FEATURE ARTICLE 1 

 THE PRECAUTIONARY APPROACH 



All Stocks considered 

 n=844 



Overfished 



Known stocks 

 n=300 



Figure 1 



Status of fisheries of the 

 United States reported to 

 Congress (NMFS. 1998). 



300 Stocks whose status was known, 33% were 

 either overfished or approaching an overfished con- 

 dition (Figure 1). Many of the unknown stocks 

 may be overfished as well, and NMFS expects that 

 the percentage ot overfished stocks will increase 

 with planned amendments to almost all fishery 

 management plans currently in progress. 



The United States is not alone in having a sig- 

 nificant portion of its stocks in an overfished state. 

 Based on data up to 1992, the Food and Agricul- 

 ture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations 

 (UN) estimated that ot those stocks for which for- 

 mal assessments were available, 44"''i] were consid- 

 ered intensively to tullv exploited, and 25% were 

 considered overexploited, depleted, or recovering. 

 Using a different classification system and consid- 

 ering the top 200 of the world's fisheries in 1994, 

 FAO estimated that about 60% can be consid- 

 ered "mature" or "senescent. "' 



WHAT IS THE 

 PRECAUTIONARY APPROACH? 



The Precautionarv Approach has been pro- 

 posed as a way of thinking about fisheries and 

 making management decisions that can help pre- 

 vent overfishing and rebuild depleted stocks. I he 

 Precautionary Approach is adapted from the Pre- 

 cautionary Principle. The latter aims to prevent 

 irreversible damage to the environment by imple- 

 menting strict conservation measures, even in the 



'FAO reports and pres.s releases l.iii he f<Hiiid on the World 

 Wide Web at http://www.fao.org 



absence of scientific evidence that environmental 

 degradation is being caused by human interven- 

 tion. The Principle is rather rigid and implies an 

 extreme form of reversal of the burden of proof 

 (in its extreme, human actions would be consid- 

 ered harmful unless proven otherwise). If strictly 

 applied to fisheries, the Principle would only al- 

 low fishing in cases where it could be proven that 

 fishing activities would not harm fishery resources 

 or their ecosystems. The Precautionary Approach 

 is a relaxation of the Principle, developed to deal 

 with systems that are slowly reversible but often 

 difficult to control, not well understood, and may 

 be subject to changing environment and human 

 values. Thus, the Precautionary Approach is par- 

 ticularly advocated for renewable resources like 

 fisheries. 



As with the Principle, the reversal of the bur- 

 den of proof still pertains in applying the Precau- 

 tionary Approach. As such, it is recognized that: 

 1 ) all fishing activities have environmental impacts, 

 and it is not appropriate to assume that these are 

 negligible until proven otherwise, 2) although 

 some fishing impacts may be potentially detrimen- 

 tal, this di>es not impK' that all fishing should cease 

 until all potential impacts have been evaluated and 

 determined to be negligible, and 3) in cases where 

 the likelv impacts of fishing activities are uncer- 

 tain, priority should be given to conserving the 

 productive capaciu' of the fishery resources. Ac- 

 cording to FAO (1995a), the standard of proof to 

 be used in tiecisions regarding authorization of 

 fishing activities should be commensurate with the 

 potential risk to the resource, while also taking into 

 account the expected benefits of the activities. 



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