ABSTRACT
Introduction Fisheries represent one of the last major wild extractive endeavors undertaken at a global scale. Yet, despite technological advances and increased effort landings have remained around 90 million metric tonnes (MT) year-1 in recent decades. At the same time, many stocks of marine fish are depleted and increasingly catches are in decline. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported in 1994 that 44 percent of world fisheries were fully to heavily exploited, and another 22 percent were either overfished or collapsed. Today, those numbers are 51 percent and 28 percent, respectively – in other words, fisheries have gone from two-thirds maximally or over-exploited to over threequarters so (FAO 2009; MA 2005).
