Peter EspeutFOR A long time now I have been trying to understand the Government's complacency with respect to Jamaica's world-class record in over-harvesting our fisheries resources. The facts are that we catch only about one-third of our potential of marine fish (say the scientists), while we import hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fish each year. Jamaicans eat a lot of fish - fresh, frozen, salted, packed in water, pickled in brine, in tomato sauce, and so on - and demand far exceeds supply. Why is the government not investing in managing our national marine fish resources so that we can triple our catch (and possibly export) instead of encouraging importation? It makes no sense to me! As I observe our declining beef industry due to beef imports, and the response to the present shortage due to the ban on beef-importation from the USA (import from somewhere else!), I believe I am beginning to understand: fish is being treated like beef!
THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE
The fundamental difference between the two is that fish are hunted and cows are farmed. Thousands of years ago the scarcity of wild animals and other forest food forced humanity to make a giant technological leap from 'hunting and gathering' to 'agriculture': from having to kill wild animals for animal protein and to gather fruit, roots, nuts and berries from the wild for carbohydrates; to domesticating and raising animals and plants for human consumption. That transition has not yet taken place with respect to marine fish because the technology for raising marine fish commercially for human consumption is still in its infancy. Maybe one day fish will be farmed like beef, and capture fishing will be just for sport, but right now if we want marine fish to eat we have to go hunting in the sea. And like the situation with wild meat, fish are becoming quite scarce; and yet we irresponsibly carry on the hunt as if we would gladly kill the last one!
With beef it is a matter of price. With all the caveats of free trade, if a foreign cattleman can produce beef cheaper than we can, then we will buy from him and allow our local beef industry to wither away! If for one reason or another our cost of production is too high, then the individual producer must pay the price of his own inefficiency. A man with a herd of beef cattle knows that if he wants sustainable production he cannot slaughter faster than his cows breed, or kill his females before they have calved at least once; neither can he destroy his cowsheds or allow weeds to take over his pasture. No public laws have to be passed to regulate what happens in a man's own cowsheds and pasture.
But the fish in the sea are wild, and the fish and the sea are the common property of us all; laws and enforcement are essential to prevent the few destroying the future of the many in a free-for-all. Here the government has the responsibility to manage fisheries, a public resource living in a public asset. Fish are not like cows, but they are treated as such, and are even under the jurisdiction of the same Ministry. And so we catch juveniles in traps and nets with small meshes (there is no law governing trap mesh size), and every day dynamite is exploded on coral reefs destroying everything in an effort to catch fish (there is almost no enforcement); every hour tons of sewage and agricultural run-off are discharged into the sea, causing algae to bloom and overgrow the already stressed coral reefs (legal discharge standards are set towards public health, not coral reef and fisheries' health).
OVERFISHED
Jamaican waters are the most overfished in the Caribbean, and probably the world. We know we are the most overfished in the Caribbean because CARICOM has published a ranking; if a world ranking was published I believe we would again come out on top. We should be ashamed of ourselves! But we treat the shortage of fish the same way we treat the shortage of beef: we just import to meet the shortfall.
If we were to manage our fisheries by passing the appropriate legislation and enforcing our laws we would triple our catch weight and catch bigger and better quality fish, improve our food security, reduce poverty by increasing the incomes of fishers and their families, and improve the national balance of payments. Investments in fisheries management pay for themselves. But our national heads are turned elsewhere.
The fishers I work with in Portland Bight, Jamaica, are now involved in an exchange with their counterparts from San Andres and Providencia, islands off the coast of Colombia which Jamaicans populated some 200 years ago. In those islands they throw away (as too small) fish larger than we normally catch, and (like elsewhere in the Caribbean) they do not eat parrot fishes and doctor fishes and other fish that benefit the reef (there are Jamaican fishers who remember the days when Jamaican waters were like this). Their choice, fish, (e.g. groupers) have disappeared from Jamaican waters (we have killed them all). The use of fishing nets is illegal there, and the use of traps and scuba for fishing is frowned upon.
Despite their very healthy fisheries, they are concerned that one day theirs will decline like ours has, and they wish to avoid that catastrophe, so they have come here to learn the fisheries management strategies we are using to restore the fisheries of Portland Bight. At the same time they are reminding us here in Jamaica of what our fisheries could become. There is hope!
I challenge the Ministry of Agriculture to recognise that fishing as a hunting activity cannot be treated in the same way as the rearing of cows. What a triumph for national economic and human development if we were to triple the national marine fish catch! It is possible for people with vision!
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and executive director of an environment and development NGO.
