Wealth Extraction

When you think of wealth extraction I suspect that gold mining or oil and gas wells covering the country side. But to better understand it let’s read the definition first:

Wealth destruction - the process of extracting the most valuable elements of an ecosystem for human benefit at the expense of everything else.

For me that includes industrial and artisanal fishing. We experience each first hand at the United Fishing Agency in Honolulu which sells all fish caught by the US fleet in the Pacific and in the Sonoran Mexico town of El Gofito where fishermen uses gill nets to catch tons of corvina for sale in Mexico City.

The efficiency of each fishery is incredible. Everything they catch is sold for food. In the case of the blue marlin in the picture on the right they are sold for $1.00/lb and made into cat food. Big eye tuna can sell for $20/lb and make their way to the West Coast sushi restaurants overnight.

There is an increeasing effort by the NMFS (NOAA) to increase the commercial catch of fish. The US imported over $24B of seafood in 2021. The US government’s effort to lower that number has resulting in severe overfishing or at least setting catch limits in the us to MSY or maximum sustainable yield. That’s the number where we go right to the edge of catch and hope nothing else (like climate temps increasing) don’t screw up the fish populations. Extraction by definition means taking all you cn as fast as you can. We can only hope that land-based aquaculture or lab grown seafood will take the pressure of the wild stocks not just in the us but around the globe. There is so much money in play here that even the biggest foundations struggle to find innovative ways to lower the catch rates. I suspect the future lies in innovation rather than negotiation.