Cod Populations Are Collapsing and Britain Is Still Fishing

UK-caught cod has now been downgraded to the worst possible rating by the Marine Conservation Society, with consumers urged to avoid it completely.

For years, we have been sold the fantasy that fishing can be made acceptable with the right labels, the right quotas, the right consumer choices, the right guidebook, the right certification stamp. But what are we looking at now? A species in serious decline, zero-catch advice ignored, “protected” waters still being trawled, and supermarkets scrambling to distance themselves from the fallout after years of normalising the product in the first place.

This is what passes for responsibility in the fishing industry: wait until the numbers crash, then tell people to switch species.

Cod populations in UK waters have been declining since 2015. The main driver is fishing, with warming seas and wider ecosystem disruption worsening the problem by affecting breeding and juvenile survival. Last year, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea recommended a zero-catch policy for 2026 in the North Sea and nearby waters. Not a modest reduction. Not a slight tightening. Zero. That is how bad it has become.

And still, the killing continued.

Instead of following the scientific advice, the UK government announced a 44% cut in cod fishing for 2026. That may sound dramatic until you remember it is still not zero. When a population is said to be approaching the point where safe reproduction is at risk, carrying on regardless is not caution. It is managed collapse.

This is the pattern. First the warnings. Then the watered-down response. Then the same people who allowed the decline to happen start talking about recovery as though it were an unfortunate accident rather than the predictable result of treating living beings as harvestable units.

The same fiction is playing out elsewhere. Mackerel was removed from the Marine Conservation Society’s recommended list after persistent overfishing linked to quota disputes. Waitrose has now said it will stop selling mackerel by the end of April. Again, this is presented as a responsible correction. In reality, it is a late response to a problem that should never have been allowed to reach this point.

And then there is the grotesque farce of marine protected areas.

Almost 40% of England’s seas are designated as protected. The public is encouraged to hear that phrase and imagine refuge, recovery, safety, breathing space. But in the four years to 2024, trawlers caught more than 1.3 million tonnes of fish within these supposedly protected areas. More than a million tonnes came from pelagic trawlers using vast nets that scoop up huge volumes of marine life in one go. Another 250,000 tonnes were taken with bottom-towed gear, including bottom trawlers dragging heavy equipment across the seabed, tearing through marine ecosystems that these areas are supposedly meant to conserve.

So what exactly is being protected?

Not the fish. Not the seabed. Not the ecosystems. Not the future.

What Britain has built is not a meaningful protection regime but a branding exercise. Lines on a map. Good press copy. Ministerial language about biodiversity and recovery, while industrial extraction carries on underneath it all. Protected areas that permit destruction are not protected areas. They are administrative camouflage.

This is why the language of “sustainable seafood” keeps collapsing under scrutiny. It invites people to believe the problem is one of shopping technique, that exploitation becomes acceptable if you swap one species for another, one region for another, one capture method for another. Avoid UK cod, buy Icelandic cod. Skip one trawled species, choose another. Try hake. Try haddock. Try farmed mussels. Try trout.

But this is not a serious moral or ecological reckoning. It is consumer-level rerouting inside an industry built on extraction, commodification, and death.

The public is constantly told to make better choices, while governments refuse to impose the level of protection that the science actually demands. Industry is allowed to keep operating beyond ecological limits, then consumers are handed a seafood guide and told to do their bit. It is absurd. The burden is pushed downward while the killing remains structurally protected.

And beneath all of this sits a deeper assumption that rarely gets challenged: that marine life exists for us to manage, exploit, downgrade, substitute, and consume. If one population crashes, another can be marketed. If one fish becomes too controversial, another can be positioned as the ethical alternative. The individual disappears. The living world becomes an inventory problem.

But collapse is not a labelling issue. It is not a messaging issue. It is not a problem that can be solved by slightly better purchasing habits while trawlers continue to strip supposedly protected waters.

Cod are not warning signs for human shopping behaviour. They are sentient beings caught in a system that treats depletion as acceptable right up until the brink. The same is true for mackerel, whiting, herring, and countless others swept into nets and reduced to tonnage statistics.

If “protected” seas can still be scoured by industrial vessels, then protection is a lie. If zero-catch advice can be ignored while governments congratulate themselves for smaller cuts, then management is a lie. If sustainability means waiting for collapse before shifting consumers to the next target, then sustainability is a lie too.

The truth is much simpler.

You cannot protect marine life while paying for its destruction. You cannot rebuild populations while treating them as commodities. And you cannot keep emptying the sea, then act shocked when it starts to look empty.