Has fish really had its chips as a family favourite?

Will seafood be off the menu by 2050 as some national newspapers report, leading ultimately to the filleting of eight-and-a-half thousand UK chip shops?

Or are we being baited to swallow yet another fishy doomsday scenario?

Dr Boris Worm, of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, quoted as the lead author of the four-year report, said that its warning of a 90 per cent decline in some fish stocks by 2048 was not a forecast.

"This is what is projected, not predicted, to happen. I am confident we will not go there because we will do something about it. But if this trend continues as it has for the last 50 years the world's fished seafoods will have reached what we define as collapse by 2048," he added.

The report partly attributes the crisis to over-fishing. A Greenpeace spokesman declared that fish and chips would be off the menu within our lifetime unless something was done, such as the creation of global large-scale marine reserves and a ban on destructive fishing practices.

So is the over-exploitation of depleted fishing grounds the reason why a future generation may have to return to egg and chips as a favourite meal?

No, said Bradford-based Richard North, for 30 years a food safety consultant and researcher who has latterly worked as a political researcher in the European Parliament and for the Conservative Shadow Cabinet.

Last year he produced a 33-page consultation paper for the Conservatives on the management of fisheries in UK waters and the current European Union's Common Fisheries Policy.

"There has been a crisis in fisheries for the past 20 years; but the problem is not ecological as suggested in the report but one of management and politics," he said.

Dr North's consultation paper was a result of visits to fishing ports and fishing grounds in the Falklands, Norway, the Faroes, Iceland, Canada, the United States and Britain as well as discussions with scientists, fishermen and environmentalists.

"Prior to 1972, when we joined the European Economic Community, as the European Union was then called, British fishing was a model of sustainability. Thirty years on, after decades of the Common Fisheries Policy, areas of the most fertile and productive fishing grounds in the world are threatened with closure. Others are producing yields well short of their potential capacity, while ever-increasing restrictions are imposed on British fishermen.

"In 1995, 9,200 British fishing vessels landed 912,000 tons of fish. In 2002, 7,003 vessels landed 686,000 tons - a drop of 25 per cent over eight years.

"Then there is the grotesque nature of a policy based on setting fixed quotas of fish, forcing fishermen to throw back into the sea those fish over quota. In some fisheries substantially more fish are thrown back into the sea dead than are landed.

"The system is absurdly bureaucratic and inflexible, as I witnessed when I spent a night on a Fleetwood trawler, watching thousands of immature plaice being dragged up from the depths, only to be thrown back dead - all because the EU rules penalised fishermen.

"It is hard to believe that sane human beings can defend a system that requires fishermen to scoop up juvenile fish, accounting for 90 per cent of a catch, only to throw them back overboard dead."

He contests the common perception that all round the world fishing grounds are all but fished out.

"Go to Norway and the Faroes where they have expanding fisheries, increasing prosperity, an expanding tax take and a biomass in the sea that is on the increase. Norway, the Faroes and Iceland decided not to join the European Union because of the Common Fisheries Policy.

"Greenland used to be in the EEC, but this is the one that got away; it is the only country to have left for the major reason of fisheries policy.

"Conservationists talk about closing down breeding areas. In Iceland they have a system where they can close off an area in two to three hours.

"They have sentinel boats that monitor juvenile fish stocks. If the number of juvenile fish in a catch exceeds the limit the news is broadcast over the radio and the fishing ground is closed down.

"In the Falklands fishing boats report their catches on a day-by-day basis. On the east coast of the United States committees of interested parties - fishermen, ecologists, scientists - make local decisions.

"In the European Union decisions about fish stocks are based on information that is two years old. Quotas are a convenient bureaucratic regulation because you can stand on a quayside and count fish," Dr North added.

He advocates the end of the quota system and a ban on the practice of discarding fish that exceed the stipulated quota.

A properly thought-out national strategy operated at local level is urgently required, he believes. This strategy would include the licensing of fishing boats; restrictions as to size and power; restricting the number of fishing days per boat and allowing boats to keep what they catch.

"If you want to see the cost of what's happened to the British fishing industry, go all the way up the east coast of Scotland and visit the fishing communities that used to be thriving. Now there is unemployment and drug-taking by young people who have no hope.

"The idea that fish and fisheries are an ecological subject, is understandable; but the hard reality is that fishing is a physical resource that has to be managed - and that has to be the responsibility of government. Therefore it is essential to have an effective and responsive management system as they have in the United States.

"Contrast that with what we have over here where the ministers of 25 states, some of which don't even have a coastline, sit in secret conclave over two days in December and decide what our fishing industry should do over the next year," he added.

It comes as a surprise to hear that the collapse of cod fishing in Newfoundland, far from being the predictable disaster, had a surprising beneficial effect.

"The cod is an awful fish. It is voracious and cannibalistic. When you have cod in waters little else survives. When cod fishing collapsed in Newfoundland other species thrived. Now the value of fishing has gone up.

"There are good examples of this all down the east coast of America. Well-managed fisheries are expanding and doing extremely well. Several endangered species have gone back on the fishing list," Dr North said.

The dozen recommendations listed in the executive summary of his consultation paper include: scrapping quotas; banning the practice of discarding fish; banning industrial fishing; scrapping production subsidies; and permanently closing off areas for conservation.