The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish, with little attempt made to allow the fish populations to recover. The annual 27 billion dollars in government subsidies to fishing, mostly in rich countries, is "perverse," Mr Sukhdev said, since the entire value of fish caught is only 85 billion dollars.

This is the key issue. Being European, I remember since the 1970s that western European nations, particularly Spain, started ranging further afield because they had fished out most of the waters around their own coasts. The result was 'fishing wars' where trawlers would damage the nets or otherwise interfere with boats from competing nations, which resulted in a few diplomatic incidents. Now Euro fishermen catch way out in the mid-Atlantic, and indeed there have been clashes between Euro and Spanish fishing vessels.

Property rights are offered by some Economists as a solution, and I can see the logic of this; on the other hand I am unsure about the probity of just handing people property title for no value, and I'm uncertain about how these can be properly enforced in international waters anyway, absent solid maritime treaties. So in the meantime we have this idiotic subsidy system, which doesn't benefit anyone except the manufacturers of fishing vessels and equipment.

For example, it ignores the fact that in the Pacific Northwest, in an orgy of short-sighted stupidity, we've managed to kill off nearly all of the greatest salmon runs in the lower 48. (Look around for the Elwha dam sometime.)

Nowadays, to find salmon runs the likes of which the Pacific Northwest was once known for you, there's only one place left: Kamchatka. And I have my doubts about how long they'll last. The only problem that the Kamchatka rivers don't have that the Elwha and Columbia Rivers had (some of the world's greatest salmon runs before human stupidity finished them off) is dams.