It's like any investment program. When you are in serious imbalance, like we are with the fisheries, we need to take drastic action. Drastic action means that society has to be willing to invest, one way or the other, in order to get us back in balance.
Our analysis is showing that if we are able to put in marine protected areas, to bring in sustainable management, we'll get lots of benefits in the future. We do have numbers for this, showing that the problem is how to move from here to there. This is where people like you come in. In the rebuilding, for example, see that there is enough money to compensate fishers to help them to adjust to the short-term costs while we move society to the higher-level benefit. We're talking about billions of dollars.
Fisheries are really important, if you think globally. The reasons some of us are working so hard for sustainability are many. Number one, we take about 120 billion tonnes of fish a year out of the ocean. If you convert that to the number of mature cows, just to make you realize, that's about 120 million mature cows. I'll call them fish cows, if you like, that we pull out of the ocean each year, which is more than all of the cows we kill on our farms. We employ about 260 million people. Many are young people who will have no jobs, so imagine the security problems that we'll all face.
We need to invest. When I say we, the public and private sectors need to invest, soften the blow to our fishermen. I have a lot of sympathy for fishermen, because they are important. They are people, just like the rest of us. They need to keep their lives going. But we need that investment to move this to a higher level for everybody.