book "The Empty Sea," the world's oceans do contain enormous resources, but it is also true that -- like all biological resources -- overexploitation is a misunderstood risk that always takes people by surprise.
It is a mistake done over and over: when the yield of a fishery goes down, governmental agencies think it is a good idea to provide fishermen with more powerful boats and other technological tricks. It works, just until it doesn't. Then, it makes things worse. Overexploited fish stocks collapse, leaving fishermen with plenty of useless hardware and the sea reduced to a desert.
Below, Paul Jorion tells a story that provides much food for thought in this field: the pretense of Western "experts" to know more than the local African fishermen and to help them by means of more powerful engines and better fishnets. And, as usual, the result was plenty of wasted money, possibly worse than that. The apparent inability of the Fishermen of Benin to produce as much fish as produced in nearby regions was not because they were bad fishermen. It was because of the lack of fish off the coast of Benin.
"Upwelling" is a concept discussed in some detail in our book, it is the oscillating phenomenon that characterizes the "El Nino/La Nina" cycles off the Peruvian coast. Upwelling brings nutrients to the surfaces and generates the growth of the fish stocks. The lack of upwelling has the opposite effect. The sea is a complex environment, you can see it as a giant holobiont that goes on in cycles, as living systems often do. You must understand these cycles, you can't fight them with technology. If you try, you'll destroy the very resources that make you survive. In this case, the fishermen of Benin had perfectly well understood how to deal with the lack of upwelling: you don't fish.
Jorion doesn't say what happened with the program, but he hints that it was carried out and that it failed, badly -- as it had to. Will we ever be able to understand that growth is not always the solution for all problems?
AFRICA AND ME III. FISHERMEN NOT KNOWING HOW TO FISH
MAY 15, 2021 PAUL JORION
By Paul Jorion
The FAO project in Benin aimed at developing fisheries in the country. It had been observed that, unlike neighboring countries, coastal fishing was languishing there. Benin was living at that time under a Marxist-Leninist regime and it was considered in high places at the United Nations that the time had come to intervene also in countries whose government was of this type.
Our project was sponsored by Denmark and Japan. Its objective was to discover the reasons for the weakness of fishing and to remedy them. As is often the case with development aid projects, the conclusion we would come to was pre-established: we could read it in the fact that Denmark had offered nets and Japan Yamaha outboard motors.
A preliminary survey on the situation in Benin had been carried out a few weeks before my arrival by a British anthropologist colleague: Jacob Black-Michaud, who had highlighted in a report of about thirty pages the mediocrity of the local fishery. This report established that, for some unknown reason, fishermen in Benin did not manage to fish with the same skill as observed in neighboring countries. The rationale for the United Nations to come to their aid lay there.
I had a real affection for Jacob Black-Michaud, whom I had previously had the opportunity to meet during an evening in Cambridge. His career had been similar to mine: from the university environment to anthropology applied to development projects in the field. But unlike me, who loved to deal with reality, he lived the transition from university life to that of a bush adventurer like a downfall. I would share his sentiment, but at a different time: when, fourteen years later, at the age of fifty-one, I was recruited for my first job in the United States: a programmer in a subprime loan company. I would have the opportunity to ask myself then, like him in Benin: "How did you get there: what happened to you?"
It is always with real emotion that I think back to him and to our conversations about the deep meaning of our profession and the challenges of what is called "development aid". Black-Michaud had lived in Ceylon an experience that had transformed him on a personal level but also made him cynical on these subjects. I remember our last conversation: I didn't share his belief that anything we did was wasted (and my own experience would convince me that it was indeed not, despite the sheer size of some obstacles to come up against.) and I told him.
He wrote to me shortly before the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, I was not surprised to learn a few weeks later that during a ski tour he had fallen to his death, having fallen from an overhang.
