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Mariarosa Dalla Costa

THE FISHERMEN’S MOVEMENT that emerged in the seventies in the south of India has today a planetary dimension and in its record a heroic history of women and men. But in many countries in the Global North, it has not had a proper resonance. Yet it represents a great story of commitment, sacrifice, and poetry rich with universal meaning because of the questions it raises concerning the relations between work and the safeguarding of resources, the satisfaction of needs and the awareness of limits. They are questions of love and respect but paid with the blood shed in ever harsher clashes between the right to live and profit obtained at the price of a death sentence for many populations. At stake is the respect for life, not only that of other human beings but that of other living beings, which is manifest in poetic terms in the documents that mark the path of the movement.

This book, born of the same passion for the sea and the desire to share it with others, is intended to make a contribution to this path. We wish, first of all, to stress the polyvalence of the vital functions that the oceans represent. For oceans represent not only food but medicines, raw materials, climate, environment, biodiversity, and culture. We also wish to draw attention to the main changes in the problematic relation that has marked the history of human beings with the sea: their gradual approach to it until the recent “conquest” of the marine depths and the irrational exploitation of the riches of the abysses, leading to the depletion of this great reservoir of nature, which is now impoverished and altered. We aim to raise consciousness about the questions involved in the relation of human beings with this opulent source of nutrition and life, established first through the activity of fishing, from the casting of the fishing line for sport to commercial trawling. The book is intended to spread knowledge about a certain problematic among social circles not already directly engaged. Indeed, a remarkable awareness has grown about the questions of agriculture and land, and alternatives have been developed—thanks mainly to the initiatives taken by social subjects from the South of the world who have come to the North to denounce the consequences of productivism and technologism for real agricultural productivity and their lives. Yet similar issues relating to the sea and fishing have remained more hidden, more enclosed inside a discussion between the fish workers and those who oversee this sector.

Twenty years after the first Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio (the United Nations conference on environment and development that led to the adoption of Agenda 21, a blueprint for sustainable politics to be implemented in the twenty-first century), all the main issues remain practically unresolved. The condition of the ecosystems has worsened instead of improved, and economic inequities and social injustices have increased. Chapter 17 of the agenda, which concerns the protection of all the seas and coastal areas as well as international regulation on this matter, must gain a new authority to effectively protect the marine and adjacent coastal ecosystems and the populations who live there. Article 17.3, which calls for the protection of the exclusive economic zones (the sea up to two hundred miles from the coast) for the benefit of the area’s residents, is far from being implemented. Destructive activities of various types—not only large-scale industrial fishing, characterized by gigantic catches and bottom trawling that ruins the seabeds—continue, constantly gaining new areas of predation. As the northern seas are impoverished, the prow has turned to the seas of the south. And as the catches of many seas on the planet have been diminished or depleted, it is the coastal areas of the developing countries that are now devastated by industrial installations for the farming of shrimp and other fish that destroy the environment and with it the nutritional resources of the inhabitants of the regions. These installations increase the pressure on marine life, because a large amount of fish feed is needed for these farms, and this continues to be caught with industrial boats and bottom trawlers. At the Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in August 2002, an agreement was reached that foresaw the recovery of fish stocks by 2015 and the abolition of dangerous subsidies, but the text appears weak with regard to the plan of action, and according to environmental organizations it represents a step back with respect to the promises made in Rio in 1992 and Chapter 17 of Agenda 21. Despite the coming into effect of the Convention on the Law of the Sea of November 1994, despite the Code of Conduct of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for Responsible Fisheries with the relative International Plans of Action of 1995, and the convention on the conservation of highly migratory fish stocks of 2000, responsible fishing is still far from being achieved, while excessive fishing, outlawed fishing practices, and industrial aquaculture continue to compromise “the blue world” and its fragile coastal ecosystems.

