Members of the Fisheries Economics Unit at the UBC fisheries centre are pleased with favourable reviews for their paper “Food security implications of global marine catch losses due to overfishing” published last year in the Journal of Bioeconomics. While the cost of overfishing on marine biodiversity and ecology has been emphasized in recent literature, this work introduces the human cost of overfishing and estimates that 20 million people in the developing world are undernourished as a result of unsustainable fishing. As noted by Emmett Duffy:
“This paper shows that global overfishing results not only in the well-known degradation of biodiversity and ecosystems but also in ‘overfishing debt’, a paradoxical — and substantial — loss of revenue and food security, particularly in the nations that can least afford it.”