Editor's View: The Gov't Has Given the US Seafood Industry a Huge Opportunity; We Won't Take It
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Editor's View] by John Sackton February 23, 2015
The US Government has handed the seafood industry a huge opportunity.
The newly released Dietary Advisory Guidelines have unequivocally called for more seafood consumption to increase American’s health, and they have taken on three controversies that have consistently held back seafood consumption.
For the past twenty years, we can argue that seafood has been the most publicly controversial protein.
There is a whole NGO marine protection industry organized around the idea that fisheries are depleted, and that without radically cutting back on fishing effort, most marine fisheries will disappear. The most famous expression of that was a scientific article by Daniel Pauly, since recanted, that claimed commercial fisheries would be extinct by 2048.
It caused a media sensation, and made eating fish a moral hazard for a large proportion of high income young consumers.
Since then, organizations have tended to claim disaster by conflating fisheries the FAO calls fully exploited with those the FAO calls overexploited. In fact, the percentage of global fisheries overexploited is declining. The percentage of fully exploited fisheries is stable.
The advisory committee report says “wild caught fisheries that have been managed sustainably have remained stable
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