Nov. 2, 2026

Why "Fishing Is Bad" Backfires

Tell a fishing family their livelihood is destroying the ocean, then watch what happens.

They stop showing up to the meetings. They stop sharing catch data with scientists. They stop answering the phone. And the people who know that water better than anyone are now out of the conversation.

On this episode of How to Protect the Ocean, Andrew Lewin looks at why the simplest conservation message about fishing does so much damage, and what you can do at the fish counter that actually helps.

The feeling at the seafood counter

You've seen the documentaries and read the headlines about overfishing. Part of you thinks you should stop eating fish. Another part knows it's complicated, because families somewhere depend on catching it. So you feel guilty, or you stop thinking about it.

"Fishing is bad" seems like the easy answer. The trouble is who it lumps together. It treats a family with a small boat and a hand line the same as a fleet of industrial trawlers. It treats a well-managed fishery the same as one with no management at all. And in many coastal communities, fish is the main source of protein. When a child in one of those communities hears that fishing is bad, they hear that the way their family eats is bad.

The hidden harvest

To see how far that message misses, you need to know who actually catches the world's fish. For a long time, almost nobody did.

Fisheries statistics were built around what's easy to count: big boats landing at big ports, catch weighed and sold through formal markets. Everything else went missing. The woman wading at low tide for shellfish. The man in a canoe with a net on a lake. The fishers who land their catch on a beach and sell it in the village by noon.

A 2012 study tried to estimate the gap. It found small-scale inland catch could be underreported by as much as 70%. In developing countries, small-scale fisheries produced over half the catch, and 90 to 95% of it was eaten locally, often in rural places where good nutrition is hard to come by.

So the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Duke University and WorldFish went back to do it properly. Drawing on case studies from 58 countries plus surveys and national data, they published Illuminating Hidden Harvests in 2023. The findings:

Small-scale fisheries land at least 40% of the global catch from wild fisheries
They employ an estimated 60.2 million people, about 90% of everyone working in fisheries
Nearly 53 million more people fish for subsistence to feed their families
About 4 in 10 people in small-scale fisheries are women

When someone says "fishing is bad," most of the people hearing it are small-scale fishers. They are also often the ones losing out when large industrial fleets work the same waters.

Four principles for a better message

Sustainable seafood is complicated, and Andrew doesn't pretend otherwise. He offers four principles that hold up.

Support the people doing it well. Many small-scale fishers already manage their resources wisely. The same study found co-management, where communities and governments share decisions, is actually working for only about 20% of small-scale catch. That's a big opening to bring fishers into the process.

Aim pressure at the biggest impacts. Very large industrial operations can remove enormous amounts of fish, sometimes supplied by fleets that offload to refrigerated carrier ships. Where management, monitoring or enforcement is weak, accountability belongs with the systems that permit and police those fleets.

Show how protected areas help fisheries. A healthy marine protected area can work like a nursery, with fish spilling over its boundaries into fishing grounds. When communities see that, the conversation moves from "they're taking our water" to "this keeps our fishery alive for generations."

Make the good choice easy. Most of us won't read a stock assessment before dinner. Neither will most chefs.

A symbol on the menu

In the early 2000s, Robert Clark was executive chef at C Restaurant in Vancouver. He cared where his fish came from, but working out which seafood was sustainable meant wading through science, reports and competing opinions. Busy chefs didn't have time for that.

Clark teamed up with Jason Boyce at the Vancouver Aquarium. The aquarium would keep up with the science on which species and fisheries were in good shape, and partner restaurants would put a small symbol next to the dishes that passed. Diners would only need to look for the symbol.

They called it Ocean Wise, and it launched in 2005 with a handful of restaurants. It spread across Vancouver, then across Canada, to chefs in Toronto, Halifax and everywhere in between. Grocery stores and seafood suppliers joined. By 2023, the program had more than 750 business partners and over 2,000 locations carrying the Ocean Wise Recommended symbol.

Andrew adds an honest footnote. Ocean Wise is a recommendation program, and it doesn't certify fisheries the way the Marine Stewardship Council does. Over the years, voices in the food world have pushed for more transparency about how recommendations are made. That scrutiny is healthy, and it's part of how programs like this earn trust.

What Ocean Wise proved is that a complicated decision can be made simple at the exact moment someone is choosing. Similar programs exist elsewhere, including Seafood Watch from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the US and SASSI in South Africa.

What you can do

Ask two questions. At the grocery store, a restaurant or a market: "Where's this from? How was it caught?"

Use what you learn. If they know, look it up or check for a symbol like Ocean Wise, Seafood Watch or SASSI.

If they don't know, that still counts. You've just told that business its customers care. Enough people ask, and businesses start finding out.

Buy local when you can. If there's a fisher or fish market near you, buy direct and ask about their fishery. Most fishers love talking about it.

Picture a coastline where the fishing family and the marine scientist sit in the same room. The scientist gains decades of on-the-water knowledge. The family gains a protected area that keeps their catch coming back. And a shopper in Toronto or Cape Town asks one question that pulls the whole system toward better. That's how fishing stays in a family for generations.

Takeaways

"Fishing is bad" lumps small-scale fishers in with industrial fleets and drives them away from science
Small-scale fisheries land at least 40% of global wild catch and employ about 60 million people
Nearly 53 million people fish for subsistence, and about 4 in 10 small-scale fisheries workers are women
Co-management is actually working for only about 20% of small-scale catch
Pressure belongs on how industrial fleets are permitted, monitored and held to the rules
MPAs can support fisheries through spillover
Ocean Wise, Seafood Watch and SASSI simplify sustainable choices at the point of purchase
Your action: ask where your seafood came from and how it was caught

Sources

Andrew Lewin

CEO

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