Our Mother Ocean

Enclosure, Commons, and the Global Fishermen's Movement

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Monica Chilese

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781942173243
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The ocean today is a central protagonist in the ongoing battle for life on earth. It is the site of a violent clash between the right to live and the right to profit, as corporate interests enclose the ocean’s vast common of living riches through tourism and industrial fishing—distorting landscapes, depleting fish stocks, and destroying barriers to protection against climate disaster.

Our Mother Ocean tells the story of the Fisherman’s Movement from its beginnings in Southern India to its central role in the struggle against neoliberal globalization. Since the 1970s, the Fisherman’s Movement has been one of the ocean’s closest and most impassioned protectors, raising key questions concerning the relationship between work and the safeguarding of common resources, the provision of community needs and environmental limits of the devastating industrialization of our oceans. While a remarkable political awareness has spread over the last 40 years around questions of food, agriculture and land, the issues of the sea have remained concealed, despite the protracted struggles between fish workers and those who oversee the sector and the exploitation of the ocean’s resources.

In this crucial intervention, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Monica Chilese offer the ocean to the land-locked history of food sovereignty movements led primarily workers in the global South against dispossession.

Dalla Costa and Chilese draw attention to the polyvalent functions of the ocean as a source of food, medicine, raw materials, biodiversity and culture—and as a site of human labour and livelihood threatened by vast enclosures through industrial fishing and tourism. This book is an urgent reminder that the ocean is today the site of a heroic struggle for the preservation of life on earth. It points crucially to impassioned sectors of the movement of movements that endure in the global South, and details the stakes of the struggles and its outcomes on land and at sea as central for the future of life on earth.

TWO
THE IMPOVERISHMENT
OF THE MARINE FAUNA:
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
PROBLEMATICS

Monica Chilese

LET US TRY TO ANALYZE, then, the vulnerability of the sea, considering in particular the impoverishment of the marine fauna that endangers its future existence. Indeed, while once we could say fiat iustitia, pereat mundus (let there be justice, the world can die)—in which mundus naturally meant a quid, the renewable essential element of a whole that is never ruined—today we cannot say this any longer, because the possibility of destruction has become too real.¹

We have explained by what steps we have arrived at this situation; now we deepen our analysis of the dangers that threaten “the vast reservoir of nature,”² namely: excessive fishing; illegal fishing; the environmental impact of industrial aquaculture; and pollution. These are all activities that reduce the resources of the sea to the bare minimum, undermining its preservation.

EXCESSIVE FISHING

Fishing represents one of the main economic activities in many countries in both the North and the South. The objective, when the fishing industry is managed in a rational way, is to reach an optimal level of production while guaranteeing the renewal of the marine biological resources. Since 1950, thanks to the refinement of fishing techniques and the possibility of working and freezing the fish caught on the boats, the global catch of fish for human sustenance and the production of animal feed has witnessed a constant increase.³ Not even the maximum quotas established in the 1970s have been respected.

Technological changes, moreover, are in continuous development, due above all to the subsidies that states give to the industry. These subsidies, which should create jobs in poor coastal areas and favor the development of the fishing industry, in most cases are devoted to creating new technology that leads to overfishing.

According to estimates of the World Bank, these subsidies amount to a total of $20 billion a year.⁴ In addition, the fishing fleets for deep-sea fishing, with their large fishing boats, have exported industrial fishing to developing countries, endangering the future of local fishing communities.

To this growing technological advance we must add the problem of free access to the majority of fishing waters. Between 1957 and 1982 the part of the sea placed under national jurisdictions, with consequences for its exploitation, has passed from three miles of the territorial sea (a nautical mile corresponds to 1,852 meters) to two hundred miles of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ).⁵

Coastal states—insular or archipelagic—exercise, therefore, total control over the surface of the sea, over the watery mass, the seabed, the subocean, and all the resources there contained. However, the EEZ, a prescription by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that was supposed to guarantee rational exploitation under the responsibility of the coastal states, has turned out to be not very effective from the viewpoint of environmental protection.⁶ In the chart following we can well identify the main fishing areas.