What is ever more in danger is the whole fish patrimony, the great commonwealth that for thousands of years has guaranteed a livelihood to human settlements with modest economies but that are rich in their harmony with nature, rich therefore in all the goods that this harmony provides. More and more frequent are ecological catastrophes that, given the industrial and touristic alteration of landscapes and ecosystems, find all defensive walls destroyed and in the same places add the victims of catastrophes to the victims of impoverishment. The tsunamis in Southeast Asia in 2004 and 2005 are only some of the many tragic and dramatic examples of this in our time. The causes of poverty in the world are in any case quite evident. In addition to the choices made by the agricultural policies imposed on the countries of the South, we want to draw attention to those that characterize the politics of fishing. Precisely in this context, then, it is extremely significant that a great movement of fishermen has emerged as an important but largely unknown protagonist in a still ongoing movement of movements in the Global South. The new subjects of this movement place at the center of their activity the safeguarding of the organic connection between the craft of fishing and the maintenance of the ecosystem, with its great variety of marine, marshy, riverine, animal, and vegetable species that give meaning and provide a rich relationship between ecology and work on the sea. The fishermen’s movement moves under the banner of food sovereignty. This is a population’s right to produce its own food and to maintain access to the natural sources that generate it through the cooperation between human beings and nature. From this follows the right to maintain those small economies that, being based upon a friendly relationship with the ecosystem, preserve and utilize its resources within limits allowing for their renewal by continuing to practice crafts that are the fruit of that knowledge. This is the case for not only the coastal communities of India, to which we give special attention in this text, but also for various communities of fishermen in the advanced countries, which now develop their movements’ analysis alongside those of the former, finding common solutions and paths. The main objective of Via Campesina, the largest network of farmers who carry across the planet the flag of food sovereignty, is to guarantee the right of populations to have access to basic resources, first of all the land and the common goods it contains, from natural seeds to the water of lakes and rivers. In complete harmony with these goals, the fishermen’s movement demands first of all access to the seas, the lakes, and the rivers, to be able, by means of these resources, to continue those activities that, managed in a traditional manner, have guaranteed life for millennia.

Fishermen want to protect their economies, they want to be able to improve them and not be compelled to alter them or be expelled by economic choices that do not recognize their rights to continue to live. But the right to have access to the land and the sea is devoid of meaning if what remains is only a parched land or a sea without fish. The common good, then, requires that initiatives be taken to reconstitute it. This, in my view, is one of the most significant questions emerging in the path of the fishermen’s movement. If the farmers, in rebellion against the industrial-biotechnological model of agriculture, give time to the soil to regenerate itself so that it can host an organic agriculture, similarly fishermen often take initiatives to reconstitute the ecosystem of a given region to allow for the repopulation of that site by the species that characterized it, and which make it possible to reanimate the devastated small economies of the region. This is the case with the people in the Philippines who have gone to study the techniques of reforestation and have replanted the mangroves, which cradle many species of fish, wherever they had been cut down to make room for aquaculture tubs that were later moved to a different place. These decisions signify above all the determination not to accept as inevitable and irreversible the new, higher level of development that is imposed, in this case industrial aquaculture, with its devastation of species and human beings, and to restore instead the type of development previously adopted. This is a creative, friendly development, in contrast to the destructive one that is now prevailing, given that the promised creation through destruction of the latter has been demonstrated not to be credible. Their activities echo the words of the late Thomas Kocherry, who states in a speech he delivered upon receipt of the Sophie Prize in Oslo in 1999: “From Canada to Senegal, Brazil, Pakistan, South Africa, the fishermen of the North and South, all victims of globalization, are trying a new development paradigm … where the capacities and technologies of the natives are valorized, where small is accepted as beautiful and sustainable, and simplicity becomes a way of life, paying due respect to indigenous cultures.”

At the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle, demonstrators who were dressed as turtles and whales put on trial the predatory approach of large-scale fishing while denouncing the nonobservance of the sentence of the Supreme Court in India that since 1996 has ordered the closing of all the existing industrial installations along the country’s coast. However, the phenomenon of intensive aquaculture has for quite some time been devastating numerous coasts of tropical countries. In 2003 in Italy, for the first time in recorded history, the usual herds of tuna did not arrive in front of the few remaining traps of Favignana and Bonagia in Sicily, while a new phenomenon developed: the caging of red tuna, which is “fattened up” in large cages offshore to be ready to replenish the Japanese markets. The sequence is then repeated: the destruction of the cycles allowing for a spontaneous reproduction of life, penury instead of abundance, and the strategic creation of a fictitious abundance now replicated in the new marine prisons as well as in the coastal ones.

In the presence of these trends there is a great urgency for new forms of intervention. The social and political consequences of this conquering approach have been first of all the loss of food and livelihood. But there has also been the loss of habitat, beauty, and awareness. Some of the paths that need to be taken have already been indicated by environmental movements and experts in this sector: the abolition of perverse subsidies in the fishing industry—that is, the abolition of those forms of aid that end up being used to increase over-fishing; the adoption of provisions to eliminate all types of pollution; the creation of protected marine areas even on the high seas; the introduction of measures promoting sustainable fishing; and the elimination of threats to ecosystems. On one side, therefore, it is important to call for a change in politics; on the other it is necessary to contribute to the formation of a different consciousness among women and men. While the discourse on the quality of material life and the meaning of work—central for the institution of a different relation to the land—is reemerging in political debate, we also have to restore a different relation with the sea.

The ocean is immense and deep. To find our mother again we cannot challenge it but must approach it with love and respect, crossing the blue planet on the same boats as the small communities who have always lived on the sea and of the sea.