Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
can be consumed by or sold to dealers who can distribute anything edible inland along de-
centralized local food networks - and the less desirable species are available for the poor.
In a low impact fishing economy of this kind, the lack of technological ability to overfish
is rooted in the lack of any need to overfish. Not only is there little reason to get tangled
up in profit-seeking fisheries development schemes or to embrace new technologies that
would increase production at the expense of the community's food security; there is also
every reason to avoid such schemes. When fish stocks are abundant, fishing is easy with in-
expensive gear. When fish stocks are limited, technological improvements simply enhance
one fisherman's chances at the expense of another's, until, in the words of a Maine fisher-
man arguing for a ban on a new kind of lobster pot, 'soon everybody will have the damn
things'.
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But local inshore fishing economies, while they may be well managed and internally
stable, are vulnerable to external agents, who either infiltrate levels of technology and cap-
italization that local fishermen cannot match, or simply arrive with big offshore fleets that
mop up all the fish. Olvar Löfgren's essay From Peasant Fishing to Industrial Trawling'
recounts how the transition to a corporate dominated fishery took place in Sweden and
elsewhere on the North Atlantic fringe, over the course of the twentieth century, leading to
the collapse of herring stocks as a result of overfishing for fish meal in the 1960s. David
Matthews' book
Controlling Common Property
describes how local Newfoundland fish-
ermen could foresee the collapse of their cod fishery in the 1980s, yet were powerless to
prevent corporate trawling fleets scouring the ocean bed for the last remaining stocks, with
the complicity of fishery economists and bureaucrats.
As waters in the northern hemisphere have become overfished, corporate fleets from the
EU and South East Asia have targeted the waters around Africa. These boats are stealing
the resources of the poorest people on the planet. There was a poignant moment on the
BBC World Service late in 2008 when a reporter managed to telephone through to a ship
captured by Somali pirates, one of whom explained: 'We've had no government for 18
years. We have no life. Our last resource is the sea, and foreign trawlers are plundering our
fish'. Another BBC reporter quoted a resident of Garowe as saying 'Illegal fishing is the
root cause of the piracy problem: they call themselves coastguards.'
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Almost every inshore fishery around the world has a similar story to tell, and its a wonder
more haven't resorted to piracy to make their point. Artisanal fisheries organizations have
campaigned long and hard for trawler bans in countries such as India and Indonesia, with
partial success. During the 1990s, the influence of the 'anthropologists' persuaded organiz-
ations such as the FAO to promote schemes for community management of local fisheries.
However, both the Indian and the Indonesian government have been reluctant to sacrifice
export earnings derived from licensed trawlers, and ineffective at defending their waters
from the incursions of foreigners. In India, local fisheries have been encouraged to build
