Is it really The End of the Line for fish?

What is this film?
A documentary called The End of the Line, released last week to coincide with the UN's first ever World Oceans Day. Based on a book by British journalist Charles Clover, it has already been compared to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and even Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's book about the pesticide DDT, which helped found the environmental movement in the 1960s. Clover's message is simple: the world's fish are being hunted to extinction; if things carry on as they are, seafood will disappear by 2048.

How bad is the situation?
Perilous. The global fish catch peaked in the late 1980s and has fallen ever since, even as trawlers get bigger, faster and more sophisticated. More than 70 per cent of world fish stocks are now fully exploited or in decline; the biomass of cod in the North Sea, says the Marine Conservation Society, has fallen from 250,000 tonnes in 1970 to just 37,000 tonnes in 2007; once common North Sea species like white skate are now critically endangered. And as nations with big fishing fleets exhaust their own waters, they start fishing off the coast of developing countries, so depriving some of the world's poorest people of traditional sources of protein.

Can we blame this state of affairs on global warming?
Pollution and climate change, which are reducing the amount of oxygen in the world's oceans, are certainly contributory factors, but far more lethal has been the impact of industrialised fishing. The global fishing industry, subsidised by governments to the tune of $14bn a year, has enough nets to take in the world's catch four times over. Some nets are miles long; the mouth of the largest is big enough to swallow 12 jumbo jets. And the ecological damage caused by bottom trawling is huge. Yet at root, all this destruction is fuelled by us, the consumers.

What have we been doing?
Eating five times as much fish, worldwide, as we did in 1950. In the UK, sales of fresh fish outstripped fresh poultry for the first time last year - and we're being urged to eat yet more. The Food Standards Agency, for instance, is still pushing its 'eat two [fish] a week' campaign. But despite the warnings of what this entails, no one seems bothered. The Michelin-starred Nobu restaurant, part-owned by Robert De Niro, still serves bluefin tuna, as Clover notes in his film - a fish in danger of extinction. Thanks to the film, Charlize Theron and other celebrities have written to chef Nobu Matsuhisa asking him to cut it from the menu so they can 'dine with a clear conscience'. Pret A Manger, conscience pricked, has withdrawn tuna fish baguettes from the high street. But Britain as a whole still contributes mightily to the problem.

How is Britain culpable?
As a member of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), which has caused some of the worst over-fishing on Earth. Some 90 per cent of Europe's fish stocks are over-fished, compared with 25 per cent globally; 93 per cent of cod caught in the North Sea are killed before they can breed; 40 per cent to 60 per cent of fish caught a year are thrown over the side (in line with