Exemplars of sustainable fishing secure stocks and provide hope for the future in global World Ocean Day campaign. The Newlyn-based Cornish hake fishery, East Atlantic Bluefin tuna and Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic sardine fisheries are three standout sustainable seafood success stories featured in an international report and campaign published this World Ocean Day, 8 June.
The Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) report, Fishing for the Future, highlights these three fisheries as prime examples of how, contrary to public opinion, even severely depleted fisheries can bounce back to health with effective, science-based measures. The fisheries’ impressive transformations also see them front and centre of the MSC’s World Ocean Day campaign to promote the role of sustainable fishing in protecting our ocean.
Overexploitation led to a pronounced decline in stock levels of Cornish hake in the 1990s and the future looked bleak before a stock rebuilding plan was implemented. Incremental changes in the size of the nets mean the adults are caught while the juvenile fish swim free resulting in a 300% increase in spawning stock biomass since 1998.
These sustainable practices and others have combined to ensure a now stable stock with 2,000 tonnes of hake landed by the nine-boat fisher in Newlyn each year, and the recent renewal of the fisheries MSC certification for the second time that, in turn, provides the fishermen with larger catches, higher prices and improved market access.
This kind of transformational recovery goes counter to the almost one in three (31%) of consumers who believed fish populations can never recover from overfishing, as revealed in a survey conducted for the MSC by Globescan, also published on World Ocean Day.
George Clark, MSC UK & Ireland Programme Director, said:
“Our work with fisheries around the world, and Cornish hake is one such example, shows that whilst there is no doubting the scale of the challenge, recovery is possible. That is a message of hope — and one we need more people to hear and act on.”
Chris Ranford, CEO of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation, is proud that the hake fishery has achieved the status of a beacon of recovery and looks to the future with hope.
“Cornish fishermen and the seafood supply chain proved to be very entrepreneurial and forward thinking in approaching this, introducing various management and gear selectivity measures, including an increase in mesh size, followed by domestic marketing campaigns,” he writes in the report. “We are now at a point where the stock is at a sustainable and productive level, and we have an ever-growing demand from UK consumers.”
Another success story is the East Atlantic Bluefin Tuna which, after decades of high demand and poor adherence to catch limits so stock close to collapse in the 1990s. Strict management of catch size, limits and quotas have been just some of the measures that have contributed to a significant recovery in stocks so great that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reclassified Atlantic bluefin from ‘endangered’ to ‘least concern’ in 2021.
Similarly, as recently as 2017, sardine stocks in the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic fishery were in a critical condition and it came close to complete closure. Instead, the two countries collaborated on a recovery plan that’s seen biomass in 2025 now four times what it was in 2015 thanks to much improved stock protection through seasonal closures, catch limits and controls.
Image: MSC