Fishing about and about fishing
FULL AHEAD ON THE OUTSOURCING COURSE
If you’re an owner or executive operating a large “vertically integrated” fishery enterprise in a Northern country (that’s Europe, N.America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand), you enjoy all sorts of government’s instruments that protect your products from imports competition. The justification is that protection against cheap imports is essential to keep your fleet operating profitably and your processed products competitive on the national market, and that your fleet and processing plant are sources of direct and secondary employment for your compatriots. So, your profits, which according to the mainstream economists are the best criteria of social and economic sustainability, are OK and you’re happy. Of course, you’d be still happier, and so would be your shareholders, if you’d keep maximising those profits.
So what can you do, if you already employ the cheapest labour on the national market and operate low-priced foreign-made equipment? Even so, in the USA for example, you’d pay at least some US$5/hour. With labour costs elsewhere of $0.5/hour, and in some countries - $2-4/ day, you’d consider outsourcing your production to countries where labour and other running costs are incomparably lower than home. For US$2.00 to 4.00 per kilogram, an outsourcing company can have its fresh fish airshipped half-a-world over and back processed, and still reduce costs by a two-digit percentage figure.
Shipping by sea an/or land routes is of course much cheaper; West European companies have long been trucking and shipping fish for processing in East Europe. All they’ve got to do is to pay attention to maintaining Western standards throughout the whole process, and to cash the saved difference. You can hardly dream of a more efficient way of increasing the effectiveness of your operation, and viva la globalisation!.. Such sort of globalisation, that is.
It seems that outsourcing is nowadays the trendiest trend throughout the Northern fishery and associated industries. It has come to life decades ago in the fishing gear domain, when Northern netmakers started importing twine manufactured in Third-World countries. After some years, they’ve discovered that it’s cheaper to produce also netting there. Netting factories were set up in India, Indonesia, Thailand, and other Eastern countries with or without foreign capital. And, since, Northern netmakers have been mounting purse seines and trawls of netting woven in the South.
Presently, further “progress towards elevating economic efficiency” seems to be in the making. Recent reports are talking about Scandinavian netmakers outsourcing also assembling of fishing nets to such countries, as China and India. Well, this is the situation, and whether we consider it a positive progress or we criticise its social and national costs, we must learn how to live with it.
Globalisation steams on. Normally, we define globalisation as a worldwide process of improving communication, transportation and liberalising the conditions of international trade, including currencies convertibility and trans-national movements of money and people. In fisheries, it enables operating fleets and landing catches wherever financially convenient, chartering foreign and flag-of-convenience (FOC) and reduces relevance of national flag and homeports. If these trends are going to persist during this and the next decades, and I don’t see a reason why shouldn’t they, the general character of the larger-scale fish catching, processing and marketing would become unrecognisable to 20th century fishermen.
This evolution in the world fisheries and the associated industries transforms their structure into predominantly large-scale, transnational corporations, owners of fishing ships flying flags fitting the national quotes and fishing rights acquired for them in various ways. They’ll have “cheap labour” crews operating outsourced-made equipment, and fish both in their national and Southern countries’ waters. EU-flagged fleets would keep being subsidised through collective bargaining and resulting bulk payments by Brussels to countries that would prefer cash, over allocating stocks to their own fisheries.
Some will ship or directly land catches for outsourced processing at nationally and transnationally owned fish processing-marketing facilities in Southern countries, and shipped the more valuable products for marketing in the North, and the lesser stuff for “outsourced” marketing in poorer countries. The process of capital/ownership concentration, most conspicuous in marine fish farming would keep spreading also over capture fuisheries.
Economic and social consequences. Globalisation of the world fisheries and not only in fisheries may take quite unexpected turns. There’s a brisk development of national business and capital accumulation particularly in the two emerging economic empires of China and India. Capital from those parts can acquire, directly or through joint ventures, Northern fishing industry’s fleets and plants. In the wake of the outsourcing of production to cheap-labour countries might come “outsourcing” of capital in the opposite direction.
Fisheries globalisation carries also social consequences. Transnational fleets would tend to expand their size and areas of operation. They won’t stop at
sharing access to fish stocks worldwide through purchase of quotas or other fishing rights, but try to expand also over coastal and even inshore fishing grounds. With such trend going on, one would expect a shift from the owner-operator to the corporate sector with socially and economically often dire consequences for fishing communities and associated secondary industries, services, and national and local consumer markets.
Results can already be seen in many Southern countries’ waters that are heavily fished by subsidised foreign fleets. Some of their components often encroach inshore fishing grounds of indigenous small-scale fishermen, and market their catches in industrial countries. This prevents the local fishing sector from undisturbed access to their traditional fisheries and denies it the fish caught there by the outsiders.
Such developments can only be prevented, if governments interested in maintaining their small-scale and coastal fisheries functional and profitable, and in protecting coastal resources, keep large-scale fisheries of any kind away from coastal fishing grounds that are accessible to local small and medium-scale fishermen.
Transnationally owned Itinerant fishing fleets are hardly the best guardians of fish stocks. Their most efficient policy would almost always be to fish the cream off a stock and go fishing elsewhere. But this subject needs another article.
