"Think carefully before you go and eat cod, swordfish or tuna or plaice,"
said Justin Woolford, head of the WWF's European fisheries campaign.
"The trail of destruction behind industrialised fishing must be stopped or our children will be left with a barren ocean."
Seafood dishes scrutinised
The conservation group reviewed about half a dozen popular seafood dishes, including fried plaice, swordfish or tuna steaks and paella, warning that stocks of the basic ingredients were either threatened by overfishing or are often fished in a manner that produced huge collateral damage.
Up to 80 percent of some plaice catches in the North Sea were thrown back overboard dead or dying, partly because the fish netted were too small, according to the WWF.
Depletion of northern cod stocks, a rival favourite for local dinner tables, has already led to official restrictions on fishing. The EU has also set about trying to downsize member nations' fishing fleets.
"Three years ago there was a rather promising reform of the common fisheries policy in the European Union and rather alarmingly, from the WWF's point of view, there's still quite a trail of waste and destruction behind
European fisheries," Woolford said.
"There are too many boats chasing too few fish, subsidies maintaining the existing size of the European fleet, and a large degree of illegal fishing -- we've seen this with blue fin tuna in the Mediterranean and cod in the Baltic."
In another example, the WWF said illegal driftnet fishing in Morocco, which targets swordfish for the European market, catches one swordfish for every two sharks, needlessly killing an estimated 100,000 sharks per year.
"Certainly fish is now much more popular and fashionable than it used to be. Sixty percent of what's on European dinner plates comes from outside European waters," Woolford said.
"One of the examples we look at is paella. We sometimes find ingredients for that dish are coming from waters off west Africa where you've got Spanish and French trawlers going and fishing for squid and shrimp and other fish."
Woolford said there were signs that West African coastal communities, which depend on fish for about three-quarters of their protein, were harmed by the passage of industrial-sized trawlers offshore.
"Anecdotally, we hear that it takes a month to catch what they used to catch in four days," he said.
In July, Mauritania and the EU renewed a six-year agreement on fishing in the northwest African country's waters.
Two hundred European boats will be allowed to fish there subject to a new two-year ceiling on some types of catches, in exchange for 86 million euros ($A145 million) in grants for Mauritania including funding for the country's fishing industry.