Provide skills, not just finished technologies.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for the rest of his life - I'm sure many of us have heard that, maybe with slightly different words. The saying ends there.
Now, I'm an ichthyologist-in-training (I study fish). And, in general, what happens once man learns to fish? The stock becomes overfished. This really is a huge problem worldwide that people tend to ignore (fish are delicious, and underwater - out of sight, out of mind). Consider these data from the FAO (from 2006, unfortunately the 2008 report is not loading for me right now, and these are the most recent data I can find):
- 52% of fish stocks are fully exploited
- 20% are moderately exploited
- 17% are overexploited
- 7% are depleted
- 1% is recovering from depletion
I'll get off my soapbox now - I promise that that tangent had a point. It is important to teach people how to use their resources and involve the community, but it must be done properly. Part of this education must include an understanding that overharvesting of resources is a real and dangerous possibility if the resources are not monitored and managed. While advanced scientific data collecting and analyzing methods are probably difficult for your average fisherman, what if the local fishermen formed a partnership with the scientists, in which the fishermen provided the scientists with information on what they caught and some structures for population analysis (it's pretty easy to pull off a couple of scales, or, in some species, to extract various bones, for aging purposes). The fishermen could be compensated for their cooperation and kept up to date on the health of their population.
And I'll end that there, since I have to be off to do some fish-related research (working on a paper on the evolution of asymmetry in flatfish, fun!). My first post...I've never really had a blog before, hope someone finds something interesting here. Thanks for reading!
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