Industrial Fisheries and Ocean Accumulation
Creators: name: Elizabeth Havice
name: Campling, Liam
Publisher: name: Edward Elgar
Year: 2021
Subjects: Critical Agrarian Studies

description: Three-fourths of the world’s marine capture fisheries are at or beyond ‘full exploitation’, indicating the likelihood that many fish populations, and the ecosystem of which they are a part, will decline (if they are not already) with current and expanded levels of competitive extraction, though the geographies of fisheries decline and recovery are uneven. Fish, whether saltwater or freshwater, farmed or captured, are an important source of animal protein, micronutrients and fatty acids crucial to alleviating malnutrition, hundreds of millions of people are employed as fish workers and in fisheries-related activities, and fish exports from developing countries generate a higher export value than coffee, bananas, cocoa, tea, sugar and tobacco combined (Campling et al. 2012). State and market pressures from outside fishing industries also shape the ecological resources that fisheries depend upon. For example, the ‘deadly trio’ of oceanic warming, acidification and deoxygenation – all driven by terrestrial capitalism – threatens in particular larger-bodied animals living at the top of trophic levels in the oceans’ ecosystems (Payne et al. 2016). These changes and declines are a likely oceanic outcome of ‘business as usual’ for global capitalism.

Mainstream social science fisheries research has largely been under-attentive to fisheries systems in general and particularly in relation to questions of how they are shaped through capitalism. Historically, the prevailing treatment of fisheries in the social sciences has been biologically and economically reductionist, and policy thinking is ‘subsumed under the goals of economic growth and wealth creation’ (Symes and Phillipson 2009, 1). Fisheries have been treated as ‘a technicality, an exercise of narrow, instrumental rationality ruled by universal theory’ (Jentoft 2007, 435), and ‘the individual producer [is theorized] as an autonomous isolate engaged in the technical act of catching fish’ (Pálsson 1991, 21). However, over the last ten years, this has begun to change rapidly (for a recent review, see Bavnick et al. 2018).

With Penny McCall Howard, in 2012 we edited a special double issue of Journal of Agrarian Change that sought to examine the political economy and ecology of capture fisheries, drawing explicitly from the analytical tools available to critical agrarian studies, and enriching these tools with cases from the water. In our introduction to that special issue (Campling et al. 2012), we charted three themes that we saw then as pertinent to critical agrarian studies and the political economy of capture fisheries: market dynamics and competition in fisheries production-consumption systems; labour, forms of exploitation and resistance; and resource access and the state. In the years since, there has been a flourishing of attention to fisheries specifically, and of extractive relations in aquatic spaces more broadly. Here we advance two main objectives: 1) to introduce study of industrial fisheries to a critical agrarian studies audience and indicate relevant intersections between the two, and 2) to highlight new advances, emergent research themes and exciting scholars working in the field of ‘oceanic accumulation’ (Sibilia 2019).

Given space limitations, we focus on industrial marine capture fisheries and to raise questions about ocean accumulation more generally. We recognise the profound socio-economic and ecological importance of artisanal and small-scale coastal fisheries, and inland or riverine fisheries, as well as booming aquaculture and mariculture industries. These are essential areas for critical agrarian studies and each presents important analytical similarities and differences and we encourage scholars working in the critical agrarian studies tradition to research these and their articulations; our hope is that the discussion here offers foundations for ongoing and expanding attention to critical agrarian studies beyond the terrestrial.