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Lecture by Eugene Lapointe
IWMC President
Former Secretary General of CITES (1982-1990)

at the
International Symposium on Sustainable Fisheries Trade
10 September 2003, Cancun, Mexico

Sustainable Fisheries and Globalization: The Culture Threat

Through the 1960’s and ‘70’s a whole prognostication industry flourished in the US and Europe, an industry that painted a dire future characterized by ecological devastation, mass starvation and even nuclear winter. Such predictions have proved worth less than the ink that was wasted on writing them. One of the few predictors who proved accurate in his futurology was Marshall McLuhan who, in 1967, introduced us to the phrase "the global village" to describe the web of increasingly efficient, ever speedier communication that made our world a smaller and smaller place.

McLuhan probably never realized how right he was, for now the internet and satellite communications have combined to bring us news, and even open warfare in "real time". Naturally, where information has flowed, business has followed and, today, advocates and opponents of this trend violently dispute the benefits and disbenefits of this new "globalization" of economics. Globalization proponents promise to bring new prosperity to the developing world by integrating it into a seamless web of a universal trading structure. Critics, meanwhile, demand that those same countries be sheltered behind protective barriers to shield them from the dislocation of economic change.

This forum has not been convened for us to discuss globalization and its discontents, so I will restrict myself to two observations. First, those rapacious corporate shareholders who anti-globalization advocates invite us to scorn are, in reality, you and me and anyone else who invests in a pension plan, a retirement account or an insurance policy. Most of us do not conceive of ourselves as investors but we are and we are all seeking a return on that investment ergo we are the gasoline that fuels the globalization engine. Second, and following from the first point, any attempt to legislate the reverse of globalization will probably resemble nothing than King Knut’s attempt to order back the waves from his feet. We already inhabit a globalized economy and we will not be returning to the days of our fathers, no matter how much we aspire to do so.

Our purpose here today is to consider the impact of globalization upon wildlife conservation in general and on fisheries in particular. Superficially at least, globalization would appear to have nothing but positive implications for wildlife conservation. After all, wildlife never knew anything of mankind’s arbitrary political borders. Elephants blithely wandered between Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa without passports. The Gray Whale knows only water and has no concept whether he is navigating a Mexican or an American Exclusive Economic Zone. Under such circumstances, any conservation program worthy of its name had to be multilateral and, on occasions, even global. This was the premise upon which the United Nations established the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the organization that I had the distinct honor to head for 9 years.

However, let me strike several notes of caution here. First, we may have undergone the globalization of business, trade and international communication but we have not experienced, nor will we see, the globalization of human culture. We may be able to pick up a telephone in Hokkaido and speak directly to someone in Saskatchewan. An entrepreneur in Madras may sell goods and services in a millisecond over the internet to a consumer in Valparaiso but this new speed of communication and business does not mean that our various cultural presupposition are being fed into some vast blender from which we will all emerge uniform, flat and dull.

To the contrary, Japanese consumers will continue to seek out and consume delicacies such as seaweed and raw fish, the simple thought of which will roil the stomachs of many Americans. To the dismay of Western Europeans, those same Americans will continue to drive SUV’s the size of commercial trucks and will enthusiastically support, in European eyes, the barbarous custom of putting fellow human beings to death. Africans will view elephants as a threat to agricultural land and a potential source of revenue from ivory sales. Europeans will view them as majestic creatures that must be protected from all human activity. Each year, Norwegian fishermen will put to sea armed with harpoons to kill minke whales while American schoolchildren dig into their weekly allowances to make contributions to "Free Willie". In short, we are a crazy, mixed up world and, God willing, we are likely to stay that way, with a broad panoply of contradictory or interlocking cultures professing different values and, most notably in the context of this forum, different approaches both to the natural world around us and to the wildlife that inhabits it.

Sadly, we cannot afford to pretend that the ongoing vitality of human cultural heterogeneity will be universally welcomed. There has always been a segment of human society that aspires to subjugate diversity and to impose its own cultural, moral and ethical values upon others. In the nineteenth century we saw the British Empire spread through Asia and Africa cheered on, not as commonly believed, by merchants and soldiers but rather by clergymen and journalists who alike exhorted their national leadership to "bring the wretched heathen to the light" and "take up the white man’s burden" – in other words to bring the benefits of the supposedly superior Anglo-Saxon religion and culture to the inferior black and brown skinned people of the world.

Please do not believe for one passing moment that, with the coming of the twenty-first century, this imperialistic instinct has gone to its grave. To the contrary, the form may change and its expression may alter but the fundamental urge to subjugate one culture to the will of another remains. The new cultural imperialist does not bash a bible; he pushes an ecological manual in your face and demands your adherence. He does not avow adherence to a church of the spiritually enlightened; he professes membership in a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) of the morally superior. He comes not to save your souls; his flock will be your birds, your elephants, your reptiles and your fish. He alone knows how to care for and tend to them. He shares several salient features with his nineteenth century counterpart. He is utterly and totally convinced both of his own moral probity and of the right that his natural superiority imbues in him to tell you exactly what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. In the past, when you defied a ranting British preacher, he ran to his national government demanding military protection. The new imperialist similarly runs to his national government when he is defied. If you will not adhere to the environmental strictures that he has mapped out for you – without, of course, consulting you – then he will demand that his national government, along with any available international bodies, impose on you a broad range of economic sanctions in return for your impetuosity.

