Michelle Nijhuis notes that that declining fish populations are associated with a variety of social ills:
[Professor Justin] Brashares detailed examples: declining fish populations off the coast of southern Thailand are forcing Thai fishing fleets to work harder for the same catch, and the resulting desperation for labor has triggered an epidemic of indentured servitude and child slavery.
(The United Nations estimates that ten to fifteen per cent of the global fisheries workforce now suffers some form of enslavement.) Over the past decade, more than a hundred “fishing militias” have formed in Thailand, and clashes over local fishing rights have killed an estimated three thousand nine hundred people. In surveys of Kenyan households conducted by Kathryn Fiorella, a graduate student who works with Brashares, a large proportion of women reported exchanging sex for fish because, they said, fish had become too scarce and expensive to secure otherwise. …
These linkages are rarely discussed in academic circles, or even in the popular press. Not long after Brashares published his work on fisheries and bushmeat trends in Ghana, Science published a high-profile article on the decline of global fisheries; the same week, the Times published a story on forced child labor in the fishing industry, drawing on research and analysis by UNICEF and the International Labor Organization. Science made no mention of forced labor, and the Times made no mention of fisheries’ declines. “The science side is very focused on natural-resource trends and not really thinking about social consequences, while the policy side is looking at Somali pirates or elephant ivory, and totally disconnected from the root causes,” Brashares said.
The Dish 