The crisis has forced a re-examination of the basic principles humans have used to manage natural resources for the past 100 years. It also is the latest in a series of economic shifts in which small institutions have given way to larger, more efficient, impersonal ones. In the process, iconic figures such as the American family farmer in the 1980s, and now the small-scale fisher in the '90s, are forced grudgingly off the economic playing field and into museums and history books. Teach a man to fish, and he can feed himself for a lifetime,' '' said David Nygard, an analyst with the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. Now, if you teach a man to fish, you will impoverish him for the rest of his life.
Many people still believe that.
It's not true. Only a seventh of the 24,000 known marine finfish species are edible or commercially valuable, and they tend to live near the coast, easy pickings for nets and hooks. Technological advances and fleet expansion after World War II have made it possible to wipe out a fish population in a matter of days. Tripling from 1958 levels, the world catch peaked at 86.4 million metric tons in 1989, and it has wavered a few million tons below that ever since, despite high demand, continued expansion of international fleets and a desperate search for new fish to exploit. A generation ago, fish was known as the poor man's protein.