The planned depletion of fish

It is in a fishing port, whether European, Asian or North American, that one should begin reading this book. A port that serves as a home base for its main characters – these factory ships whose rise, since the 1930s, has made possible the overexploitation that is affecting maritime resources everywhere today. While the global volume of fisheries peaked at 86.4 million tonnes in 1996, it has since experienced a precarious stagnation, despite various strategies for maintaining catches. But while it makes the dramatic observation of this depletion, the book is mainly interested in its genesis. The questioning is that of the port observer: where do these ships come from? Who built them? Who equipped them and made them real predators of the seas?

Carmel Finley is a major figure in marine research in the Anglo-Saxon world, at the crossroads of activism and scientific work. For many years, she has been building an analytical edifice whose particularity is to explore the multiple ways in which a system of overexploitation of the seas has been put in place. In 2011, she devoted a book to the notion of maximum sustainable yield (maximum sustainable yield), where she showed how oceanographic science had been used to consolidate an international fisheries framework that was blind to its own effects. In this new work, the focus shifts to industrial fishing fleets, whose birth and development it is a question of understanding. At the heart of Finley’s argument is the idea that governments have played a major role in the production of this fishing industry, for political and geopolitical reasons as much as economic ones.

The birth of the factory ship

The factory ship received its letters of nobility, if the expression is appropriate here, from the end of the 1920s, when the Japanese proletarian writer Takiji Kobayashi (1903-1933) dedicated one of his stories to it, rediscovered in the 2000s and now available in French. This text, attached to describing the ship as much as the fishermen-workers who work there, deploys in dark tones the transformations of Japanese fishing in the interwar period. Through the story of the violence, social and physical, at work on one of these ships, off the coast of Japan and Kamchatka, Kobayashi shows the emergence of an industrial conception of fishing, against a backdrop of growing geopolitical rivalries.

With 13 factory ships as early as 1931, Japan was ahead of the industrialization of the fishing industry on a global scale. These ships were, admittedly, a tiny minority compared to the hundreds of thousands of boats of the million and a half Japanese fishermen. But they marked the horizon of the entire sector. On a technical level, by embodying the possibilities opened up by the canning of products, before the invention of frozen fish in the early 1950s further multiplied the potential market. On a geographical level, because these ships were sent primarily to the new areas that Japan was trying to win for its fisheries. Already very present in Southeast Asia, Japan launched an expansion towards Central and Latin America in 1933-1934, before introducing whaling in the Antarctic.

In the rise of this industrial fishing, Finley underlines the crucial place occupied by government authorities, who focused on fishing several aspirations: feeding growing populations while diversifying their diet and ensuring a projection of force across the planet. The international growth of these industrial fleets really began at the end of the Second World War. Finley does not analyze the development of the entire sector and, on this point, it should be noted that his account remains fairly American-centric. The book does, however, provide benchmarks for following the parallel development of the world’s major fleets: between 1956 and 1975, for example, no fewer than 5,400 long-distance fishing vessels were built by the Soviet Union, in a concerted effort to rise to the forefront of world fishing.

The Cold War Armadas

The technical account of the construction of the fishing fleets is not, however, the heart of the argument, which pays close attention to the geopolitical context of their development. One of the most followed stories in the book concerns the privileged relationship established, during the Second World War, between the United States and Iceland. A major base for American troops between the summer of 1941 and June 1946, Iceland was profoundly transformed by this military presence, in a striking parallel with the Pacific islands where these troops also settled. Its fishing industry developed rapidly and obtained significant customs concessions thanks to a bilateral agreement in 1943. Icelandic tuna became an element of political alliances, which did not escape the Soviets who proposed in 1946, in an attempt to rally the island to their cause, to buy its entire fish production for the following year.

Subsequently, the fisheries issue remained at the heart of major diplomatic considerations. Finley thus offers a maritime reading of the history, known in its more general aspects, of the alliance renewed between Japan after 1945 and the United States. This partnership in fact implies a resumption by Washington of the defense of the maritime interests of the archipelago. The American authorities thus decided, against the advice of their own industrialists, to ensure advantageous commercial conditions for Japanese fisheries exports, in order to seal the mutual security treaty signed in September 1951, in the midst of the Korean War. The American occupation authorities in the country – the SCAP – have themselves, it is true, supervised the revival of these exports since 1948.