M. Ben-Yami Column WORLD FISHING, December 2005
GLOBALISATION AND FISH STOCKS
(The influence of globalisation of fisheries on world fish stocks and their management)
Last month I wrote about processes in the world fisheries that have been enabled, stimulated, promoted, and nourished by Globalisation. Such are: outsourcing of fish processing and fishing gear and vessels manufacturing to countries where labour is cheap, manning fishing vessels with crews from such countries, buying fishing rights to exploit national waters of non-industrialised countries, creation of FOC fleets, chartering of foreign vessels by national owners of fishing quotas, acquisition of national quotas by foreign interests, spreading fleets of poachers, and more.
Apart from the various social and national consequences of those processes, there’s the problem of their influence on the state of the world’s fish stocks, many of which are in urgent need of national and international attention and protection.
Unfortunately, unsustainable fishing practice is often exported in various forms to the poor countries of the South. For example, the EU has paid the Mauritanian government £300m to fish in its waters between 2001 and 2006, although the stocks are already depleted. Unsettled negotiations with Senegal, which formerly had a similar agreement with the EU, have been focusing rather on financial terms than on better management. Still, two-thirds of the country's export earnings come from the fish exported to Europe.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), foreign fleets, including those from Europe, are causing alarming reductions in fish stocks off West Africa and South America, putting local fishermen out of business and removing a vital food item from local markets. Governments of poor countries are selling fishing rights in a ways that harm both fish stocks and coastal communities.
Dr.Andrew A. Rosenberg, of the University of New Hampshire, who used to be a deputy director of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), thinks that the problem of declining stocks can't be fixed "one fishery at a time because the boats move around. The effort simply shifts to somewhere else and makes the problems worse," he said.
The UN held last summer a special conference in Geneva with 100 delegates from the states involved, environmental groups, the World Trade Organisation, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The conference was told, that country after country has been plundered by foreign fleets, which have then moved on to new areas, While such pronouncement might’ve been overstated, such countries have a problem with protecting their national fisheries, and the whole world with fishing in international waters. All the more that fleets from the strongest fishing countries tend to go where the management is weakest or non-existent, which aggravates the problem of illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. Certainly, more nations should follow Australia's tough tactics of tracking and intercepting poaching vessels.
Regulations that prevent profitable operation motivate fishing fleets to move to foreign countries and/or reflag vessels to nations that do not enforce such regulations. Enforcement is difficult also where management methodology, such as running multi-species fisheries by single species quotas, encourage “black” landings and dumping bycatch that cannot be legally landed. Managing such fisheries by the weakest species may cause more damage than benefit, in case of species that compete for food and habitat and even prey on each other’s offspring.
Existing laws and international pacts are often circumvented by industrial fleets, producing illegal markets. Following a series of seizures this summer Norwegian patrol inspectors estimated that fish worth NOK1.5 bn (US$235 mn) are being illegally fished in the Barents Sea every year. Among the poachers were several Russian vessels found offloading fish in the Netherlands, England and Germany.
In fact, the world’s fish resources are only partly managed, and even those that are, are often subject to a faulty management based on inadequate, flawed science. If the situation and the pattern of development I described above and in my November column would continue, things would only get worse. Is there anything nations could do to sustain at least their inshore and coastal marine fisheries?
There’re, several things they could do. Firstly, they might proclaim new Coastal Fisheries Exclusive Zones (CoFEZ), tailored to every particular case, within and beyond their EEZs. For the management of fisheries, the standard 200-mile EEZ pattern, in spite of its legal convenience, has proved inappropriate in more than one case. It may be too wide in some oceanic countries with narrow continental shelf that are unable in the foreseeable future to protect and develop their own deep-sea fisheries. On the other hand, 200 miles maybe inadequate, as for example, in the area of Grand Banks where “Nose and Tail” have been partly left beyond the Canadian EEZ’s boundary, thus preventing Canada from effective control of their cod stocks.
Secondly, having defined CoFEZ for their country’s waters, which, according to local geographical, biological, administrative, and political conditions, may be of different extent in different parts of the country, nations might formulate legislate national fisheries protection laws, which would allocate exclusive fishing rights to very well defined groups of users, and define those excluded.
Now, who should be allowed to fish in such local CoFEZ? (i) Local recreational fishermen; (ii) locally-based (that is not carried from beyond the CoFEZ on decks of “motherships”) artisanal and small-scale commercial fishermen fishing in small open ore semi-decked boats or from shore; (iii) locally based small and medium-scale fishing vessels that employ local or national crews, or in case of shortage, also immigrant fishermen but enjoying similar pay and labour rights and working conditions as nationals. Such vessels must be limited in size, engine power, and/or fish-hold capacity. Limiting by only a single criterion is insufficient, as the short, over-fat little gas-guzzling “monster-trawlers”, designed to “conform” to length-limit rules, bear witness to. In case of effort management, also the number of the boats should be limited.
There’s no single way of managing fisheries that fits all cases. However legally and bureaucratically inconvenient, management methods must be tailored to the separate fisheries.