Fishing Industry

Fishing was an established part of preconquest subsistence and exchange in Latin America. Archaeological evidence from the Peruvian coastal plain, for example, suggests that the population around 2,500 to 2,000 bce was heavily reliant on shellfish, seabirds, and marine mammals and fish caught using lines or beach nets. In the Classic Period (500–900 ce) hunting and fishing from boats using lines, nets, and harpoons was integral to coastal livelihoods. Fishing was also important to the Inca civilization, and fish supplemented the basic vegetarian diet of the Aztecs. Fishing was not merely a subsistence activity in precolonial times—the Mayans traded conserved fish, fairs (which proved integral to the development of north-south trade) were organized around the Orinoco turtle fisheries, and both dried and smoked fish products contributed to subsistence and exchange activities in the south Atlantic region.

THE COLONIAL AND EARLY POSTCOLONIAL PERIODS

Regional colonial and early postcolonial histories make only infrequent references to fishing. However, there is evidence that Catalan fishermen were active in the sea bream and conger eel fisheries off Chile in the 1770s, drying and exporting their catches to Peru's mining towns. Nicholas de Arredondo (viceroy of Rio Plata, 1789–1795) promoted whaling and fishing off Patagonia through a royal monopoly. Fur and elephant seals were early targets of colonial seafarers and fishers; the trade in skins peaked in 1822 when more than 1.2 million animals were slaughtered on the island of South Georgia alone. In Brazil a state whaling monopoly coexisted alongside artisanal fishing by slaves until the turn of the twentieth century, though evidence shows that social elites preferred to import salted cod from Portugal. Efforts to introduce modern fishing practices in the late nineteenth century, including the recruitment of British fishermen to develop a Chilean trawl fishery, were largely unsuccessful.

Catches increased modestly through the early twentieth century, reaching some 255,850 tonnes in 1938. Brazil accounted for around 40 percent of the regional catch, as Portuguese and Spanish migrants employed ever larger boats to fish for sardines out of Brazil's southern states. Migrants—this time, Italian and Spanish migrants venturing out from Mar de Plata—also provided the bulk of Argentine catches (22% of the regional catch). By the outbreak of World War II, Latin America contributed a mere 1.2 percent of world production.

THE EMERGENCE OF A MODERN FISHING INDUSTRY

The situation changed markedly in the second half of the twentieth century. Concerned at the growing incursion of foreign vessels into territorial waters, Mexico approved legislation in 1947 and 1949 that granted the cooperative sector exclusive access to the nine most important inshore marine and shellfish fisheries, and limited foreign fishing within the coastal zone. In Brazil the state-sponsored formation of fishermen's guilds in the early 1920s was an early harbinger of a statist development strategy that reached its apogee with the introduction of an extensive national fisheries development program in the 1960s.

The most notable postwar change occurred in Peru. Frustrated by the national government's failure to control the extensive operations of the Japanese tuna fleet off the Peruvian coast during the late 1940s and early 1950s and a growing inability to compete with Japanese exporters in the U.S. canned tuna market, Peruvian fishing entrepreneurs switched their attention to the anchovy instead.

Anchovy catches grew swiftly following the collapse of the Californian sardine fishery in 1949 to 1950 as redundant capital equipment and expertise migrated southwards, with Peru's first fishmeal plant established in 1953. The relaxation of domestic constraints (export taxes and restrictions on fishing activity) that had protected the Guano Administration Company, allied to the adoption of modern fishing techniques, saw an extraordinary escalation in production and exports (see Figure 1). At its peak in 1970 the industry employed more than 1,400 boats and 21,700 fishers to catch 12.3 million tonnes of anchovy, nearly one-quarter of world marine fisheries production and approximately five-sixths of the regional marine catch. This was converted by some 170 factories, employing more than 9,000 workers, into fishmeal, which supplied one-third of the country's export earnings. The bonanza proved shortlived, and the abrupt collapse in anchovy stocks—due to overfishing and the 1972 to 1973 El Niño event—led to the fishery's nationalization.

