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Comment by Biologist123 | Hacker News Reader

> Genuinely interested: what environmental problem did you solve there?

Soil erosion.

> Are "fishing families" really the problem with fishing? I would have thought that the industrial fishing boats are not "family businesses"...

They fish different zones. Big trawlers offshore/deep sea. Artisanal fishers inshore. The inshore fisheries catch has declined 75% in 30 years in some areas.

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But did some behaviour of the artisanal fishers actually change that would lead this decline back to them? It could just as well be industrial trawlers disrupting migration routes, pollution, ocean acidification etc disrupting ecosystems etc.

definitely the big guys are causing havoc all of their own deep sea where they fish, with bottom dredging nets etc. And maybe there was some contribution inshore, certainly I’ve heard complaints about this in Somalia. But the more immediate causes in inshore decline seems to have been increase in fishing pressure due to demand growth (population growth, exports, tourism), loss of spawning sites due to mangrove destruction, and dynamite fishing which destroys habitat.

My question as well! I have no idea, but intuitively I would rather stop the industrial trawlers than the "family businesses" :-).

You don’t have to stop the family business, the resource just needs to be sustainably-managed - sustainable offtake levels, otherwise the resource itself will crash. Indeed they already have - as although catch volume is down 75%, people now catch and eat fish not consumed in the past.

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