Peter Espeut - environmentalist and executive director of the Caribbean Coastal Area Management (C-CAM) Foundation.

At a time when more people are depending on the fisheries industry to earn a living, indications are that the catch has been declining rapidly due to over-fishing. As part of our focus on the agricultural sector we present excerpts of the views presented by experts and stakeholders on the reason for this decline and possible solutions.

"I am agreeing with the conclusion that we have a problem in our fisheries (industry), but I come at the problem from a slightly different perspective.

Jamaica has the most over-fished waters in the Caribbean, we take this to be normal whereas it is profoundly pathological, it has a lot to do with our history. Part of the difficulty of talking about this topic is that it does require data.

In every fisheries (industry), there is a relationship between the fish that is caught and the effort that you expend to catch it. "The trouble is that we have been treating fisheries as a development issue, in other words, we only catch X, we want to catch Y and therefore we have to increase our effort.

Complex variable

Fishing effort is a complex variable that includes many things; more fishermen, more boats, more fish-pots, more hooks on the fishing lines, more lines, more nets, smaller mesh in the nets, longer nets, more spare fishermen, more spare guns, more dynamite, et cetera. So in the past, if you read, for example, the 1962 Five Year Development Plan, the plan for fisheries is to expand fishing effort, to increase the catch and it was in the 1970s that the Fisheries Division was finally created because similarly in the 1972 Five Year Development Plan by the new PNP (Peoples' National Party) Government, they said well, we have got to do the same thing, we have got to expand. Now, this is, if you pardon me saying so, an illiterate view of fisheries...

Most fishermen believe that the relationship between catch and fishing pressure is a linear relationship, in other words, the more effort you put out, the more fish you are supposed to catch. That of course is wrong, it is not a straight line, it's a curve. So what happens is, as you put more pressure you begin to catch the breeding stock, so that you are not only catching fish for today, but you are also catching tomorrow's fish because you are catching the fish that would lay eggs that would then expand the next generation."