Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
up their fishing capacity with larger boats and outboard motors in order to compete with
the offshore trawlers, but the main effect has been to exacerbate competition amongst each
other. In Kerala the local fishing fleet doubled in horsepower between 1991 and 1998 yet
there was no increase in catch; it was, says a representative of the fishing union, 'entirely
tomises the human condition more accurately than Hardin's 'rational graziers'.
Fishing communities in India wishing to look into the future might do well to examine
the fate of the UK fishing industry. In Britain the number of fishing boats over 15 tonnes
declined from 41,723 in 1872 to 2,142 in 1970. Now there are just 1,411 boats over 10
metres long and fewer than 6,000 boats in all. When Britain joined the EU its waters be-
came part of the 'European pond', with much of the quota going to Spain's massive trawl-
er fleet, or to the select elite of huge Scottish pelagic vessels based in the Shetlands. 'Our
resource base has been “prostituted” like a maritime Highland Clearance', writes Alastair
MacIntosh. 'Some three-dozen millionaires scoop up Scotland's entire catch of herring and
mackerel. About 45 ocean-going ships involving some 450 crew members now monopolize
a community resource that once supported more than 1,000 boats, 10,000 crew members
and an even greater workforce around Scotland's coastline at the end of World War II.'
Former Scottish fisherman David Thomson is one of many who have been fighting
against the combined influences of free market economists and EU bureaucrats to resurrect
the Scottish inshore fishery and the coastal communities it supports. In 1997, he drew up
for the FAO the table reproduced as Table 5 below which shows more graphically than any
paragraph I could write how ecologically and socially damaging it is to place ownership
of the world's marine biomass in the hands of a few powerful and overcapitalized corpora-
tions.
Table 5: The World's Two Marine Fishing Industries - How They Compare
