The Potential Harvest of the Sea

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Abstract
Postwar growth of world marine fisheries has been rapid, from 17 million metric tons in 1948 to 40 million in 1962, and recently seems to have accelerated. Crude estimates of the potential total harvest may be made on the basis of information about unfished regions and underexploited stocks. These lead the author to conclude that, without radical changes in fishing techniques, or radical intervention, as for example by extensive aquaculture, the harvest can easily be increased by a factor of two, and probably four. It should also be possible to estimate potential harvest from net photosynthetic productivity and rates of transfer of materials through the food web to harvestable species, but such estimates are imprecise due to lack of good information about routes and rates of transfer. However, they support a conclusion that a potential harvest of 200 million tons a year is probably conservative. By harvesting species lower in the food chain, in areas where they occur in economically catchable aggregations, harvests may be greatly increased. More detailed knowledge of food chains and their dynamics is required, both to improve evaluation of potential fisheries using present techniques, and to provide the basis for eventual more radical intervention in the ecological system further to increase the harvest.

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