Fishing about and about fishing

 

BOB MAC’s COMPLAINT

 

Bob McDonald is a big burly man and a great, mainly self-taught, coastal ecologist who lives in Australia. He’s one of the few people I met in the world fisheries community, who truly understand and think and talk ecosystem. He’s able to grasp and mentally analyze multi-disciplinary information and synthesize it for the sake of inter-disciplinary treatment of problems without neglecting social, environmental, natural and man-caused factors and influences, a quality essential for management of fishery ecosystems.

 

Big Bob’s frustration stems from the introduction of quota system to small-scale family-operated fisheries in his country and the resulting hoarding of fishing rights in a fewer and fewer hands. He’s been witnessing how a fishery management system, which favours large-scale business at the expense of smaller-scale fisheries, coastal processing industries, and their individual operators, and indifferent to its social and cultural ramifications, endangers the survival of a whole fishing sector.

 

One of the reasons, if not the main one, for recurring failures of fishery management is that a whole complex of knowledge and information is ignored leading to the current practice of reducing the complexity of fishery systems to the terms of yields. Such disregard is evidently caused by the prevailing practice of getting away from such complexity to the safe haven of computer models, statistical manipulation, and the various quota systems. 

 

Bob McDonald who saw small-scale fishing operations and fishing communities destroyed by such management was frequently posting his frustration with the Australian academic fishery science establishment and management on the FISHFOLK Internet discussion list. His comments, however, are equally relevant wherever small-scale fisheries become target to dogmatic management.

 

Bob believes that as academic advice and opinion increasingly contain obvious fundamental misconceptions, the feelings toward academics among fisherfolk have become increasingly hostile. He is asking how this erosion in confidence can be arrested in view of decline of academic independence, the need for security of tenure of positions, increasingly unreliable research funding, and the mushrooming of consultancies that with apparent impunity bend science to suit clients' needs 

 

Fishing economists – writes Bob - want owner operator and family operations replaced by corporate fisheries, recreational fishing or 'tourism' - all of which are portrayed as being worth more money to the society. They persuaded governments to introduce quota systems consistent with the (neo-liberal) economics culture/conviction, which now dominates western universities, bureaucracies and governments. Such policies have wiped out many thousands of family and community-based fishing operations worldwide and continue to do so at an astonishing rate. In this respect, using fishery science to justify such policies may be particularly harmful, because they’re targeting a specific culture – the smaller scale fishing. 

 

The great assets of each commercial fishery are its operators fishing and sea-going experience, knowledge of the boat, the fishing gear, the deck equipment, the market and the buyers, and most importantly, the character and dynamics of the fishing grounds worked. Such knowledge is gained by young fishermen apprenticing to their elders in the most traditional sense and by later experience.  The recognition of fishing culture and traditional learning has been profound. Certification courses in navigation, engineering and safety at sea as well as boat operators, have been recognizing these apprenticeships with sea-time an important factor and oral tests for 'tickets' are available to this day.  

 

It is not fish species that have become extinct – writes Bob McDonald - it is the whole complex of traditional fishing knowledge that fades away.  Dying is the culture that provided all of this and so much more; a culture that always minded through supply of fish the elderly, the poor, the hospitals, friends and family. It is a culture, which trains its own at no expense to the taxpayer, which has adapted like no other, to changes in the environment, the resource, and the market. It is a culture that is linked by common forms of thinking, including producing divergent views - as unique as academic style - with communication threads throughout its economy from the fish-truck drivers to fish retailers and on to fish processing and marketing companies, often headed by ex-fishermen with little formal education.

 

In Australia that culture has been pushed beyond its limits of adaptation; there’s an acute and growing shortage of skippers and of boat and ferry-drivers that formerly were getting their training on fishing boats.  With state and federal government management making it increasingly impossible to move from an apprentice to owning a viable fishing boat, the culture - and the knowledge are becoming extinct. However calculable, the economic cost of extinction of this culture - in cash spent in the economy, in jobs generated, in the dozens of different and not so visible contributions including rescuing people at sea - contributing to national efforts in time of war and disaster is vast but remains uncalculated.  

 

To put things to rights, Bob proposes “flexibility for allowing small boats in to enable young skippers to find their feet and efforts made to keep older skippers at sea in recognition of their contribution to apprenticing deckhands. There need to be low cost ways of entering the fleet - a learners’ licence if you like - and low cost ways of staying at sea when you are interested in teaching and keeping your hand in rather than catching the biggest possible load of fish”.

 

In his comments Bob is joining those independent scientists, who’re criticizing the still prevailing employment of inadequate science in politically charged fishery management focused on redistribution of benefits from fishery resources away from the small-scale private initiative to the bigger business and corporate interests. Obviously, the problem is not of scientists per-se, but of those scientists, who being dependent on their bread givers are unable or unwilling to admit that their work for years has been based on wrong premises and twisted to serve partisan interests.  And the rest is written in the history of fishery mismanagement.