Sea folk
Bravo on the fisheries committee for its 100th meeting (No 264/265, December 2007-January 2008). The attention you bring to fishers is valuable, and your line against fish piracy commendable too. However, I sometimes wonder if your reform ideas, many of them good, don’t sometimes go a little too far.
Is it really that easy for whole and sometimes rather remote communities to retrain and adjust to new kinds of economic pursuits? Is government help really at hand and is their advice welcome? It would be useful to include real experiences of this, but I suspect many fishing villages fear they are being literally left out to dry. As you say in another article in the same edition (“Problems of scale”, book review), fishing is an ancient economic activity. But more than that, the sea is a culture apart and a way of life.
Joe Doyle
Dublin, Ireland
©OECD Observer No 267 May-June 2008
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