NEOLIBERALISM AND CONTINUED FISHERIES EXPANSION

The emergence of neoliberal governments and their commitment to export-oriented growth provided a substantive boost to fisheries production across the region (see Figure 1). In Chile, the privatization after 1974 of the northern pelagic fleet (catching fish that shoal on the surface), the gradual exclusion of foreign vessels from national fishing grounds, and the removal of access restrictions to pelagic stocks were supplemented by aggressive exchange-rate and export-promotion strategies—and saw Chile displace Peru as the region's leading fish exporter in 1980. New investment swiftly entered the Peruvian fisheries sector after the neoliberal government of Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) privatized anchovy fishing and processing, introduced a more competitive exchange rate, and established fiscal and monetary regimes favoring exporters. However, although investment encouraged a reduced dependency upon the anchovy fishery, the industry remains critically exposed to a repeat of the crisis it experienced in the early1970s, as was evidenced in 1997 to 1998.

In Argentina, the decisions by the administration of Carlos Menem (1989–1999) to exempt new vessels from trade taxes, to allow Argentine firms to lease foreign vessels, and to simplify procedures for "naturalizing" foreign vessels saw the rapid incorporation of new factory and freezer vessels into the Argentine fleet. But as catches increased, so did the number and intensity of fishery conflicts. Mexico was an exception insofar as industrial expansion preceded neoliberalism: The gross registered tonnage of the Mexican fleet rose swiftly, from 8,000 to 289,000 tonnes, between 1970 and 1988. Tuna was the newly targeted resource, though U.S. embargoes on Mexican tuna exports in 1980 and 1986 and a worsening macroeconomic environment saw the sector become overly reliant on state support. Carlos Salinas de Gortari's neoliberal regime (1988–1994) sharply cut this support and also rescinded the cooperative's exclusive fishing rights, causing fishery conflicts to intensify while catches remained static. Other examples of neoliberal governments encouraging domestic and foreign investment into the sector include the reflagging of Spanish tuna boats in Costa Rica, Norwegian investment in Nicaragua's shellfish industries, Spanish and Venezuelan joint ventures, and Taiwanese and U.S. participation in Uruguayan fisheries. The intensification of fishing across the region has brought many of the major commercial fisheries to the point of collapse (see Table 1).

The response to this crisis has been two-fold. First, greater attention is being paid to stock management, with a number of countries (most notably Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Chile) employing or moving toward the use of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) as a method of apportioning TACs (Total Allowable Catches) in regulating marine fishing activity. Second, recognition of the limited opportunities for future capture fisheries growth has led to ever greater emphasis on the development of regional aquacultural activities (see Figure 2).

AQUACULTURE AS A SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS IN MARINE FISHERIES?

Commercial salmon and trout farming evolved in Chile during the early 1980s and, benefiting from the economic incentives offered to exporters by neo-liberal governments, grew rapidly from 500 tonnes in 1985 to 25,000 tonnes in 1990. By 2000 342,000 tonnes were exported; this leaped to 563,000 tonnes, worth U.S.$2.3 billion, by 2004. In 2007 aquaculture was Chile's fourth largest export earner by value, and the country was likely to become the world's largest salmon producer in the next few years. Elsewhere, the emphasis has been on shrimp culture. Led by Ecuador, where shrimp farming began in the late 1970s, Latin America now harvests 287,000 tonnes of shrimp worth U.S.$1.3 billion, around one-quarter of the world's cultivated shrimp production. Shrimp production and exports are particularly important in Brazil, Belize, Colombia, Honduras, and Venezuela. However, scientists have raised concerns about the ecological problems caused by aquacultural activities—in particular the widespread destruction of coastal mangroves, in the case of shrimp farming, and the disposal of effluent waste, in the case of salmon and shrimp farming.

See alsoEl Niño; Menem, Carlos Saúl; Salinas de Gortari, Carlos.

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                                                        Andy Thorpe

                                                          Chris Reid