Quite the opposite: this fishery enjoys the prestigious protection of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), with Prince Charles, the Queen of Jordan and many large corporations among its patrons, benefactors and champions.
When I first stumbled upon mangrove forests as a journalist in 1992, visiting several fishing communities along the Andaman Sea in southern Thailand, I noticed a common thread of problems faced by the fisherfolk: outside investors were ruining their lands and livelihoods by cutting mangroves to make way for shrimp farms, devastating their local fishery and agriculture.
Anything at or just below the surface of the seabed the benthic zone, in fishery parlance gets dragged up.
FISHERY statistics tend, just like fish, to be rather slippery.
One study suggests yearly shrimp-fishery losses of nearly 13%.
Many other developing countries that have seen industrial-scale fishing empty their seas backed the proposal.China, Japan, Singapore and others objected, arguing that it is hard to identify sharks by their fins, and the trade should be treated as a fishery-management issue.
One fishery in four around the world has collapsed in the past 50 years.
The other is to accept the advice, and then discover it isn't good enough.For decades the Atlantic bluefin-tuna fishery has fallen into the former camp.
At the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona last week both Spain (an important tuna-fishing nation) and Japan (an important tuna-buying nation) supported the closure of the Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery until stocks rise.
The fishery is promising, especially since pirates have scared off illegal tuna boats.
Where mariners' only thought was once to catch fish before the next man, they now want to catch fewer fish than they are allowed to because conservation increases the value of the fishery and their share in it.
