Fishing is a human activity that has gone on for millennia. Nowadays, it remains one of the very few large scale economic activities that is still based on the ‘hunting and gathering’ of wild biological resources, contrary to agriculture or animal farming, where a few productive species and races were domesticated and grown or bred for human use long ago. With a few exceptions, the sustainability of fishing had been broadly maintained until recent decades, mainly based on small-capacity, shore fleets. Increasing technology and fishing power of industrial vessels since the 1950s resulted in massive increases of catches of the most popular species that often exceeded the maximum sustainable yield1 and led to collapses of some of these species’ populations and the fisheries that were dependent upon them. The Grand Bank cod fishery off Canada is a paradigmatic example. Absence of appropriate regulation and enforcement, especially in developing countries and in the open seas, contributed to this.