It was therefore necessary to find out why the performance of coastal fishing in Benin was so disappointing. In Houat, I went to a good school for the fishing profession, and also to a good school in Cambridge, in terms of mastering analytical tools. The first thing I did, with the help of a team of "statisticians" that the project had enabled me to recruit, was a census of the eight fisherman camps in Benin (including Beninese and Ghanaian people) who had been selected for our mission. project.
A census allows, among other things, to build an age pyramid. This is a very simple exercise in graphing the age composition of a population. After having counted the people of each sex of such or such age, this number is represented on a horizontal scale, the men on the left and the women on the right, by convention. The age groups are stacked along a vertical scale graduated according to age: children between zero and one year old are shown at the base, while the highest age group is shown. which belongs to the oldest person still alive.
For each age group, a line is drawn whose length is proportional to the number of people of that age. As with aging and accidents people die, the general shape tapers upwards. In traditional populations ravaged by very high infant mortality, the figure generally had the shape of a pyramid, the steps of which were made up of age groups.
The pyramid is generally asymmetrical at the top: thicker on the female side for the reason that everyone knows that in all societies, women live longer than men and there are therefore more women than men at the top.
However, the age pyramids of my villages all had the same unexpected shape: asymmetrical, showing a very noticeable dip on the side of men in the age groups of fifteen to forty-five years. The interpretation was unequivocal: men in their prime were missing out. Where could they possibly be?
I went to see the women: "Where are the men I asked?" "In Liberia, Gabon, Congo!" They replied, adding:" Where there is fish. Not like here!" The men followed the fish, often leaving the women behind. Sometimes the women followed their men, in trucks, along the coast. I would discover that the Beninese had the reputation of being outstanding fishermen wherever they went fishing, returning periodically to the country, either seasonally or after stays that lasted several years. The men we saw in Benin, for example practicing the "beach seine" (this long pocket-shaped net that is spun off with the help of a boat after leaving one of its two ropes retained by a team on the beach, and which is then folded down after having brought the second rope back to the beach, the two teams then hauling the pocket by its two ends), were either those occasionally returning, those who came to see their families, or, and essentially, the disabled and the sick ones. I had involuntarily innovated, I had introduced a new style in development projects in West Africa: I had spoken to the people we said we wanted to help!
The explanation for the absence of fish in large quantities in Benin is the absence of "upwelling ", a thermal phenomenon: the upwelling of cold water from the depths near the coast, allowing an algal bloom. diatoms on which the larvae of mollusks and crustaceans feed. The upwelling allows the plankton (phytoplankton and zooplankton), basic food fish, to grow. The upwelling moves along the coast of West Africa but it rarely develops in the Gulf of Guinea, in the area stretching from Benin to the west of Cameroon. In this area, fish are rare.
It was neither laziness nor incompetence that explained the mediocrity of fishing in Benin but the thermodynamics of the oceans. I explained this to my colleagues. It turned out very badly: the remedies available to us were, as I have already said, of two kinds: Danish nets and Japanese engines. The only explanations considered for the poor fishing in Benin were inappropriate equipment and the incompetence of the fishermen. Unfortunately, the real explanation refused to fit into this pre-established mold.
Our project was sponsored by Denmark and Japan. Its objective was to discover the reasons for the weakness of fishing and to remedy them. As is often the case with development aid projects, the conclusion we would come to was pre-established: we could read it in the fact that Denmark had offered nets and Japan Yamaha outboard motors.
A preliminary survey on the situation in Benin had been carried out a few weeks before my arrival by a British anthropologist colleague: Jacob Black-Michaud, who had highlighted in a report of about thirty pages the mediocrity of the local fishery. This report established that, for some unknown reason, fishermen in Benin did not manage to fish with the same skill as observed in neighboring countries. The rationale for the United Nations to come to their aid lay there.
I had a real affection for Jacob Black-Michaud, whom I had previously had the opportunity to meet during an evening in Cambridge. His career had been similar to mine: from the university environment to anthropology applied to development projects in the field. But unlike me, who loved to deal with reality, he lived the transition from university life to that of a bush adventurer like a downfall. I would share his sentiment, but at a different time: when, fourteen years later, at the age of fifty-one, I was recruited for my first job in the United States: a programmer in a subprime loan company. I would have the opportunity to ask myself then, like him in Benin: "How did you get there: what happened to you?"