Our new imperialist also comes armed with two new weapons that would arouse the intense envy of his clerical predecessor, namely, ready access to an instant global communications and support network that will amplify his message around the globe and equally ready access to enormous bank accounts that can finance both his activities and the international promulgation of his message.

I should point out, in passing, that no-one, not one lone individual has ever cast a single vote to condone these supposedly pro-environmental international activities. The NGO’s tell us that they are the guardians of wildlife, but we always need to bear in mind that they are self-appointed guardians. Their only mandate is the one that they have chosen to arrogate to themselves. Ironically, the NGO’s will demand that multilateral meetings of elected officials throw open their doors to their participation in order to "democratize" them – a somewhat hilarious claim when stemming from non-elected bodies. They will tell us that they "speak for the world", but how can we recognize their claims when they have never subjected their mandate to popular scrutiny?

Now why should a symposium on sustainable fisheries trade concern itself with my complaints and historical analogies on the workings of today’s international environmental NGO’s? My answer to you is simple and forthright – these NGO’s operate in a predictable, repetitive manner and every indication is, ladies and gentlemen, that you are the next target on their target list.

It is necessary to understand that these NGO’s operate like the mythical shark in the water that must go forward to eat and must eat to go forward. On the rare occasions when we can get a look at the NGOs financial records, one fact becomes clear – their single largest outlay goes towards raising money to sustain their activities. In other words, they must raise money in order to have the funding to raise more money. This international ponzi scheme can be maintained only through the repeated generation of headlines trumpeting either that a new species has been discovered to be gravely endangered or that a particular NGO is uniquely qualified to "save" an endangered species. Calls for ever more funding then go out through mass mailings and the internet while "friends" in the print and electronic media are called upon to publicize both the problem and the campaign.

Consider the headlines of 2003. In January 2003, the Pew Oceans Commission announced that, according to its studies, ocean resources, particularly those around North America were so severely depleted as to constitute nothing less than an ecological crisis. Not surprisingly, the study was publicized at great expense in order to get across the message that existing fisheries management in the US was broken and could not be fixed. I assume that no-one here was surprised to learn that, according to the Commission, the existing eight existing US regional fisheries management councils need to be abolished and replaced with a new bureaucracy in Washington DC. I wonder who the members of the Pew Oceans Commission thinks would be suitable to lead that new bureaucracy and whether it envisions any role for the fishing industry itself? Given that the Commission explicitly states that existing management regimes, in which the fishing industry participates, are irredeemably broken, I suspect that the industry can confidently expect to be excluded from the deliberations of this new bureaucracy.

The World Wildlife Fund has now "discovered" and, once again, announced with a fanfare of publicity, that over 300,000 cetaceans are killed each year when they are taken as bi-catch by the global fishing industry. This number is vastly higher than any previous calculation and no scientific evidence was brought forward to buttress it but I think we can expect to witness the usual modus operandi, namely, the figure will simply be repeated over and over again until it becomes a platitude on the lips of journalists and talk show hosts until it has passed into the political lexicon as simple accepted fact. As many of you will have observed, the NGO’s preach that all cetacean species, no matter how plentiful, must always remain totally off-limits to all forms of sustainable use and any human activity that interferes with cetaceans – even whale watching – needs to be carefully circumscribed. Once again, I think that you can all confidently expect to be subject to an ever tightening noose of regulation of fishing activities in order to minimize – no, not minimize, eradicate – any impact that fishing activity might have on cetacean populations.

In this context, I find it interesting that at its 55^th annual meeting in Berlin this June, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), an institution now thoroughly subordinated to the NGO agenda, took its first tentative – and uninvited – steps into the field of general fisheries regulation when it announced the establishment of a new "Conservation Committee" that would examine, among other interesting questions – the cetacean bi-catch question. Fishermen around the world can look forward to receiving new sets of NGO origin instructions emanating from, and bearing the stamp of, the IWC.

In closing, let me make one final remark. In the world that we now inhabit, regulations, once issued, are never rescinded. Species, once identified - rightly or not - as endangered, are never allowed to recover. There is a delicious, if painful, irony in the fact that NGO’s demand that we take radical action to preserve endangered species but, simultaneously, they insist that none of those measures have ever done any good. This is because their fundamental agenda is to terminate all human interaction with the natural world around us. Theirs is a peculiarly post-industrial vision. Since the birth of homo sapiens our species has survived and flourished in harmony with nature, tilling our fields and fishing the oceans. Now, it is proposed that we withdraw from nature and view our lands, our seas and the wildlife that inhabit them as if behind glass. It is an approach that I categorically reject. Mankind springs from nature. We should embrace that legacy and continue to live in, and play an active role in, the world that surrounds us. Any proposal to the contrary runs in the face of the human – and, indeed, the animal, experience.

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