• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 684 0

1970s only about 1,800. So also with tuna and other species in the Pacific. In the 1990s the world fishing industry was in trouble. Only two of the world's fifteen major fishing regions have still-increasing catches: the western and eastern Indian Ocean zones, This is what has been called the tragedy of the commons. Humans deplete natural resources which no one 'owns'; the sea and fish are prime examples. In a situation of unrestricted access to resources, the result must be depletion. The world situation is deteriorating all the time. As shallow water fisheries collapse, very deep-sea trawling, going as deep as 1.5 km, increases. About 40 per cent of the world's trawling grounds are now in water deeper than the continental shelf. What makes this even more threatening is that while fish species found in shallow waters can recover quite quickly, deep water species take much longer to replenish themselves. One example is the orange roughy, which only begins to reproduce when it is twenty years old, and can live to be 150 years old. Now it is close to extinction. Similarly, deep sea coral which took 5,000 years to grow can be destroyed by one trawler passing its net over it.58

It was not only depletion in traditional western fishing grounds which caused the swing to the Indian Ocean. The move was also helped by its cheap skilled labour. First world manufacturing tends to move to third world areas where wages are low, and working conditions often unregulated. The fishing industry, and especially prawn cultivation, is merely one example.

The prawn industry is at the cutting edge of globalisation. Once used as fertiliser in India, from the 1960s their price has increased dramatically due to freezing techniques which enable them to be exported to markets in Japan, Europe and North America. The beach price of 'pink gold' in 1961–62 was Rs. 240 per tonne, but by 1971–72 it was Rs. 1,180 per tonne.

The result was a huge increase in the value of this new industry, especially in the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal: in the Indian state of West Bengal, in Bangladesh, and in Thailand. In 1984 total production in South Asia was worth $US 512 million, in 1995 $US 2.79 billion. This was achieved by the introduction of intensive industrial methods of production. Traditional fish farms produced 1,000 kg per hectare, but the new intensive 'industrial' farms 10 tonnes per hectare. In Bangladesh production was pushed by the World Bank and IMF, who insisted that the country develop export industries. There was however a marked down side to this achievement. Much of the capital came from overseas, and government laws to control the industry were often ignored. Pollution has increased, and as the process becomes more mechanised, less local labour was needed.

Critics of export-oriented aquaculture argue that it has largely negative social and environmental consequences and that marine and estuarine fishers and coastal agricultural communities whose livelihoods have traditionally been rooted in local systems of fishing and crop cultivation are being incorporated into global networks of commodity flows which increasingly dictate standard and type of product, price, and other conditions of production, marketing and sale.59

Most revealing of the reality of a global market was an episode between July 1997 and July 1998. The European Union and the United States banned the importation of Bangladesh prawns, claiming that unhygienic production methods rendered them unfit for human consumption. The ban was lifted after quality control had been improved.60

A similar move to intensive industrial production has occurred on parts of India's west coast also. Here and elsewhere traditional agricultural lands have been taken over for prawn farming. It used to be that in coastal areas fish and rice coexisted on the lowlying land, rather as in the Marsh Arab area of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. Sluice gates were used to regulate the supply of water for both. Fish and prawns were a by-product of rice cultivation. Now with the price of fish, especially