It is always with real emotion that I think back to him and to our conversations about the deep meaning of our profession and the challenges of what is called "development aid". Black-Michaud had lived in Ceylon an experience that had transformed him on a personal level but also made him cynical on these subjects. I remember our last conversation: I didn't share his belief that anything we did was wasted (and my own experience would convince me that it was indeed not, despite the sheer size of some obstacles to come up against.) and I told him.
He wrote to me shortly before the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately, I was not surprised to learn a few weeks later that during a ski tour he had fallen to his death, having fallen from an overhang.
It was therefore necessary to find out why the performance of coastal fishing in Benin was so disappointing. In Houat, I went to a good school for the fishing profession, and also to a good school in Cambridge, in terms of mastering analytical tools. The first thing I did, with the help of a team of "statisticians" that the project had enabled me to recruit, was a census of the eight fisherman camps in Benin (including Beninese and Ghanaian people) who had been selected for our mission. project.
A census allows, among other things, to build an age pyramid. This is a very simple exercise in graphing the age composition of a population. After having counted the people of each sex of such or such age, this number is represented on a horizontal scale, the men on the left and the women on the right, by convention. The age groups are stacked along a vertical scale graduated according to age: children between zero and one year old are shown at the base, while the highest age group is shown. which belongs to the oldest person still alive.
For each age group, a line is drawn whose length is proportional to the number of people of that age. As with aging and accidents people die, the general shape tapers upwards. In traditional populations ravaged by very high infant mortality, the figure generally had the shape of a pyramid, the steps of which were made up of age groups.
The pyramid is generally asymmetrical at the top: thicker on the female side for the reason that everyone knows that in all societies, women live longer than men and there are therefore more women than men at the top.
However, the age pyramids of my villages all had the same unexpected shape: asymmetrical, showing a very noticeable dip on the side of men in the age groups of fifteen to forty-five years. The interpretation was unequivocal: men in their prime were missing out. Where could they possibly be?
I went to see the women: "Where are the men I asked?" "In Liberia, Gabon, Congo!" They replied, adding:" Where there is fish. Not like here!" The men followed the fish, often leaving the women behind. Sometimes the women followed their men, in trucks, along the coast. I would discover that the Beninese had the reputation of being outstanding fishermen wherever they went fishing, returning periodically to the country, either seasonally or after stays that lasted several years. The men we saw in Benin, for example practicing the "beach seine" (this long pocket-shaped net that is spun off with the help of a boat after leaving one of its two ropes retained by a team on the beach, and which is then folded down after having brought the second rope back to the beach, the two teams then hauling the pocket by its two ends), were either those occasionally returning, those who came to see their families, or, and essentially, the disabled and the sick ones. I had involuntarily innovated, I had introduced a new style in development projects in West Africa: I had spoken to the people we said we wanted to help!
The explanation for the absence of fish in large quantities in Benin is the absence of "upwelling ", a thermal phenomenon: the upwelling of cold water from the depths near the coast, allowing an algal bloom. diatoms on which the larvae of mollusks and crustaceans feed. The upwelling allows the plankton (phytoplankton and zooplankton), basic food fish, to grow. The upwelling moves along the coast of West Africa but it rarely develops in the Gulf of Guinea, in the area stretching from Benin to the west of Cameroon. In this area, fish are rare.
It was neither laziness nor incompetence that explained the mediocrity of fishing in Benin but the thermodynamics of the oceans. I explained this to my colleagues. It turned out very badly: the remedies available to us were, as I have already said, of two kinds: Danish nets and Japanese engines. The only explanations considered for the poor fishing in Benin were inappropriate equipment and the incompetence of the fishermen. Unfortunately, the real explanation refused to fit into this pre-established mold.
