Problem of Ghost Gear - Fishing | Current Affairs

What is the issue?

What are the recent happenings?

Ghost gear is any fishing equipment that has been lost, discarded or abandoned in water bodies.
The problem of ghost gear has grown from a fishing outcome that people had not heard of to one that is now difficult to ignore.
In March 2018, fishermen hauled 400 kg of fishing nets out of the sea in a few locations off Kerala’s south coast.
Reportedly, many divers regularly make underwater trips just to extract nets that have sunk to the ocean floor.
It covers the regions off India’s coasts, ranging from Tamil Nadu to Maharashtra.

What is the impact?

Ghost nets are often ‘ghost fishers’ as ocean currents carry them for thousands of km across the ocean floor.
E.g. discarded Indian and Thai fishing nets have been fished out of Maldivian coasts
They entangle, injure and drown marine life and damage live corals along the way.
The Olive Ridley Project is a U.K. registered charity that removes ghost nets and protects sea turtles.
The project, between 2011 and 2018 alone, recorded around 600 sea turtles being entangled in ghost gear near the Maldives.
Of this, 528 were Olive Ridleys, the same species that come in thousands to Odisha’s coasts to nest.
Other casualties worldwide include whales, dolphins, sharks and even pelagic birds.
In 2016, another study found over 5,400 marine animals belonging to 40 different species entangled in ghost gear, or associated with it.

What are the concerns?

The analysis showed a huge gap in data from the Indian, Southern and Arctic Oceans, and thus prompted on future studies to focus on these areas.
But even after two years, there are still no data pertaining to the extent of prevalence of ghost gear off India’s coast.
Data is crucial because the detrimental effects of these nets also spillover into other countries and oceans.
The government is currently preparing a national ghost net management policy.
But besides ghost nets, the larger concern is the bigger violations wherein large vessels do fishing where they are not supposed to.
Unless this is checked, implementing a policy on the management of ghost nets is hard.
The consequences of overfishing, using nets of the smallest mesh size, and illegal fishing are far less visible, but are more worrying.
Entire fishing communities are affected by these actions.
Especially in developing countries like India where the demand for fish keeps rising, the impact is serious.

What should be done?

There are numerous innovative solutions to tackle the problem of ghost nets, which India should consider.
E.g. in countries like Canada and Thailand, fishermen retain their used nets.
These are recycled into yarn to craft socks and even carpet tiles.
For the first time in a developing country, a gear-marking programme is being tested in Indonesia.
By this, the trajectory of fishing gear, if it drifts away, can be studied better.
Outreach and education among fishing communities would also be crucial along with policy-level changes.

Source: The Hindu

Problem of Ghost Gear - Fishing