Due to greed, governments and organizations have wilfully ignored scientists' warnings about unsustainable fishing practices. This failure to regulate the industry has caused serious depletion of fishing stocks, placing some species in danger of extinction.
Fishing has been encouraged by governments even when no longer profitable. By 1989, the value of the worldwide catch was $72 billion, but the operating costs of the 3 million fishing vessels were $92 billion. The shortfall was made good by government subsidies. Nations cannot agree on how much fishing to sacrifice, or on how to share the loss among nations. Instead, the national policies have been to take as many fish as possible and accuse others of overfishing or mismanaging their fishing stocks.
The CCSBT to date has been unable to fulfil its role of conserving the southern bluefin tuna. If it remains unable to agree on measures to rebuild southern bluefin tuna stocks and stem the increase in global fishing for the species, then the CCSBT will go down in history as the body which drove its target species to extinction.