Deep-Sea Fishing's Damage

The Washington Post reports on a newly released study calling for a ban on deep-sea fishing:

Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Institute and the paper’s lead author, said the world has turned to deep-sea fishing “out of desperation” without realizing fish stocks there take much longer to recover.
“We’re now fishing in the worst places to fish,” Norse said in an interview. “These things don’t come back.”
As vessels use Global Positioning System devices and trawlers, which scrape massive metal plates across the sea bottom, the catch of deep-water species has increased sevenfold between 1960 and 2004, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
“What they’re doing out there is more like mining than fishing,” said Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
The estimated mean depth of fishing has more than tripled since the 1950s, from 492 feet to 1,706 feet in 2004, according to Telmo Morato, a marine biologist with the department of oceanography and fisheries at the University of the Azores in Portugal and one of the paper’s authors.

I can guarantee one thing, U.S. multinational corporations aren't involved in the industry if a person from the American Enterprise Institute is critical of it.  It is pretty obvious why so many nations subsidize the industry.  It is mining protein.  Why waste the effort of growing food when you can go take it.  Unfortunately, the lack of controls is destroying the world's fisheries.  We'll be lucky if there is any wild catch in 20 years.  The story of the Atlantic Cod fishery is a tragedy of immense proportions, expect it to be worldwide in our lifetimes.