Willie MacKenzie, a Greenpeace ocean campaigner, said: "Europe has over-exploited its own waters, and now is exporting the problem to Africa.
It all means that globally about 85% of stocks are said to be fully exploited, over-exploited, depleted or slowly recovering.
As of 2008, 85%% of the world's fish stocks were fully exploited, over-exploited, or depleted, with scholars predicting a complete collapse of fish stocks by 2048 at this rate (EFTEC 2008; Worm et al. 2009).
Their situation is dire: Almost 60percentt of the world's total fish stocks since the 1950s have been wiped out (with over 80percentt of remaining stocks fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted), including some 90percentt of pelagic species.
Around 85% of global fish stocks are over-exploited, depleted, fully exploited or in recovery from exploitation.
In the chart accompanying our article on oceans on February 22nd, we swapped the "over-exploited" and "fully exploited" labels.
Our results suggest that half of the fisheries had peaked as of 2004 (Fig. 3A), with 18% fully exploited, 21% over-exploited or restrictively managed, and 13% collapsed or closed with little difference across functional groups (Fig. S6).
Nearly two-thirds of the world's fisheries are "fully exploited", and most of the rest are over-exploited.
