Environmental campaigners have begun a push at the United Nations for a moratorium on sea-bottom trawling in international waters, a fishing practice they claim is equivalent to bulldozing whole forests to catch rabbits.

According to Greenpeace, part of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition of environmental pressure groups, the technique is "one of the most destructive fishing practices in the world", wielding vast bottom-trawl nets "that indiscriminately smash and crush corals" and "swallow everything in their path".