Water represents 70,71% of the planet. In the last thirty years, world’s demand for fish products has doubled and is expected to increase of approximatively 1,5% every year.
Since 1966, Thai waters are one of the most overexploited area on Earth. Today, Thai’s maritime resources and biodiversity are in a crisis. Nowadays, fishing vessels catch only 14% of what they would have captured in the 60s. Beside this, fishing boats need to stay even longer on the ocean. They also need to move far away from the coast to keep doing profit. In a recent report, Greenpeace noted that Thailand’s fishermen were catching an average of 300kg of fishes every hour in 1961 while they catch only 25kg now.
At this rate of fishing, fishes will no longer have time to reproduce.
Actual practice of fishing within Thai waters or Indonesian and Philippian waters threatens to destroy definitively their respective marine ecosystem. In addition of this, emerging technologies have an important role in the fishing industry fall as nowadays fishing lines can reach 120-kilometres-long and can be equipped with thousand of hooks…
Also, rapid industrialization of Thai’s fleet in the 2000s had for consequences an excessive number of boats. Without mentioning that Thai’s fleet is using disastrous fishing’s methods for the environment.
Per example, the uncontrolled fishery by trawl which reduced seabed to a smooth surface. With this method, maritime ecosystem is endangered as seabed’s algae are a vital ecosystem for over 149 species of fishes. The seabed is also represents a food court for marine animals such as dolphins and turtles.
In 2010, Thai authorities tried to fight against the disappearance of fishes by immersing metal’s tanks carcasses. Thai army immersed twenty-five old tanks in the bay of Thailand in order to try to save their ecosystem.
Fishing is an important activity in Thailand but is now being threatened by overfishing. Thai’s people were catching so many fishes before but by increasing their performance they started to endanger biodiversity to the point that Thai government had to act.
