Our Mother Ocean. Mariarosa Dalla Costa

waged worker, in later years her work has been mostly concerned with the manifold forms of resistance that women and men across the planet are engaged in, in opposition to the neoliberal assault on their means of subsistence and reproductive systems.

      In a variety of articles published between the late eighties and the present, she has returned again and again to this theme, increasingly inspired in her perspective by the work of ecofeminist writers and the struggles of indigenous people, starting with the Zapatista movement. At the core of her theoretical engagement in these contexts have been the devastating impacts of the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs on the lives of people across the continents and the central roles of the struggles over land and food sovereignty in the construction of new commons, developing her thinking about them hand in hand with her participation in the antiglobalization movements. Our Mother Ocean is a logical step in the urgent and ongoing discussions we must have about a subsistence perspective, social reproduction on a planetary level, and the commons, for only by artificial distinctions can we separate the planet’s lands, air, and waters.

      Dalla Costa’s contribution to the book, a long essay dedicated to the rise of the fishermen movement, focuses on the social consequences of the “blue revolution”—from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Honduras, Japan, Norway, and Madagascar. Coastal communities everywhere are forced to abandon their lands, as they cannot compete with corporate fleets, or for instance, they must make space for the cultivation of shrimp. Indeed, paraphrasing Thomas Moore’s famous comment on the English enclosures, we can say that “shrimp” today are “eating human beings,” in a bizarre twist in which the need to satisfy the palate of those who can pay exacts costly human sacrifices, such as the loss of land and enslavement to the brutal work regimes that the shelling and processing of the popular fish demand.¹ Echoing similar denunciations by Vandana Shiva, Dalla Costa contrasts the irreparable damages produced by the new fishing technologies with the creativity of the traditional methods they replace, which for centuries guaranteed the livelihood of millions of people. What she describes is a war against farming and fishing communities that relies on collusion between the fish/aquaculture industry and the local political elites and police forces that kill and torture at their service, all to bring shrimp and other chosen fish to the tables of people thousands of miles away.

      Since the late eighties, however, resistance has begun to mount on the sea as on the land, and it is one of the merits of this book to have brought to the foreground this struggle and, as a new international political subject, the world fishers’ movement first created in India in 1997 that since then has spread to every part of the world. Dalla Costa’s recognition of the importance of this movement, generally ignored by most “global justice” theoreticians and activists, is timely. Not only is the expropriation of the marine wealth of the populations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America by multinational corporations proceeding at an accelerating pace; in the “North” as well we are witnessing a sustained assault on the remaining fishing commons, ironically conducted under the guise of conservation and protection against overfishing.

      Exemplary in this regard is the attack that in recent years has been waged on the fishermen and fishing communities of New England by the Regional Fishery Management Councils (of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) that, in arguing for the need to rebuild fish stocks, have introduced “catch-sharing” programs, i.e., fishing quotas that have been established on the basis of previous fishing history that privileges large boats and makes it impossible for small owners to survive. If this succeeds, the New England fishing industry will undergo a “historic change,” marking the end (in the words of a Maine fisherman’s journal) of “a tradition of fishing rights older than this nation.”² Thus, at the moment, New England fishermen are fighting desperately—but quite alone—against this de facto privatization of the fisheries in an attempt to save their source of livelihood and the existence of their communities. Taken by itself, their struggle may seem hopeless. But this is where a book like Our Mother Ocean becomes most important. For it broadens our political horizon and helps us realize that resistance against the enclosure and destruction of the ocean has now become a global phenomenon.

       NOTES

      1. “[Y]our sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities.” From Sir Thomas More, The ‘Utopia’ and the History of Edward V, Maurice Adams, ed. (London: Walter Scott, 1980).

      2. Fishermen’s Voice (December 2009), available at: http://www.fishermenvoice.com

       INTRODUCTION

      Mariarosa Dalla Costa

      THE FISHERMEN’S MOVEMENT that emerged in the seventies in the south of India has today a planetary dimension and in its record a heroic history of women and men. But in many countries in the Global North, it has not had a proper resonance. Yet it represents a great story of commitment, sacrifice, and poetry rich with universal meaning because of the questions it raises concerning the relations between work and the safeguarding of resources, the satisfaction of needs and the awareness of limits. They are questions of love and respect but paid with the blood shed in ever harsher clashes between the right to live and profit obtained at the price of a death sentence for many populations. At stake is the respect for life, not only that of other human beings but that of other living beings, which is manifest in poetic terms in the documents that mark the path of the movement.

      This book, born of the same passion for the sea and the desire to share it with others, is intended to make a contribution to this path. We wish, first of all, to stress the polyvalence of the vital functions that the oceans represent. For oceans represent not only food but medicines, raw materials, climate, environment, biodiversity, and culture. We also wish to draw attention to the main changes in the problematic relation that has marked the history of human beings with the sea: their gradual approach to it until the recent “conquest” of the marine depths and the irrational exploitation of the riches of the abysses, leading to the depletion of this great reservoir of nature, which is now impoverished and altered. We aim to raise consciousness about the questions involved in the relation of human beings with this opulent source of nutrition and life, established first through the activity of fishing, from the casting of the fishing line for sport to commercial trawling. The book is intended to spread knowledge about a certain problematic among social circles not already directly engaged. Indeed, a remarkable awareness has grown about the questions of agriculture and land, and alternatives have been developed—thanks mainly to the initiatives taken by social subjects from the South of the world who have come to the North to denounce the consequences of productivism and technologism for real agricultural productivity and their lives. Yet similar issues relating to the sea and fishing have remained more hidden, more enclosed inside a discussion between the fish workers and those who oversee this sector.

      Twenty years after the first Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio (the United Nations conference on environment and development that led to the adoption of Agenda 21, a blueprint for sustainable politics to be implemented in the twenty-first century), all the main issues remain practically unresolved. The condition of the ecosystems has worsened instead of improved, and economic inequities and social injustices have increased. Chapter 17 of the agenda, which concerns the protection of all the seas and coastal areas as well as international regulation on this matter, must gain a new authority to effectively protect the marine and adjacent coastal ecosystems and the populations who live there. Article 17.3, which calls for the protection of the exclusive economic zones (the sea up to two hundred miles from the coast) for the benefit of the area’s residents, is far from being implemented. Destructive activities of various types—not only large-scale industrial fishing, characterized by gigantic catches and bottom trawling that ruins the seabeds—continue, constantly gaining new areas of predation. As the northern seas are impoverished, the prow has turned to the seas of the south. And as the catches of many seas on the planet have been