Oceans

The New Year’s storms have brought a lurid, unmissable reminder to UK beaches, with thousands of bright pink detergent bottles being churned up by the sea. As waves of highly-visible plastic trash hit British beaches, it’s a timely reminder of a much bigger problem: we are turning our oceans into plastic soup. It’s been estimated recently that about EIGHT MILLION TONNES of plastic ends up in the ocean each year.

About 8 years ago, I had the joy of doing a live news interview from a fish processing factory in Grimsby. Being in a fish processing factory in Grimsby was fine, it was wearing a hair net on national TV that wasn’t.

The story being discussed was seafood brand Young’s decision to ship UK-caught shrimp all the way to Thailand and back, a move that was ‘better’ in terms of CO2 emissions, and cheaper for consumers.

But what price do we pay for cheap seafood?

Every year on the 21 November fishing communities around the world celebrate World Fisheries Day and remind us that we need to ensure a healthy oceans ecosystem with plenty more fish swimming in the sea. More than two-thirds of the world’s fisheries have been overfished and unsustainable fishing methods like bottom trawling or the use of FAD's (Fish Aggregation Devices) threaten to deplete fish stocks.

The Fisheries Minister George Eustice just received a petition signed by himself, calling on himself to implement the measures George Eustice believes that George Eustice should take in redistributing fishing quota to small, sustainable, fishing vessels.