All the fish you can eat, and less

At Phuket's fishing port, a girl deshells portunid crabs by the basketload. The airy hall where the catch of the day is sorted, processed and sold seems built for a far larger capacity than the haul we saw that day. A few arriving trawlers unloaded paltry slivers of pelagic fish with ample helpings of by-catch – undersized squid and crabs that are tossed aside – onto conveyors that ferry the still-writhing creatures to giant rollers that crush fresh marine protein into powdery fine meal. It seems the boats must venture further out across the Andaman Sea to find shoals worth the effort, and even so, the harvest continues to shrink as too many ships chase increasingly fewer fish and in the process worsen the problem by deploying pushnets and bottom trawls that uproot meadows of seagrass in which fish and other sea creatures shelter. The tragedy of the commons is repeated in this corner of the Indian Ocean, where rules and restraint vanish at land's end, and politicians and producers both labour under the myth of infinite resources and thus perpetuate a perverse scene where it makes more sense for every fisherman to catch the very last fish than limit his efforts for future fruit.

Comments

[DDeden]

You have a very good understanding of the coastal situation. Overexploitation & ecosystem destruction creates an ecological/nutritional vacuum for future generations.