HOPES that short-term cuts in fishing will quickly replenish Europe’s fish stocks are likely to be dashed – because overfishing goes back to the Victorians.
This week, ministers trying to reform the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy , but more than half of these could recover to 1970s levels if fishing lets up for a few years. Yet this assumes that stocks were healthy 40 years ago.
That may be wrong. A team led by Ruth Thurston at the University of York, UK, calculated the amount of fish, such as cod,…
