Marine ecosystems may thrive and larger fishing operations might profit from less independent competition after the December tsunami in the Indian Ocean, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder expert on global fishing communities.
"If you were a fish, you might have loved the tsunami," said James McGoodwin, professor and associate chair of CU-Boulder's department of anthropology. "The wave churned up buried nutrients in the sea, the same way plowing a field renews the soil for crops."
McGoodwin explained that while the wave caused tremendous destruction and pollution in coastal areas, the natural cleansing action of the tides and long-shore currents remove toxic material relatively quickly.
"The environment for fish and marine life should actually improve as a direct result of the tsunami," he said. "Basically, the combination of rejuvenation of the marine ecosystems and drastic reduction in human fishing effort in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami might, at least at first, cause development of healthier marine ecosystems than existed prior to the disaster."
Fishing industry implications of the tsunami are important in the Indian Ocean region, McGoodwin said, because it is a major local source of food and jobs. "Fish are the main source of animal protein in the diets of people living in the tsunami-impacted regions. The widespread destruction of smaller individual fishing operations and resulting drop in fishing activity may also benefit larger fishing companies.
"So many boats were destroyed and so much equipment was lost in the tsunami," he said. "However, the fishermen who will suffer the most are the small independents. Larger companies have more capital available to make repairs and are better connected to governments and organizations that can provide aid.
"Also, depending on where boats were anchored at the time, some outfits may have been completely destroyed while others suffered minimal damage," said McGoodwin. "The selective destruction will result in some fishing outfits being able to profit from others' losses. They will be able to fish in areas they didn't have access to before the tsunami.
"More often than not, the larger companies will gain from the misfortune of the smaller operations," McGoodwin said. "The short-term implication for fisheries may be strengthening and consolidation in the larger industrialized sector, and in the recreational fishing sector, at the expense of the small-scale fishing sector."
McGoodwin believes local governments should step in to protect recovering small-scale fishing operations from unfair competition in the aftermath of the disaster. He said officials in the Indian Ocean region could learn from mistakes made in the aftermath of another natural disaster, Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed virtually all commercial fishing vessels in its path when it struck south Florida in 1992.
"In the weeks and months following Hurricane Andrew, state fisheries officials foot-dragged on supporting programs that were aimed at facilitating the recovery of sectors of the storm-impacted fisheries that they had been having problems with prior to the storm," he said.
"Also, while stressing the need to take a cautious approach to permitting fishing activities to resume, they pushed management policies that favored the recreational rather than the small-scale commercial sectors of south Florida's fisheries."
McGoodwin's research focuses on fishing people and cultures, the human dynamics that drive resource-management policies, and the impacts of climatic and global change. He has conducted research in Alaska, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, Mexico, Newfoundland, Portugal, Spain and the West Indies.
His writings include the 1990 book, "Crisis in the World's Fisheries: People, Problems, and Policies." He co-edited "Folk Management in the World's Fisheries: Lessons for Modern Fisheries Management" in 1994 and published "Understanding the Cultures of Fishing Communities: A Key to Fisheries Management and Food Security" for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2001.