‘What do they do if the fish are gone?’
Study sounds alarm over state of resources
The world loves seafood. According to some estimates, people consumed about 102 million tons of it last year.
A new study released Friday by the University of British Columbia shows that indigenous people who live on the world’s coasts are definitely hooked. They consume 15 times more seafood per capita than people in other parts of the world, about 2.3 million tons, or about two per cent of the global catch, the study said.
They don’t simply catch and eat fish and other seafood. It’s the heart of communities, t he centre of culture and religion, a gift from the heavens. Seafood is crucial to the cultures of coastal indigenous people in the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Arctic, among other places, and overfishing and the ocean- wide movement of fish due to climate change could wipe those resources out.
On the coast of Africa at the equator, huge commercial ships are starting to encroach on native fishing areas as ocean stocks diminish. In places such as Madagascar, the stocks of community fisheries have been nearly lost.
“These big industrial fisheries are chasing the fish. In west Africa, larger vessels are moving closer and closer to shore,” said Andrés Cisneros- Montemayor, research associate at UBC and a lead author of the study published in PLOS One. “A lot of these indigenous communities, all they have are dug out canoes.”
“What you’ve seen is as people have less access to t heir t raditional f i shing ground people have turned to eating more food in the stores,” Montemayor said. “People are wondering about the effects on their health. There’s an elevation in cases of diabetes.”
Coastal c ommunities greatly rely on fishing, but no one knew exactly how much indigenous people on the coast need fish.
Policymakers around the world who sought to understand the impact of overfishing, encroachment on community fisheries and climate change had on coastal communities lacked basic information. Montemayor said that’s why his team of researchers embarked on the study.
They used United Nations data to discover and define indigenous populations. According to the data, about 370 million people are considered to be indigenous, five per cent of the world’s population. They are mostly racial and ethnic minorities who are native inhabitants of their regions. Some are recognized by governments and some are not.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community watched as salmon runs from the oceans to rivers diminished because of development. Last year, as a drought plagued nearly all parts of the West, they watched and worried as disease that developed in warmer waters resulted in record fish kills in areas where salmon make spawning runs.
“I grew up always having salmon,” Lorraine Loomis, fisheries director for the tribal community, said. Her culture is so intertwined with the migratory fish that they’re called the “People of the Salmon.” Salmon feasts marked every phase of life on the reservation north of Seattle — naming ceremonies, weddings, funerals, memorials to the dead. Now they are few, she said.
“A lot of communities are very similar, their food and cultural practices. What do they do if the fish are gone?” Montemayor asked. “We are at risk of losing human cultures that have been around f or t housands of years, which makes this issue much more than environmental.”