Liza Griffin explores the implications of the British appetite for fish

What better than walking down the pier at your favourite British coastal resort tucking into a large cod and chips? It's so fresh that you can taste the sea. Bliss! We know that our supper was probably swimming around in the ocean less than a week ago, but how did it end up on top of our paper cone of chips and what are the consequences of it being there?

Fishing has been a feature of our coastline in Britain for hundreds of years, and because of its long history it is something that we tend to romanticise. Fishermen are the last of the 'hunters' in the Western world and many of us are aware of how dangerous and precarious the work of a fisherman can be. So when we listen to the shipping forecast on the radio, while safely tucked up in a warm bed, we can imagine the fisherman bravely hauling up his latest catch in treacherous weather conditions; indeed a catch that may contain next week's fish supper.

However, these idealised notions of fishing are really only part of the story. The small harbours that we might visit on trips to the coast no longer support the communities that developed around them at the beginning of the last century; and they certainly don't support enough boats to provide the quantity of seafood that we now require for our own consumption and for foreign markets.

While fishing only represents about 0.05 % of the UK economy some coastal communities, particularly those in the Northeast of Scotland, still rely on this industry to provide local employment. And these ports, that do still support significant fishing and its related industries, may not be the sorts of romantic places that we want to visit at all! They may comprise rather industrial landscapes, dominated by processing factories and modern infrastructure, like roads, railways and transport interchanges.

Fish today is rarely sold directly to retailers. It is landed from the boats in harbours around the UK's coast. The fish is then auctioned off at markets to merchants who will probably send it to a processing plant, where it may be gutted and packed and perhaps sent to a supermarket. Apart from adding value to the fish, these processes also provide jobs, and as long as the tasks involved are performed locally then the communities that caught the fish will benefit.

But things are changing. Where was the cod that you are eating actually caught? Has it been processed within the local community or was it frozen days ago and sent to Britain from Norway, for instance? Has it travelled for hundreds of miles by lorry or by boat? Fishing, like all industry, has been affected by global economic changes that mean we won't necessarily get our food from the nearest supplier, but rather the supplier that purchased and processed the food - like our piece of 'fresh' fish - for the lowest price in a global market.

Fishermen, then, are not just adventurous hunters. They are like all other business people and they operate in a market economy where they compete with others, hoping to sell their catches to the highest bidder. And in an economic environment where consumers and retailers nowadays have wide choices about where they can purchase their fish, the fisher/business men have to work hard to ensure that they catch the most and the best fish in order to make the profit which is their livelihood.

On top of this, intense competition amongst fishermen means that any fish that is not caught by your vessel could instead be caught by another, so it may be in your interests to catch that fish first! All this means that skippers, who run the fishing boats, will want to invest some of their profits in new and more efficient technology, so that they are able to keep up with the other vessel owners who will be doing the same. Fishing has undergone vast technological changes over the last fifty years. Fishing gear, such as the nets and other equipment, has been improved so that today each vessel can catch much more fish in a single trip.

These factors - improvements in technology and increased global competition - coupled with an increasing global appetite for seafood, mean that our oceans now tend to be overfished. Until well into the 20th century, the resources of the ocean were thought to be infinite. Recently, however, increased fishing effort has corresponded with declining stocks and smaller catches, and it could be that over 70% of oceans are over-fished.

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