[PEN-L:29907] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Russia turns to yuan"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Melvin:
> Lou, in my head I believe that every shortage of natural resources on
> earth is artificial and contrived.

But this is not so. While there have been debates on PEN-L with Mark Jones
about dwindling oil supplies, there obviously can be no debate about--for
example--the decline of fish stocks. This is the reason I emphasized that
expanding the forces of production in terms understood 125 years ago is not
the answer. According to the Food and Agriculture Administration (FAO), a
US agency, the present capacity of the world's fishing fleets is 200% of
the world's available fisheries. Over the past 50 years, technological
breakthroughs in the fishing industry have far exceeded nature's ability to
reproduce itself. The biggest change has been the introduction of sonar, a
wartime innovation. Many of the first new fishing trawlers were actually
converted WWII submarine hunters.

In the early 1950s, new ships were built from the ground up that could
catch 500 tons of fish a day. Huge trawl nets brought the catch on the deck
and dumped it into onboard processing and freezing facilities. In the past,
ships had to return to port quickly before the fish spoiled. Now equipped
with freezers they could spend months at sea, sweeping up vast quantities
of fish. They roamed the planet in search of profits. In 1970 the tonnage
of all fishing boats was 13,616. In 1992 it was 25,994, a 91% increase.
Capital simply flowed to the profitable fishing industry with little regard
to the long-term consequences.

One of the consequences of the industrial trawling model is that
large-scale production techniques generate huge amounts of waste. The nets
draw unwanted species that are simply discarded. The FAO estimates that
discarded fish total 27 million tons each year, about 1/3 of the total
catch. This includes sea mammals, seabirds and turtles. While Greenpeace
activists fight for the life of the unfortunate porpoise, many other
species are disappearing without fanfare. The loss is serious since all of
these species interact with each other in the marine ecosystem and make
natural reproduction possible.

All of these new technologies, from freezing to sonar, simply lead to the
more rapid exhaustion of a key natural resource, namely seafood and fish.
The wing of the socialist movement that has retained a kind of
techno-optimism often tends to equate the need for environmental
sustainability with Malthusianism, Luddism, romantic reaction or even
green-Fascism. Obliviously socialism can solve lots of problems. But it
cannot repopulate the oceans with Bluefin Tuna once they are extinct.


Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org