Compares Fishing without fighting: Maybe there’s hope, after all
SEATTLE — I am hanging around the Pacific Northwest this week, where you can still buy a fillet of wild salmon the length of your shinbone, and where fisheries scientists have just told the world how to fish. These two facts are connected: You can’t buy fresh, wild Atlantic salmon in Atlantic Canada because we hunted the legendary species to a crisis point before we learned how to fish.
Nicolas Gutiérrez and Ray Hilborn, two University of Washington scientists based in Seattle, figure this sort of thing doesn’t have to happen anymore.
Gutiérrez is lead author of a study on fisheries co-management published this week in the journal Nature. (Hilborn is a co-author.) The study (involving 130 fisheries in 44 nations) shows that top-down management by governments hasn’t exactly been the ticket to successful, sustainable fisheries around the world.
What works better, far better in fact, is co-management in which leadership is provided by government and by people in local communities — including the guys who go out on the water to set traps or haul nets.
"Community-based co-management is the only realistic solution for the majority of the world’s fisheries, and is an effective way to sustain aquatic resources and the livelihoods of communities depending on them," says Gutiérrez.
Two keys to successful fishing are community leadership and social cohesion, the study says. In the absence of community champions, often at the local level through mayors or fishermen, co-management doesn’t work.
People of a certain sentimental persuasion — let’s call them campfire socialists, just for fun — tend to get all dewy-eyed about this sort of thing. The authors do conclude, after all, that co-management is a sound way to protect species and feed millions of people.
But I should make it clear that the principles of co-management apply both to small-boat fisheries and to industrial fisheries — that is, to the large, efficient vessels which ply the seas in search of fish and catch it as efficiently as they can using heavy gear.
Here’s the other thing about social cohesion: In Nova Scotia, at least, this isn’t always a touchy-feely concept. I know of at least one legendary Antigonish-area fisherman who achieved social consent at the point of gun. Just try laying lobster traps in the areas that he, and his father before him, had claimed as their own, and you would feel the blunt force of family anger.
Interestingly enough, the Nature study highlights the wisdom implicit in this approach to fisheries management. It says, for instance, that fisheries are better sustained once fishermen have some certainty that they can catch a certain amount of fish in a certain area. In short, you want to fish inside an area that is protected from the intrusions of outsiders.
Kick me in my impolitic butt if you like, but it sounds to me like the authors of this study are promoting a form of "property-rights" fishery and calling it by a more palatable name — co-management.
It will come as a surprise to many people, fed on the apocalyptic rhetoric that passes as news these days, that many of the world’s leading fisheries scientists are now more optimistic about sustainable fisheries than they were a few years ago — no matter how big your boat is.
The current Nature study shows that hundreds of small fisheries around the world are succeeding because the harvesters themselves, and their communities, are starting to take some control of the fishing effort. Two years ago, Hilborn and Dalhousie University’s Boris Worm were among the co-authors of another study that showed the world’s industrial fisheries were doing an OK job as well.
Here’s what Hilborn told me this week about the 2009 study: "In terms of food security, most of the industrial fisheries we have examined are sustainable and producing at near maximal levels." My own conclusion (admittedly unscientific) is that a kind of creeping and cautious capitalism is taking hold in all sectors of the fishery.
I say cautious because thousands of fishermen, with de facto individual quotas in their back pockets, have abandoned the wild hunt for everything they can catch in favour of a measured harvest which sustains the resource (and the business).
In short, there are signs aplenty that now we’re finally learning how to fish, instead of extending a pyrrhic battle over access to dwindling stocks.
Maybe there’s hope for the old planet, after all.Read More ...
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