need to do, apparently, is establish huge no-fishing zones out in the wide open sea and restrict fishing to national fishing waters. The fear that there will not be enough fish in those designated areas to meet demand is, experts maintain, unfounded. Once we stop massive-scale fishing in the wider international ocean areas, stocks of fish and shellfish will re-establish themselves. And as there are no fences down under the sea and the fish don’t know where they are supposed to go or not go these newly enlarged stocks will spread into national waters.

Supplies will be sufficient to meet demand although we might need to pay a little more. But maybe small fishermen could make a living as well.

Of course, to organise this kind of thing we would need to have international agreement, a global decision to save the sea.

We already know we need a global decision to deal with other environmental problems. In the same way, we really know that we need a global decision to tackle the problems of refugees, people fleeing famine zones and other problems all over the world.

If we ever do come to a global solution, some time in the future people will look back to now and wonder how it took us so long to sort it out.

I am not optimistic. The leaders of our political parties are finding it hard to work together. Even within parties they are having difficulties reaching a consensus on all sorts of things. Do we really think that we can come to international agreement sensibly?