Governments seem to be more aware of preserving marine life these days, and with good reason. More people are beginning to realize how valuable marine life and ecosystems are to us. Some strategies, however, have been backfiring with a vengeance. One example of this is the island nation in the central Pacific, Kiribati (KIR-a-bahs).
The people of Kiribati either pick coconuts from their trees and produce coconut oil, or catch fish. Most people, however, do both. The government of Kiribati was growing increasingly concerned about overfishing so they decided to subsidize the coconut oil industry. They figured that if people were paid more to do coconut agriculture, they would do less fishing. So ultimately, there would be less overfishing and people would have higher incomes.
This turned out to be far from the reality of the situation. Instead of decreasing overfishing, it actually increased it by 33 percent, decreasing the reef fish population by 17 percent. The reason behind these ghastly numbers was that since people were earning more, they could work less and eventually, they spent their new leisure time, um, fishing.
All of this is adds more to the idea that fisherman don’t fish just for money. In fact, some people even pay to go sports-fishing. There’s a certain thrill for people to catch impressive qualities and/or quantities of fish and coming home with something cool. Also, it’s been a proverbial bonding thing between friends, and especially fathers and their sons. We so often hear about “takin my boy fishin this weekend,” or “goin fishin with the old man.”
So this begs the question: what, then, is the solution to overfishing? Adding fishing as leisure only complicates the equation that has consisted predominantly of greed and money. How do we stop something that not only makes a huge profit, but is a great hobby to many people? Maybe jobs like patrolling the waters where people who like being on the water can still be there without doing any harm? Any ideas or thoughts? Maybe something to think about over the weekend for those who still have any brain power left.
