I remember my older relatives telling me about what it was like in the depression, after several years, the white tail deer almost disappeared completely, as soon as demand went up. Now that there are managed deer there is a pretty good abundance, but this wouldn't have happened with unregulated hunting, they would have continued top decline. Happened with wild ginseng as well throughout appalachia, harvested almost to extinction, even market pressure didn't help, because with the ginseng being one of the few ways to snag cash in a collapsed rural economy, the older patches kept getting found and wiped out. It's extremely hard to find legitimate quality "wild" ginseng anymore. I'm in the woods a lot, only seen a coupla decent wild patches in years and years of trompping sround, and from reports it used to be quite abundant.
Market hunting/fishing is just that, it's a foraging/scavenging effort it's not an agricultural effort. The worlds wild and healthy stocks are being seriously depleted in the oceans, and with populatiion pressure increasing the demand, it's going to get worse. An unregulated market will just keep driving up the price, as there are enough rich people who would kep demanding it, well past the point of the majority of the peoples ability to consider it as affordable food anymore. Look how close wild buffalo got, and then there's the passenger pigeon complete 100% reality, unregulated hunting and demand wiped out a species in a few years that numbered in the billions, now there really, really, really aren't *any*, no matter what the free marketers might say. The 'farmed' salt water stocks are not healthy, you can see it in the reports, they suffer a lot, the technology still isn't there yet, and probably won't be for a long time. It's an effort to be sure, but in no way would it replace what a humongous ocean sized wild count would be, and the cost would rise dramatically. It can be done, and I'm a proponent of more efforts there, but it's really down to apples and oranges then, it's not "fishing" in the classical sense of just harvesting-only. I mean, it's just numbers, x- billions of people eating fish, that demand just keeps goes up, x-more boats fishing because as demand goes up the price per pound goes up, will lead to "much less fish" and much more effort per fish to aquire remaining in the wild. Where a collapse point is, is about the only thing left to "debate' there, what would constitute a collapse.
Hmm, was reading about the lobstering, it used to be you could go just offshore to get big lobsters, now they have to set pots in water so deep just to get small ones that it would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Try to even just start a lobstering business, it's not hardly possible now.
This isn't to say they are NO fish left, obviously there are, but the studies probably have some good validity to them. No easy solution either, best I can think of is no exceptions to the 200 mile economic exclusion zone. we have such a zone, it's not enforced much, and a lot of exceptions are allowed. That and protecting the estuaries where a lot of the food chain habitat is critical for a variety of species. It's tremendously important to keep what estuaries we still have healthy, because they are the initiators of a lot of the fish we consume, an incredibly important part of the whole ocean marine animal cycle.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
No sir, I don't like it. I donts like it at t'all. :)