Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
gist, James McGoodwin, adds: 'What I find most objectionable about the Tragedy of the
Commons model, at least when it is applied to the fisheries, is the cynical view of the men-
tality, character and personality of fishers implied in the explanation of how the tragedy
develops.'
19
Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s in particular, anthropologists working in the field
consistently reported that the communities they studied had developed often sophisticated
methods for managing resources to ensure that they were not over exploited and were dis-
tributed reasonably equitably - though this generosity did not necessarily extend to every-
body in the community; in some cases a resource may have been kept common only to an
elite or a particular social group. Some of these studies focussed on land-based activities
such as hunting or pastoralism, but more than half involved fishing communities, for it was
the marine resource base that had best survived the colonial and industrial land grabs of the
19th and 20th centuries. Coastal communities, in both industrial and undeveloped coun-
tries, have evolved a wide variety of methods for controlling fishing effort, for example:
banning or restricting commercial sales, taboos on eating certain foods, limits on the num-
ber or size of pots, nets or boats, restriction on certain areas, seasonal restrictions, lotteries
for favoured fishing sites, queuing systems for fishing favoured areas in turn etc.
20
In addition, fishing in most coastal communities is often a part time activity with fish-
ermen having 'one boot in the boat and the other in the field.' In Northern Sweden in
the 1920s 'one called oneself “ fisherman”, but to this had to be added: log driver, steve-
dore, mason, logger, seal hunter, carpenter, boatbuilder, industrial worker, shoemaker, rope-
searcher in the South Pacific noted that 'almost no one is willing to be a full-time any-
thing'.
22
The ability to turn to several occupations is characteristic of peasant communities in gen-
eral, and of many rural communities in more developed countries; it is a way both of ad-
apting to seasonal variations, and of spreading risk, so that a poor harvest or the closure of
a local sawmill is not a disaster. When a fishing community spreads its own risks in this
way, they are also spread for the fish. Whereas a dedicated commercial fishing fleet, ob-
liged to pay off its capital investment, seeks to maintain catch levels when fish are scarce,
maritime or riverine peasants are more likely to turn their hand to other occupations un-
'default land user strategy', harvesting what rises effortlessly to the top of the food chain,
rather than pursuing an 'active sea-user strategy' designed to squeeze out of the sea what
she only grudgingly yields. The two types of fishery also have contrasting approaches to
waste. Modern trawlers discard about half the fish they catch, because they are targeting
a single species for an industrial processor, or because they have exceeded their quota. A
local coastal fishery, managing its own resources, discards nothing of value, for everything
