As in Europe, South American countries largely fished their own or their neighbor’s EEZs over the study period [6], but unlike Europe, South America was a net exporter and presently dominates the fishmeal trade [9]. According to the management report card by Pitcher et al. [28], Peru PLX-4720 clinical trial just failed; Brazil, Argentina, and Ecuador, whose estimated losses mounted in the 1990s (Fig. 1c), failed; and Chile, also listed in Table 1, barely passed. The assessment by Mora et al. [29] gave South American countries a mid-level rating for their policy-making transparency, found to be a key attribute of fisheries sustainability, but deemed Peru’s and Chile’s fisheries very likely unsustainable at present. Fishing

in the continental shelves off North America has been intensive for centuries [32], and by 2005, the Northwest Atlantic had one of the highest percentages of depleted marine species [15]. selleck screening library Not unexpectedly, the US and Canada rank 1st and 4th in Table 1. Recently, however, the US and Canada’s management schemes have been rated well [28] with a good level of policy-making

transparency [29]—reasons, perhaps, why their estimated catch losses fell or stabilized, respectively, since the late 1990s. This is consistent with a study by Beddington et al. [33], who reported a recent decline in the number of US stocks classified as overfished. At the same time, however, high US demand has been served by rising imports, increasingly from Asia [9]. Looking to Central America in Fig. 2, Guatemala’s high relative losses were

likely driven by a spike in foreign fishing in the early 1970s (including fleets from Mexico, Panama and the US, but also Japan and the Soviet Union), while Cuba largely depleted its own waters [6]. Overfishing in the waters of Asia has been proceeding on different timelines. Overall landings in Japan’s and South Korea’s EEZs clearly peaked in the mid to late 1980s and have been declining ever since [6]. Meanwhile, catches in China’s waters rose by an order of magnitude from 1950 to 2000 [6] (even after having been corrected for the substantial overreporting by the Chinese government [34]), and this has obscured the species-level depletions that occurred along the way. Overall landings in many Asian EEZs continue G protein-coupled receptor kinase to climb. Thailand and Viet Nam may have lost more than a million tonnes each to overfishing from 1950 to 2004, placing them 26th and 29th in the world in losses, but this is not at all apparent in the increasing overall catch trends from their waters [6]. Whereas Japan passed according to Pitcher et al.’s assessment of fisheries management, China received a failing score (∼40%), and Thailand and Viet Nam fared much worse (∼20%) [28]. Mora et al. however, gave Japan and China low likelihood of fisheries sustainability, highlighting Japan’s heavy reliance on subsidies [29].