The End of the Line is making waves for fish stocks recovery

Retailers are beginning to respond but we must keep up the pressure for sustainable catches

Felicity Lawrence
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 June 2009 16.58 BST

The End of the Line began life as a ground-breaking book by the environment journalist Charles Clover in 2004. It was an impassioned description of the wanton destruction being wreaked on fish stocks by industrial fishing round the world. It left me feeling both angry and despondent. Now it's been turned into a film of the same title, and it's a must-see.
Perhaps it's the gorgeous, uplifting pictures of underwater life, or the fact that Charles has kept going with his crusade for over 20 years, but the effect on me of the film was different: it's more galvanising than depressing. It too makes you angry, but film has the power to reach a wider audience and it feels as though this one may just lead to action. If it doesn't, as Prof Boris Worm, the gloriously named marine conservation expert who appears in it, says, we'll end up with no seafood at all in 50 years' time.
Humanity has always exploited the oceans, but until the 1950s our ability to inflict damage on the sea was restricted by the physical limitations of boats and the elements. Since then, highly capitalised, often subsidised fleets with more and more advanced equipment have been able to exploit every last depth, deploying technologies originally designed for military use – from sonar to satellite mapping – to target everything that moves. Governments and the industrial fishing industry with their annual quotas and over-optimistic calculations of stocks persist in the notion that we can negotiate with biology. But we can't.
It was another marine conservationist, Prof Callum Roberts, who first helped me see how our current fishing policy would end in collapse.
He has a collection of old photographs of fishermen and their catch going back a hundred years and more. Irish fishermen in the early 20th century standing next to common skate caught near their shores that were nearly twice their own size; the common skate as its name implies was abundant then but is now extinct in many areas. The hold of a 1905 Lowestoft fishing boat employing over a dozen men is so bursting with mackerel that the fish fill the decks to the gunnels. Anglers of the time stand next to their trawl from a day's leisurely fishing: prize specimens so large and plentiful they are strung up row upon row. They reminded me of the Victorian pictures of old colonial hunters in Africa photographed next to their bag from a day's hunting. They happily shot every tiger that moved, little thinking they might wipe them all out.
Roberts is a great optimist though. He says that where marine reserves are introduced and proper no-catch zones are enforced before areas collapse, biodiversity can recover quite well and fish stocks around the exclusion zones can increase, giving fishermen batter catches. It is nearly, but not completely, too late.
Fortunately, consumer attitudes are changing. When I wrote my own chapter on fish in Eat Your Heart Out in 2008, about 7% of world fish stocks were certified or being assessed by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) as sustainable sources of seafood. Supermarkets and high street chains were beginning to respond to pressure from campaign groups such as Greenpeace to take endangered species out of their shops.
Now, the supermarkets have increased their targets for sustainable fish, and The End of the Line's film release has prompted a flurry of announcements – most notably from M&S and Pret a Manger – to move even faster. And there's no doubt the MSC label is starting to appear on a wider range of fish in supermarkets and restaurants.
There is reason to hope that fish stocks can still recover, but we need to keep asking for sustainable catches. Keep the pressure up.