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Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you’ll find that he already knew that better than you

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you’ll find that he already knew that better than you

The UN program “The Ocean Decade” is starting this year. It is supposed to be ten years of research, assessment, and development of what the world’s oceans can provide to humankind and how that can be managed in a sustainable manner within the concept called “The Blue Economy”. It is a good idea, in general, but from what I saw up to now, many of the participants in the program are still anchored to the view that the Oceans contain large, untapped resources that can be exploited within the model of “sustainable development,” normally understood in terms of economic growth. 

 

That may be a remarkable misunderstanding. As we explain in our recent
book “The Empty Sea,” the world’s oceans do contain enormous resources, but it is also true that — like all biological resources — overexploitation is a misunderstood risk that always takes people by surprise. 

 
It is a mistake done over and over: when the yield of a fishery goes down, governmental agencies think it is a good idea to provide fishermen with more powerful boats and other technological tricks. It works, just until it doesn’t. Then, it makes things worse. Overexploited fish stocks collapse, leaving fishermen with plenty of useless hardware and the sea reduced to a desert. 
 
Below, Paul Jorion tells a story that provides much food for thought in this field: the pretense of Western “experts” to know more than the local African fishermen and to help them by means of more powerful engines and better fishnets. And, as usual, the result was plenty of wasted money, possibly worse than that. The apparent inability of the Fishermen of Benin to produce as much fish as produced in nearby regions was not because they were bad fishermen. It was because of the lack of fish off the coast of Benin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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