The example of the alliance with Japan highlights Finley’s main argument. In evoking the primacy of government policies in the production of fishing fleets, it does not simply aim at the promotion by states of their own fleets. If this is indeed the case for the Soviets, the United States seems on the contrary to accept a decline in the fishing sector on its own soil, in order to ensure geopolitical alliances with foreign states. The federal government thus turns a blind eye to the tax and commercial arrangements that allow Japan to have the product of its fisheries in the South Pacific processed in Samoa, thus taking advantage of an advantageous customs regime. Such a practice more broadly consolidates the support of the United States on the string of Pacific islands, in the face of the progressive development by the Soviets of a world fleet – a phenomenon that is also known for its military aspect in the 1970s. The active diplomacy that Japan conducts to secure fishing grounds is therefore carried out in the shadow of this American patronage.

Fish and law

If such a policy is necessary on the part of Tokyo – notably through bilateral fisheries agreements, the number of which increased from 11 in the 1960s to 115 in 2011 – it is because global developments in the fisheries sector, combined with the discovery of other economic and strategic resources in maritime areas, have profoundly modified the legal framework of the seas and oceans. Fisheries offer a particularly fertile ground for analyzing the relationship between environmental and legal issues, even if Finley does not always take it to its conclusion.

The most striking trend is the reduction of freedom of the seas, both in terms of movement and exploitation of maritime resources, which constituted the default regime of international law until the Second World War. We are indeed seeing an increase in initiatives to proclaim forms of sovereignty, as an extension of terrestrial sovereignty, over maritime areas. We are familiar with the Truman Proclamations of September 1945, which put forward the notion of an underwater continental shelf over which the United States would have rights, as well as the idea of ​​”conservation zones” with regard to fisheries.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Latin American states and Iceland also embarked on a series of initiatives to extend their sovereign rights beyond the narrow territorial sea that customary law recognized them as having. Everything about these claims was problematic: the distance, the types of rights recognized to the coastal state, the forms of their application. The controversy was waged in multiple forums: at the International Law Commission (CDI) of theUNto the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and in the sessions of the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which resulted in two Conventions, in 1958 and 1982. It often sees opposition between Southern States, in search of sovereignty over their natural resources, and developed States which extend the geographical scope in their quest for these same resources.

But conflicts are also developing, at all levels, between fishermen supported by their respective governments. This is the age of major proceedings before the International Court of Justice, starting with theFisheries case (United Kingdom v. Norway), judged in December 1951. In several places, quasi-military tensions developed, receiving a proverbial illustration in the “cod war” which opposed the United Kingdom and Iceland, in a perceptible or open manner, between 1958 and the mid-1970s. The Convention on the Law of the Sea of ​​1982 partly renewed the legal framework of these conflicts, extending the territorial sea and creating the concept of “exclusive economic zones”. The increasing exhaustion of resources, however, perpetuated conflicts of use and displaced them, as shown by the tensions which arose in the 1990s off the coast of Canada or in the Bay of Biscay.

None of the passengers on this odyssey in fish-filled waters really emerge unscathed: neither the Soviet captains who concealed suspicious fishing practices and camouflaged their catch figures, nor the American authorities who willingly ignored their own fishermen in order to build a strategic alliance with Japan, nor any of the countless players in these global networks of the fishing industry, from capture to consumption. In this sense, the book succeeds in constructing a global perspective on a fishing industry that is too often divided into sub-sectors, with each species being the subject of specialized studies.

It convincingly shows the globalization of fishing fleets, based on new industrial processes and supported by States. It also analyzes the geopolitical issues at work behind this deployment and attempts to articulate them with the production of new frameworks of the law of the sea, which must deal with the “elementary fluidity” of the element it deals with. Exclusive economic zones, international fisheries agreements and regional or sectoral regulatory organizations are the elements of a system that cannot claim, whatever it may say, to have as its objective a real preservation of resources. So many elements that encourage us to give up explaining the depletion of fishery resources by the eternal “tragedy of the commons” and to look in the face of very human policies.