Reef Conservation Strategy Backfires

This is a very interesting story for job seekers as it highlights the challenges to transfer some occupations that have great difficulties in adapting to new work environments (e.g., fishermen), as well as highlighting how all things are interconnected, and may have a profound influence upon each other.

From NPR All Things Considered | by Richard Harris | November 18, 2009

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered

[4 min 27 sec]

 Sheila Walsh

A
day's catch on the Pacific island of Kiribati. Conservationists tried
to prevent overfishing on the island by encouraging fishermen to do
something else.

A
day's catch on the Pacific island of Kiribati. Conservationists tried
to prevent overfishing on the island by encouraging fishermen to do
something else.

November 18, 2009

Aid organizations concerned about overfishing on tropical reefs often
try to encourage fishermen out of their boats by offering them
better-paying jobs on shore. But this strategy actually may make
matters worse.

Fish Or Coconuts

Take, for
example, the story of Kiribati, an island nation in the central
Pacific. Kiribati (pronounced KIR-a-bahs) has a simple economy. People
either catch fish, or they pick coconuts from their trees and produce
coconut oil. Sheila Walsh, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown
University, says most people do a bit of each.

The Kiribati government was concerned about overfishing. So it came up with a plan: It would subsidize the coconut oil industry.

"The
thought was that by paying people more to do coconut agriculture, they
would do less fishing," says Walsh. "And this would fulfill two goals:
One, they would reduce overfishing; and two, people would be better
off. They would have higher incomes."

It
hit us like a bumper sticker saying -- a bad day fishing is better than
a good day working. And that's sort of the story here.

Walsh
wanted to know whether this plan was working, and the government
invited her to study the issue. So, as part of her graduate work at the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, she flew to Kiribati to interview
fishermen.

Coconut Subsidies Cause More Fishing

"And
it turned out that, actually, the result of paying people more to do
coconut agriculture was to increase fishing," she says. In fact,
fishing increased by a startling 33 percent. The reef fish population
dropped by an estimated 17 percent, putting the whole ecosystem at risk.

"It was a bit of a surprise, and we were wondering: What's going on here?"

The
answer was simplicity itself. Walsh's study concludes that people
earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less
to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing.

"It
hit us like a bumper sticker saying - a bad day fishing is better than
a good day working. And that's sort of the story here," Walsh says.

Fishing For Pleasure

It
turns out she had stumbled into a universal truth about fishing.
Fishermen aren't just in it for the money. Anthropologist Richard
Pollnac of the University of Rhode Island says, just think of those
snazzy sport-fishing excursions.

"People pay big money to go
sports-fishing," he notes. There aren't very many occupations that
people will actually pay money to do in their leisure time, he says.

So
fishing as an occupation provides psychic benefits, as well as money.
Pollnac argues that not just individuals but whole cultures get hooked
on the thrill of being out on the water, and the gamble of coming back
with either a boatload or empty-handed.

"This type of an
occupation selects for a certain type of personality, and that kind of
personality will not be happy in many other occupations other than
fishing," Pollnac says. As a result, attempts to get fishermen to do
something else - even something that pays better - often end in failure.

"There
have been projects where they had vessel buyback programs, and almost
50 percent of the fishermen used that money to buy another boat to do
another type of fishing, and in some cases get right back into
fishing," Pollnac says.

The track record for international
projects is poorly studied, which makes Walsh's research notable.
Pollnac says he can't point to any great successes.

"A great deal of the international development money, I would argue, is wasted."

This
problem is not lost on Craig Leisher at the Nature Conservancy. His
organization does spend money to help fishermen seek other livelihoods.
But does it keep them out of their boats?

"Well, no," he says. "It doesn't work to get them off the water. Rarely."

New Jobs Should Be On Water

He
says the Nature Conservancy creates non-fishing jobs, but only as a
tactic to help during a transition. For example, fishermen may need a
temporary source of income when a new no-fishing zone is established.
Fishermen lose their fishing income for a while - until fish
populations in the no-fishing zone grow large enough to provide a new
source of fish in the surrounding waters.

"What we have found
with our research is that a lot of alternative income activities are
not successful in the long term, so we look for activities that can
benefit communities in the near term, just two or three years," Leisher
says.

Which brings us back to the island nation of Kiribati.
Walsh says she's trying to help the government figure out how to fix
the problem of overfishing, which they'd accidentally made worse.
Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by
hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.