High-profile chefs will today join Greenpeace in a new campaign urging restaurants to use only sustainable seafood on their menus. Raymond Blanc and Tom Aikens are to launch the Seafood, See Life campaign - which already has the backing of multiple Michelin-starred chefs Heston Blumenthal and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - at the Old Billingsgate fish market in London tonight. Along with Greenpeace's executive director, John Sauven, they will ask members of the restaurant industry to choose to serve only sustainable seafood and urge food writers to drop unsustainably caught fish from their recipes.

Greenpeace wants restaurant owners and chefs to avoid using species that are threatened with overfishing, such as Atlantic cod, plaice, tuna, haddock, European hake, Atlantic halibut, Dover sole, monkfish, and Atlantic salmon and instead use seafood from well-managed fisheries that use sustainable fishing practices like line-caught Pollack, seabass and Cornish mackerel, Cornish sardines, English herring, and scallops, winkles, clams, oysters or mussels that have been hand-gathered rather than dredged.

Blanc said: "Protecting the diversity of fish in our seas is as important as looking after wildlife on land. Those of us who are passionate about cooking and serving seafood will be equally passionate about using only sustainable species, as the fish we cook and eat now will determine what we have in the future."

Sarah Shoraka from Greenpeace said: "No one wants to see fishy favourites disappear from dinner plates, but that is what the future holds, unless we change the way we catch fish. Making large areas of the ocean into marine reserves, where fishing doesn't take place, would allow depleted stocks to rebuild.

"Chefs and food writers can help to save the world's oceans by putting sustainability as a vital ingredient on every menu." Guests at the event will be asked to sign a pledge to stop using or promoting unsustainable fish species and to support the creation of "marine reserves" to help fish stocks recover.

Greenpeace is calling for 40% of the world's oceans to become protected as marine reserves. It says figures from the royal commission on environmental pollution show that only 0.006% of England's territorial waters are designated as "no fishing" areas to protect damaged stocks.

The government announced a draft marine bill in the Queen's speech last November, but this was criticised by conservationists, who said a draft bill rather than a full bill showed its lack of commitment in protecting offshore habitats and species

Willie Mackenzie of Greenpeace said: "Getting talented and well-known chefs behind the campaign to save threatened fish stocks is crucially important. But the Government must also do its bit. Finally delivering the promised Marine Bill would be a step in the right direction and creating legislation that would protect large areas of the UK's water as marine reserves would provide a huge boost to threatened fish stocks and protect the future of the fishing industry."

Overfishing as a result of modern, industrialised practices is seriously depleting the ocean's fish stocks. According to the United Nations, 71-78% of the world's fisheries are classed as fully exploited, over exploited or significantly depleted. Some species have already been fished to commercial extinction, and many more, like cod and tuna, are under threat.

This week, a report released by the IUCN World Conservation Union warned that widespread corruption was adding to the devastating effects of overfishing in the world's oceans. It said declining fish stocks and growing consumer demand for marine food was encouraging illegal fishing and even the false labelling of products as "ecofish".

(Por Jessica Aldred, The Guardian, 31/01/2008)