After years of industrial expansion, the commercial fishing industry has stabilized, because harvesting has reached a point that exploitation exceeds the reproductive capacity of fish stocks. Consequently, places such as the coast of Terranova in Newfoundland, which has been the site of cod fishing for five centuries, are presently deprived of precious fish. By 1992, the sea was empty, yet not even the Canadian government’s prohibition of fishing has managed to change this situation, which to this day has remained the same. In many European seas, things are not better. Excessive fishing, denounced in the policy debates of the EU Green Book in March 2001, has led to the collapse of forty of the sixty main stocks of fish in the Northeast Atlantic.⁷

Main fishing areas

01 - Africa

02 - North America

03 - South America

04 - Asia

05 - Europe

06 - Oceania

08 - Antarctica

18 - Arctic Sea

21 - Atlantic Ocean (North-west)

27 - Atlantic Ocean (North-east)

22 - 32 Subdivision of the Baltic Sea

31 - Atlantic Ocean (Center-west)

34 - Atlantic Ocean (Center-east)

37 - Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea

41 - Atlantic Ocean (south-west)

47 - Atlantic Ocean (south-east)

48 - Atlantic Ocean (Antarctic zone)

51 - Indian Ocean (west)

57 - Indian Ocean (east)

58 - Indian Ocean (Antarctic zone)

61 - Pacific ocean (north-west)

67 - Pacific ocean (north-east)

71 - Pacific Ocean (center-west)

77 - Pacific ocean (center-east)

81 - Pacific Ocean (south-west

87 - Pacific Ocean (south-east)

88 - Pacific Ocean (Antarctic zone)

Source: www.fao.org/fi/maps/world_2003.gif.

At the turn of the millennium, the total production of sea fishing reached 94.8 million tons, the highest level ever registered, but estimates, made on the basis of forecasts by major countries, demonstrate a decisive reduction, amounting to about 92 million tons. If we exclude China (the main producer), global production based on the catch of 2000 has suffered a further loss, 78.million tons compared to 83 million in 1989.⁸ From the following figure we can get an idea of the progress of global production.

World Production of Fish catch in 2000

The areas represented are those in which production has exceeded two million tons.

Production of Fish Catch in the Main Fishing Areas in 2000

The areas represented are those in which production has exceeded two million tons.

Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “Situation mondiale des pêches de l’aquaculture,” in Rapporto SOFIA 2002: La situation mondiale des pêches et de l’aquaculture, 8–10.

World Fishers and Fish Farmers by continent

Source : Fao, Situation mondial des pêches de l’aquaculture , in Rapporto Sofia 2002: La situation mondial des pêches de l’aquaculture, p.16.

With this continuous growth, the number of operators has greatly increased. Out of 35 million persons active in the field, the number of fishermen increased by 2.2 percent per year starting in 1990.

In this context, the regional organizations of the continental fishing industry that are responsible to the international community have not succeeded in effectively protecting the stocks most profitable for the market, having more of a consulting role than managing power, which has largely been delegated to national authorities.⁹ Let us remember, in this regard, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), founded in 1946, that has not succeeded in controlling whale hunting. In just the few years that followed a moratorium placed on this practice, which came into effect in 1998, Japan has hunted a total of 5,779 whales on the pretext that catching whales has scientific purposes.¹⁰ But the great cetaceans are not used to bolster scientific research, as is officially claimed; instead, they reach international markets, where whale meat is destined for consumption. This type of trade, moreover, has grown. Every year more than 1,300 animals are killed, in violation of the international ban on the trade in whale meat established by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Far from complying, Japan and Norway, another country involved in the hunting of cetaceans, would like to see this international trade reopened. In 2002 the Norwegians even decided to increase their quota of whales to be hunted, from 552 specimens to 672. According to the Norwegian whale industry, such an increase would be justified by the size of the total population of rorquals, which amounts to 118,000 animals in the catching areas.¹¹ In the fifty-fourth meeting of the IWC (May 24, 2002), Japan, not having succeeded in overturning the moratorium, blocked the creation of protected marine areas for whales in the oceans of the South Pacific and in the South Atlantic.¹²

As for the situation of the fishing industry in the European Union, this too is not without problems. The communitarian management of one of the main fishing markets in the world is not a simple thing. Italy, which is in second place among the beneficiaries of European subsidies to the fishing industry, contributes to overfishing with an annual increase in its fleet of 7 percent. The main ports where fishing activities are concentrated are: Naples, Venice, Bari, Mazara del Vallo, Chioggia, and Catania. The total number of ports and landing places on national territory is eight hundred. Despite the fact that 80 percent of the fleet is composed of small boats, generally quite old, modern fishing boats use very sophisticated technologies—satellite navigation systems (global positioning system...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• Introduction
• One: “The Fount and Scourge of Ocean Life” Monica Chilese
• Two: The Impoverishment of the Marine Fauna: Social and Political Problematics Monica Chilese
• Three: Neither Fish Nor Fishermen Monica Chilese
• Four: The Fishermen Movement Mariarosa Dalla Costa
• Appendix One: The Situation of Fishing in the European Union
• Appendix Two: Statute of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP)
• Appendix Three: World Fisheries Day 2004
• Bibliography