With too much fishing in home waters, heavy competition for declining stocks is a powerful incentive to fleet owners to move to more productive fishing ground, either on the unregulated high seas, or in other countries waters. Government's encourage this transfer of over-capacity, often by subsidizing fleet owners to send them to other parts of the world.
Typically, the shift is from the overfished waters of the industrialized North to the waters of so-called developing countries (and also onto the high seas) where it's hoped there may be more fish and fewer, if any, regulations.
This export of fishing over-capacity carries with it the same wasteful and destructive habits that have led to the declines and collapses of fish stocks back home. There is little regard for the economic or nutritional needs of the country where these fleets end up, or what the environmental and social effects may be. No government holds its companies accountable in a comprehensive manner for ecological or social damage done by their fishing fleets in other countries' waters.
A good example are the fisheries of Senegal which are marked by the importance of artisanal and traditional fishing, a low-technology approach, low initial investment and a large workforce. The artisanal sector is as, or even more, essential for nutritional reasons as for economic ones. Senegal has 47,000 artisanal fishermen. They comprise over seven per cent of the active population and bring in more than 70 per cent of the total volume of fish caught. As European waters have become progressively overfished, the European Union (EU) has looked further afield, to countries like Senegal, for new fishing grounds. This has been done as the EU strives to secure access to resources abroad, not only to supply its huge market, but also keep its industrialised fishing fleets active and thereby avoid social unrest. Over 15 years, in the absence of an appropriate management regime and effective enforcement, EU fishing operations have affected the resource, the marine environment and the Senegalese fishing communities dependent on it. As fish become scarcer, artisanal fishermen had to travel further out at sea to meet their catch. Some fishermen, unable to pay for equipment and fuel, resort to fishing to supply European or Asian boats who use local fishermen and their pirogues to get access to coastal areas and resources.
Government subsidies have encouraged the world's excess fishing capacity to migrate, often as a form of regional aid in response to falling local catches. That is the case, for example, with the European Union's desperate need to dump 40 percent of its excess fishing capacity -- much of it owned by Spanish fishing companies. The European Union (EU) pays handsome subsidies called "exit grants" to vessel owners to send their ships to fish in other countries' waters.
Multinational fishing companies, like Spain's Pescanova or Japan's Mitsubishi, are well placed to take advantage of such subsidies. Like many other corporations with worldwide fishing and seafood marketing operations, they maintain extensive worldwide operations concentrated around Africa, Asia and Latin America, even in such far flung places as New Zealand and the waters off Antarctica. Geographical diversification enables transnational fishing companies to offset the impact of declining catches in one region by substituting supplies from another.
Anxious to earn hard currency to service their national debt, the governments of developing, Southern coastal nations have been selling the right to fish in their waters to hi-tech, foreign industrial fleets. During the same period, many of these Southern countries acquired their own 'modernized' fleets. With this enormous increase in fishing capacity it was only a matter of time before over-fishing began to chip away at fish stocks in Southern seas.
In response, local fishing people are fighting back. Recently, the Indian government was forced to backtrack on its deepsea fishing policy designed to open up India's fisheries to foreign industrial fishing fleets. The policy was met with fierce resistance from more than a million local fishers and fishworkers who staged national strikes. They have been joined by a significant section of India's 300 million fish eaters who consciously chose a fish-free diet in protest against giving international joint ventures free access to fish in the country's waters. Without such concerted action, India's deepsea fishing policy would have allowed more than 2000 large-scale foreign fishing vessels into Indian waters to fish almost entirely for export markets. Protestors feared that the livelihoods of India's 8 million fishermen would ultimately be ruined if that had happened, and supplies of fish for millions of local consumers would have dried up because of the export-oriented policy.
Much of this fisheries 'development' in the South is the result of aid programs by rich Northern nations, and their multi-lateral financial institutions which make low-interest loans. Fishing infrastructure (new wharves, freezer plants and processing ports for example) has been promoted and financed by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and others. The European Community, Norway, the U.S. and Canada, Japan, Taiwan and other industrialised fishing nations are also in on the act with bilateral aid programs that often fail to achieve their stated objectives of helping local people improve their lives.
The rationale for these "development" programs is that increased fish production will help local economies by providing more jobs, more money, and more food. In fact, this super-efficient factory fishing does nothing of the kind. Instead it worsens the drain of resources from South to North. More fish from Third World waters winds up on the dinner tables and in the livestock feedlots of the rich developed countries, not on the plates of hungry people in the countries where the need is most acute.