| By Gavin Chait,
on 31 December 2007
|
 Ugly, but valuable... During the 15th and 16th centuries in England, starvation in the countryside was widespread. Subsistence farmers grazed their sheep and cows on commonly held grazing land. Herds intermingled, livestock diseases travelled easily, and the soils were depleted. The problem that medieval peasant farmers discovered was this: as long as the common area was massively big then there could be no limitation on grazing; as soon as grazing became in short supply then everyone had an incentive to use up the last of it as quickly as possible before anyone else did. Modern free markets have a solution to such shortages. The price goes up. Medieval commons had no such mechanism. Everyone owned the right to graze, and so the grazing had no value. Starvation followed. The solution was as simple as it was devastating. The commons were enclosed and title was transferred to individuals. The waves of peasants who flocked to the cities in the 18th and 19th centuries were fleeing villages wiped out by enclosures. They triggered the most dramatic social change in human history: the industrial revolution. With it came the astonishing innovations that led to the motor car, airplanes and cellular phones. The 2,000 years of the middle ages came to a cacophonous end with the coming of the industrial revolution and, a little over 100 years later, to us.
Joseph Schumpeter came up with the phrase "creative destruction" in 1942; the act which destroys the old way of doing things and unlocks fantastic new opportunities. Which leads us to perlemoen. The ocean is a very large common. Humans have been pulling food out and chucking waste in for millennia. The same industrial revolution that gave us motor cars also gave us the means to massively increase the amount of sea-food we could catch. A motorised trawler can haul significantly more fish than one chap in a skiff with a hand-net. Governments around the world recognised the problem. In 1982 the United Nations Convention on the Sea gave governments strict control of their 200 mile exclusion zone but left the deep oceans open to all (after all, who would police it). Governments issued permits. It didn't help. Rogue elements could too easily fish and smuggle their catch where it would attract the least attention. Soon, and it will be this century, commercial fishing of wild fish-stocks will be a memory. Environmental Affairs minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk bravely put his neck out and declared that, henceforth, perlemoen fishing would be banned. Tony Ehrenreich, Cosatu's regional secretary, complained about the lack of consultation and the unfairness of this. Yellow-tailed, van Schalkwyk backed down. Try and imagine the level of pillage that will take place during this six-month warning zone? Everyone who can possibly carry a bucket is down at the beach harpooning the poor creatures (or however they're caught) before the deadline. The "tradition" of fishing for wild sea-food will end. As did the "tradition" of gas-light lighters, chimney-sweeps and many other careers fallen by the way-side by the march of social and environmental change. It is clear that government has a lot to learn about supporting those who lose their jobs in one industry to reskill and transition to another. Van Schalkwyk has done his credibility no good by suggesting that the artisanal fishing community simply become tour-guides. But that doesn't mean that other options don't exist. It is just as clear that many, such as Ehrenreich, would rather their children deal with environmental disaster in the future than accept responsibility for their own actions right now. |
