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Fish provide roughly 40 per cent of the protein consumed by nearly two-thirds of the world's population. For example, over a billion people throughout Asia depend on fish and seafood as their major source of animal protein. But, fish have moved into the luxury-style, high-priced food class. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warns that fish, long regarded as the "poor man's protein", is diminishing globally as a result of increasing market demand and overfishing. Declaring that "the golden age" of fishing had ended, UNESCO, along with the Food and Agriculture Organization, has warned that there will be a global shortfall of fish for human diets of 20 to 30 million tons by the year 2000.
The developed nations are winning in the consumption stakes. While their citizens have average annual supplies of about 26 kilograms of seafood per person each year, people in the developing countries have only nine kilograms of fish per person each year. During the period 1988-1990, the developed nations imported 76% by weight of all fish for direct human consumption that went into international trade.
For people with abundant food alternatives, the risk of having less fish or lower quality fish may be little more than an annoyance. But for people who are highly dependent on fish in their diets, uncertain fish food supplies may mean they are exposed to the possibility of real harm. Like other foods, fisheries products go to those who can pay for them. In the case of developing countries, for instance, the benefits of increased fish production are often directed toward the wealthier inhabitants in the big cities, or siphoned off to even richer export markets in the northern industrialized countries. When people whose household budgets are largely devoted to food face a large increase in the cost of one of their major foods they become worse off economically as well as in nutritive terms. Poorer consumers are forced to shift to inferior foods, putting them at risk of missing important nutrients.
In many countries where coastal communities substantially depend on local fisheries people watch helplessly as their fish stocks are whittled away by export-oriented production policies favored by their governments and local entrepreneurs.
Maritime anthropologist, James McGoodwin, reports that in one rural shrimp fishing community of Pacific Mexico, that he has studied for many years, late summer often finds many local inhabitants close to starvation. There are no agricultural harvests available, and the government closes the most important fishing grounds to local fishers seeking food nearer to shore to allow juvenile shrimp to get bigger and move into deeper waters where they can be caught later by fishing companies who are exporters. Local fishers are excluded from participating in the export industry because their "artisanal" mode of production is considered by the government to be too unproductive, inefficient and extensive. Consequently, McGoodwin reports, as summer wears on hungry village children are forced to "eat dirt or sand to ally the gnawing hunger in their bellies."
This exemplifies a growing trend that in many of the world's fish producing countries sees impoverished coastal peoples being denied access to an important local food resource so that it may become a discretionary, luxury food item for other people far away, who already have surplus food supplies.
Often such export-oriented fisheries development policies are assisted or fostered by powerful international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who insist that these countries export even more of their natural resources just to pay the interest on burdensome development debt. As a consequence, the problems faced by small-scale, artisanal fishing people are being compounded.
Export-oriented fisheries development policies have become an invitation to global corporate seafood predators seeking quick profits. Even if their industrial scale fleets remain within deep sea areas and do not venture inshore, they still affect fisheries close to shore where fishers from coastal communities get their catches. Many of the species these coastal communities catch are mobile populations of fish that move back and forth between deep and coastal waters where they can be caught as food fish for local needs.
Even worse, the foreign fleets often do not stay offshore where they've been licensed to fish, but move in to compete with local, coastal fishers. Such encroachment has increased pressure on biologically renewable fishery resources nearer to shore to such an extent as to cause total landings of small-scale, local fishermen to decline in both weight and value. This threat to a vulnerable resource has serious implications for domestic consumers in regions where fish are the only affordable source of protein.
Many export-oriented fisheries in developing countries, particularly shrimp trawl fisheries in tropical waters, produce enormous bycatch -- called "trash-fish" -- which are usually discarded back to the sea -- either dead or dying. Recently, though, "trash-fish" is being retained and ground into fishmeal for export shrimp production in marine farms. This has meant the loss of many tons of valuable food fish that might otherwise have satisfied vital local requirements for protein. In the waters off Bangladesh -- a country where malnourishment and starvation are chronic -- the trash-fish catch wasted in the export-oriented shrimp trawl fisheries is estimated around 400,000 tons annually!
Their removal from the ecosystem in such massive quantities is
harming local fisheries and undermining the ability of local people
who have very little in the first place to feed themselves -- and
all for sake of supplying a luxury food item, the likes of shrimp,
for richer people far away, who already have more than enough food
on their plates as it is.
AQUACULTURE THREAT TO FOOD SECURITY
FISHING FOR FARM FEEDS AND FERTILIZERS
