Supermarkets are making a significant effort to address the issue of unsustainable and destructive fishing, according to a new Greenpeace report.

The report contains the organisation’s second annual supermarket league table, which suggests that it has shamed the major retailers into acting more ethically when they purchase seafood.

Marks and Spencer heads the table for the second year in a row for dropping destructively fished species from its shelves. Waitrose is a close second after committing to remove all beam-trawled products from its shelves by the end of 2007. Somerfield and Iceland are at the bottom of the table, the former having actually dropped three places, as it has no plans to develop a more
comprehensive sustainable seafood policy.

The UK’s seafood retail market is worth £1.8billion a year and almost 90 per cent of sales are made through supermarkets.
“The seafood industry in the UK is undergoing nothing short of a revolution and it is being driven by the new standards in
‘green’ seafood demanded by supermarkets,” said Oliver Knowles, Greenpeace’s oceans campaigner.

The report’s release was soon followed by news that the world’s fish stocks faced imminent collapse. A group of scientists led by Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, reached this conclusion after analysing dozens of studies, along with fishing data collected by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization and other sources.

They found that almost a third of commercially fished species had been exploited so heavily or were so aff ected by pollution
or habitat loss that they were down to one tenth of previous levels, their definition of ‘collapse’. And by extrapolating existing trends, they found that there would be a total collapse of world fi sheries by 2048.