Category Archives: Fisheries

Fishing communities around the globe find themselves locked paradoxically between intensely local expressions of community and increasingly liberalized economic regimes. Commonly referred to as globalization, these trans-national processes are having a direct and often destabilizing effect on fishing communities. However, the changes are neither preordained nor uniform across different local settings. Furthermore, local level processes also play a critical role in shaping the interaction between the global and the local. New developments in information technology combine with increasingly liberal international trade regulations to make the job of any study of the local obsolete or, at best inadequate, if such a study does not take into account the implications of globalizing processes. This project, funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is designed to build upon emerging and developing approaches to anthropological research in such a way as to incorporate and to highlight the complex interconnections between the local and the global. This is accomplished through a methodological approach that combines traditional locality-based field research with research located in the virtual spaces of transatlantic networks of social solidarity (between fishers organizations), trade (fish, fish products, and capital) and information (variously captured in electronic communications and web sites).

This project will identify and analyze the economic and cultural implications of both longterm and emerging TransAtlantic connections: how fishing communities are increasingly integrated into global markets and how this integration is shaped and mediated by local history and social relations. Ethnographic investigation of local perceptions of, and responses to, globalization will illuminate how global processes transform and reinforce local experience, and how local culture is articulated with global phenomena.

Conducted over three years this project involves ethnographic research in four fishing communities and three ‘virtual’ field sites. Standard anthropological participant observation methods are combined with participatory video production in which community members and university-based researchers collaborate in the production of ethnographic videos. Ultimately, this multi-sited research programme sets as its objective an empirical case study of globalization as experienced and expressed within four fishing communities along the shores of the North Atlantic.

Principal Investigator – Charles Menzies
Research Collaborators – Caroline Butler, Kim Brown, Rene-Pierre Chever, Madaleine Hall-Arber

Extremely low salmon returns paired with falling salmon prices forced the Governor of Alaska to declare Bristol Bay an economic disaster in 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2001. In addition to economic hardship, the “no fish and fewer dollars” scenario, which persisted through the 2003 season, resulted in significant demographic change and the potential opening of Bristol Bay’s nonrenewable doors that have historically remained decidedly shut.

Located in southwest Alaska, Bristol Bay produces the largest red salmon runs in the world. Much like the volcanic mountains forming the backbone of the upper Aleutian Peninsula, the commercial fishing industry forms economic and social life in the region. The livelihood of the many rural fishing communities scattered along the coast of Bristol Bay’s rich waters depends entirely on ecological circumstance. Rapid ecological change in recent years reveals the magnitude of this relationship.
The late 1990s mark the beginning of an era of ecological uncertainty in Bristol Bay. Several outside factors influence the ecological condition of Bristol Bay communities.

Scientists agree that climate change is responsible for fisheries decline in this period. Low salmon returns and smaller than average fish are attributed to changes in atmospheric and oceanic conditions beginning in 1996. In addition to fewer and smaller fish, the impact of climatic change on Bering Sea life includes massive algae blooms over the continental shelf (visible from outer space), altered currents, a decrease in the annual extent of sea ice and warmer sea surface temperatures.

The economic piece of Bristol Bay’s pie extends beyond the Bering. It is comprised of overseas economies and international markets. The decline in sockeye salmon prices happened because of competition between farmed salmon and Alaska wild salmon in international markets. Japan is the major buyer of Bristol Bay salmon. Over 90 percent of sockeye salmon caught in Bristol Bay are shipped frozen to Japanese markets. A downturn in Japans economy in the late 1990s and competition from the farmed fish industry had significant and negative impacts on salmon prices. It is worth noting that between 1992 and 2003 farmed fish replaced wild salmon as the dominant product in Japanese markets.

The above factors bear considerable weight in the lives of Bristol Bay residents, fishermen and non-fishermen alike. The impacts of ecological change, notably high levels of out-migration (especially among young people) and local government program and budget cuts, create subsequent social and economic problems that are not easily remedied, or forgotten, with the return of healthy stocks. It is for these reasons that some residents of Bristol Bay have opened up to the idea of non-renewable resource development in the region.

For the first time in the history of Bristol Bay, the once taboo subject of oil development in Bristol Bay is being seriously considered. Mineral mining is another potential source of economic growth and opportunity in the region. A Vancouver-based mining exploration company recently released results from drilling tests near the headwaters of Bristol Bay’s productive streams. The Pebble Mine will be an open-pit mine and is believed to be the largest gold and second largest copper mine in North America.

Support for the introduction of new industry is complicated by the return of 43 million sockeye in 2004. The 2004 sockeye salmon season closed as the 10th largest run ever recorded and 2005 was just as impressive. Salmon prices have also improved over the last two years (from a low of 0.45 cents a pound in 2003 to 0.65 in 2005). Communities in the region have yet to reach a consensus on the actual risks and benefits of development in the region.

From the cbc online:

At least 38 sockeye salmon runs along the West Coast are in danger of imminent extinction, says a new report by the Sierra Club of B.C.

The report by salmon biologist Dr. David Levy’s blames the declining sockeye runs on mixed-stock fisheries, poor fisheries management as well as climate change. Download full story. Original source here.

Left unsaid in the press release and related report is the underlying political agenda that takes as its starting point an opposition to BC’s family-based commercial fishing fleet. Of the five causes for the decline of salmon identified by the Sierra Club report it is the so-called mixed stock fishery that is highlighted as the primary factor of devastation. According to the report mixed stock fisheries –harvesting salmon in channels and along migration paths- must be replaced by terminal fisheries at river mouths or far inland close to spawning channels. With individual transferable fishing quotas crashing down upon BC’s fishermen the connection between the environmental movement’s sudden release of yet another crisis report raises serious questions. Fishing quotas, supported by many Environmental NGOs, act to privatize the resource and, in terms of the salmon fishery, may also contribute to the creation of so-called terminal fisheries.

One of the potential causal factors for resource decline that the report completely ignores is the effects of criminalization of aboriginal stewardship and harvesting practices dating from the extension of the Canadian Fisheries Act to BC in the 1880s. Why might this have a bearing on resource depletion?

Our research group has identified traditional practices of resource stewardship in several of the north coast watersheds (specifically on or near Banks Island and at Lowe Inlet) that would indicate that the level of fish stocks first encountered by the late 19th century industrial salmon canning fishery was in part a by-product of human activity –that is, what Gitxaała people were doing in terms of harvesting and watershed maintenance directly contributed to the level of fish available for harvest.

The Canadian Fisheries act made modification to waterways, use of barricades and traps a criminal offense as access to and ownership of the resource was transferred to the control of the colonial state and their corporate proxies (commercial fish canners). Our research documents extensive human intervention in the very creeks in DFO statistical area 5 identified by the Sierra Report as facing declining stock levels.

Gitxaała community members engaged in a series of practices that formally included practices that today might be referred to as watershed restoration and salmon enhancement. Rather than recognizing this history of aboriginal practices along the coast the Sierra Report (notwithstanding a nod toward our importance on page 26-7 of the report) focuses on the family-based commercial fishing fleet as being the primary cause of sockeye depletion. If only that was the ‘real’ source of the problem.

An effective solution would transfer control of the salmon fishery to the hands of the family-based fishing enterprises and First Nations community members –the people who are directly involved with and reliant upon the salmon. Local control combined with a return to an intensive programme of watershed management that draws upon the local ecological knowledge and traditional technologies can ensure sustainability for people and fish.