The justification for this support is that protection against cheap imports is essential to keep national fleets operating profitably and their processed products competitive on the national market. Also, these fleets and processing plants are seen as sources of direct and secondary employment for your compatriots. So, your profits, which according to the mainstream economists are the best criteria of social and economic sustainability, are OK and you\u2019re happy. Of course, you\u2019d be still happier, and so would be your shareholders, if you could keep maximising those profits.<\/p>\n
So what can you do, if you already employ the cheapest labour on your home market, and are already using low-priced, foreign-made equipment? In the USA for example, you\u2019d pay at least $5 per hour. When you learn that in some parts of the world hourly costs can be only 50 cents an hour, and even lower at $2-4 per day, you might start to think seriously about outsourcing your production there. Indeed, for $2 to $4 per kilo, a country in the ‘North’, outsourcing to the poorer ‘South’, can get its fresh fish shipped half the way round the world by air for processing and bring it back, and still cut costs by a two-digit percentage figure.<\/p>\n
Shipping by sea or land routes is even cheaper. European Union countries have seen the savings to be made by trucking and shipping fish for processing in cheaper neighbouring countries. Dutch and Belgium shrimp does a road roundtrip to Morocco, for peeling, in less than a week. The key factor is simply to ensure EU standards are met throughout the whole process. Then you cash the difference in wages saved. What a dream! Increase your efficiency and profits and vive la globalisation! Well, that sort of globalisation.<\/p>\n
Outsourcing has become very trendy for companies operating in the northern fisheries and associated industries. It is not new. Decades ago, in the fishing gear domain, northern netmakers started importing twine manufactured in Third World countries. After some years, they\u2019ve discovered that it was also cheaper to produce the netting there too, and now we find factories in India, Indonesia, Thailand, and other countries in the Far East, with or without foreign capital.<\/p>\n
Further \u201cprogress towards elevating economic efficiency\u201d seems to be in the making. World Fishing has already reported Scandinavian netmakers outsourcing production and assembly of nets to countries such as India.<\/p>\n
So, that is the situation. Whether we consider it to be positive progress, or criticise its social and national costs, we must learn how to live with it. Globalisation steams ahead. One can define globalisation as a worldwide process which is marked by improved communication, transport and a liberalisation of the conditions of international trade, including currency convertibility and transnational movements of money and people.<\/p>\n
For the fishing industry it means operating fleets and landing catches wherever financially convenient, chartering foreign and flag-of-convenience (FOC) vessels and fudging the significance of national flags and home ports. If these trends continue over the next decade and beyond (and I see no reason why shouldn\u2019t) the general character of the larger-scale industrial fish catching, processing and marketing will become unrecognisable to 20th century fishermen.<\/p>\n
This evolution will transmogrify disparate fleets and processing companies around the world into consolidated operations owned by transnational corporations(TNCs). The TNCs will own ships flying flags linked to national quotas and fishing rights acquired in various ways. They\u2019ll have \u201ccheap labour\u201d crews operating outsourced-made equipment, and catch fish both in their national and southern countries\u2019 waters. EU-flagged fleets will be subsidised through collective bargaining and large payments by Brussels to fish-rich developing countries whose governments prefer cash rather than allocate and exploit their fish themselves. Often they do not have fleets of their own which are able to get the best out of their fish stocks. That is their dilemma.<\/p>\n
We see how these deals mean that the catch is transhipped or directly landed for outsourced processing at nationally and transnationally owned fish processing and marketing facilities in southern countries. The more valuable products head north for retail sale, and the product with less value-added potential heads off for \u201coutsourced\u201d marketing in poorer countries. The process of capital\/ownership concentration, which is already very conspicuous in marine fish farming, will spread to the wild catch sector.<\/p>\n
So who gets hurt in this process? The globalisation of the world’s fisheries (and other sectors too) may produce some unexpected twists and turns. There\u2019s a brisk development of overseas business acquisition through capital accumulation in the two expanding economic empires of China and India. Capital from there is making acquisitions abroad in the ‘rich countries’, directly or through joint ventures. They may have been targets for outsourced production, but now some cheap-labour countries are going in the opposite direction and making good money by “outsource” the profits of their low-cost labour services to buy up companies in the rich countries.<\/p>\n
On the social front, TNC fleets may expand in size and acquire the areas of operation of existing smaller companies. They won\u2019t stop at getting hold of access to fish stocks worldwide by buying up quotas and other fishing rights. They will try to encroach into traditional coastal and inshore fishing grounds. This is the mode of hypermarket chains buying up local convenience stores run by families. This shift, from the owner-operator to the corporate sector, may produce dire social and economic consequences for local fishing communities and their associated secondary industries, services, and national and local consumer markets.<\/p>\n
The impact is already clear in the waters of many of the southern countries which have been heavily fished by subsidised, foreign fleets. The latter sometimes encroach on inshore fishing grounds and so affect indigenous, small-scale fishing livelihoods. The catch vanishes abroad to consumers in rich, industrialised countries. Local fishermen lose undisturbed access to their traditional fisheries and lose the fish which is taken by outsiders. This downside can only be prevented if governments take action. If they are interested in making sure their small-scale and coastal fisheries remain functional and profitable, and ensuring coastal resources are protected, they must keep large-scale fisheries of any kind away from coastal fishing grounds.<\/p>\n
Transnationally owned, itinerant fishing fleets are hardly the best guardians of fish stocks. Their most efficient policy would almost always be to take the cream of a stock and then move on elsewhere. But that is another issue\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Globalisation of the world fisheries and not only in fisheries may take quite unexpected turns – If you\u2019re an owner or executive operating a large, \u201cvertically integrated\u201d fishery enterprise in a rich region or country (e.g. Europe, North America, Japan, Australia or New Zealand), you may benefit from all sorts of government instruments which protect your products from competing imports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-10616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10616"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=10616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}