Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
situation is made worse because indigenous hunters are paid to shoot meat for the log-
ging camps - for maybe 2000 people who were not there before.
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Even in Alaska, where population pressures are still low, the tension between indigenous
and urban interests colours the conservation debate. There are few subsistence farmers in
Alaska, but there are many subsistence hunters or fishermen - 95 per cent of rural house-
rision for liberals in the Lower 48, but bagging the annual moose is as normal for Alaskans
as growing vegetables is for the English. Subsistence hunting is enshrined in the Alaskan
constitution, which rules that fish and wildlife are 'reserved to the people for common use'
and that 'no exclusive right or special privilege of fishery shall be created or authorized'.
Unfortunately the States' founding fathers, when they drafted the constitution in 1959,
failed to anticipate that ten years later the land would be coveted for other uses. Indigenous
hunting and fishing rights threatened to hold up construction of the Trans Alaska Oil
Pipeline, and in 1971 the federal government bought out these rights through the Alaska
Native Claims Settlement Act - promising that the native subsistence lifestyle would non-
etheless be upheld. In order to keep this promise, the federal government, with the support
of wildlife conservationists mandated that subsistence hunting and fishing would be prior-
itized for rural residents - Alaskans living in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Sitka and other cities
could no longer claim by right their salmon and their moose. The Alaskan State fought this
ruling through the courts for about ten years, with the result that now all Alaskans have
subsistence rights on 40 per cent of the territory, and rural Alaskans have priority on the
and fish per year, whereas rural Alaskans consume an impressive 170 kilos - about a pound
a day. This is understandable given that nothing else grows in Alaska, except for monstrous
75 pound cabbages in the Matanuska Valley. Sarah Palin would have created a better im-
pression on the East Coast if she had been photographed holding one of these.
Fish
Outposts like Alaska are a reminder of how bountiful the world was before the rise of
the agrarian city state. Alaska calls itself 'the last frontier' but it is only the penultimate,
for beyond lies the ocean - indeed 60 per cent of Alaska's subsistence meat is fish. Only a
tiny fraction of the world's terrestrial meat is hunted, but almost all of the marine fish that
provide five per cent of the world's protein are wild animals, captured in the chase. Wild
fish do not respect borders or fences, they belong to no one and so fishing has traditionally
offered opportunities for the poor and landless. But that frontier, too, is under threat. As
societies and nations have become urbanized and detached from nature, encouraging their
