Big Fish Little Fish
When Supply Chains Are Binding
Trade Based On An Offer One Can’t Refuse Is Not Trade
As social animals, we congregate. Unlike almost all, when humans do it’s not just for strength of numbers. We share resources amongst ourselves and the distribution strengthens the group. This goes for food to the hungry, tools to the able-bodied, ideas shared to all.
Altruism drives sharing, but at it’s base there’s usually a reciprocal nature to it. Trading… it’s what’s tempting when two parties have dissimilar offerings of mutually perceived value.
The key though is in the “mutual”. Coveting something and making arrangements to abscond with it is something different. With imbalanced parties, or when affected partners don’t get a say in the exchange, trading is more accurately termed “thievery”.
The New Yorker’s journalists recently shone a light on a manifestation of our trade nature, revealing ugly complications when there’s a mismatch. In this latest example from West Africa, China’s presence the Gambia is raising profound questions about African autonomy, foreign hegemony, and the stewardship of the environment in regions of the world it is functionally impossible to defend.
The past few hundred years are rife with examples of state actors applying the concentrated power of money based on broad demand for commodities (say, the demand for protein to fuel aquaculture enterprises), which drive a mismatched export arrangement. We’ll speak of China-Gambia concerns, but don’t limit yourself to thinking this is specific history.
For instance, this article is insufficient arena to unpack the effect of export-driven sugar cane farming in Hawai’i prior to U.S. annexation, or to reconcile how the on the heels of that annexation came the founding of the progenitor of what is now the Dole company.
When you snake through attractive mounds of exotic fruits at the entry of your supermarket, take a moment to remember that multinational fruit companies are the industry from which the sadly observant economic term “banana republic” grew, denoting a particularly distasteful flavour of exploitation.
While Hawai’i is as any example a multifaceted one, it’s appropriate as a reference: a faraway public’s demand for product, represented by money, concentrated on a locality, influence brought to bear through the forces of law and politics, forever altering fertile lands and their people.
But back to the Gambian case. Spoiler alert if you’ve not seen the short-form New Yorker documentary or read deep into West African regional articles the past few years: China has set up factories at the Gambian coast to process hundreds of tonnes of locally-caught fish into protein pellets to swell fish farms back in China. Insult to injury, the Chinese-farmed fish are allegedly sometimes shipped back into the Gambia for sale to Gambians. Legal and ethical pitfalls abound.
The jobs provided Gambians are few. The factories are foreign owned and much of the work is mechanised. Furthermore, the conditions, particularly on boats, can be appalling.
There are rules protecting the workers but they are lax and there is low incentive for policy makers to enforce them. With a preposterous 24,000x difference in GDP as purchasing power between a country at the top versus one nearing the bottom of the world rankings, it’s hardly contentious to contemplate the power of bribes of Gambian officials as an easy hedge against any pesky bureaucracy.
Once these financial arrangements are in play the local citizenry’s ability to manage upwards to get the Gambia’s leaders to represent them are pale. Ditto the disregard of the environment. Rubber-stamping zero-environmental-review permits for factory operation near the shoreline? Unlikely to be challenged. Chinese-sponsored fishing craft plying the local waters with abandon? With near zero possibility of oversight or enforcement, why not?
So here we are with no comforting routes to Gambian self-determination. Do we look away as China fish out the local waters, muscle out the small-boat fishermen, then sell them back marked-up, imported fish fattened from the Gambia’s losses? Isn’t that concession that the Gambia’s population (which at only two million would barely crack the top 50 largest Chinese cities), have been reduced to being citizens of a de facto suburb servicing a foreign industrial outreach? Ugh.
I’ll cheer the idealistic rogues of Sea Shepard’s African campaigns on whose boat the intrepid journalist Ian Urbina sailed, but can’t see a lot of options before the fish stocks are drawn so low the Gambia is criminally beholden to offshore forces for its own nutrition. The Gambia is nutritionally impoverished already with a low-protein diet. A foreign actor taking control of an important and potentially sustainable source and a.) making it expensive and b.) wrecking any micro-economy of coastal fishmongers, is galling.
Are there any options then? Well, with the introduction of large-vessel fishing pressure up and down the greater coastline the fishmongers are probably stuffed. Conceding that, an unappealing idea based in the some of the ugly but effective elements of capitalism is to install a big competitor such as a European or US firm’s fishing operation in an attempt to compel a more balanced, and therefore more manageable playing field by the Gambia. With no political value to the country — but clearly an economic one if China is already capitalizing on it — this seems the most probable.
The Gambia’s government would get to arbitrate two suitors of its fisheries slowing the corruption inherent in the untenable single-state access now. In time, one could imagine better fisheries management along the entire western coast, where quotas and pricing concerns are bubbled up to more abstracted, international consortium levels. One holds hope a fisheries scientist or two are consulted, and NGO’s such as Greenpeace, who already have the current situation on record, may provide views onto the economic effects of centralized policy decisions, views making transparent what needs viewing.
The annoying aspect of the above is the insinuation that bureaucracy ever solves anything.
The truly dark aspect of the above is it’s an echo of the paternalistic European colonialism in West Africa from the 1800s.
Colonialism arguably inhibited the natural development and progress of the region for the next 100 years, leaving the area with arbitrary and weak European-defined shapes such as the Gambia, vulnerable for ascendant nations to return and experiment anew with the reach of their power.
Our focus here begins with the diminishing of little fish, but as we can see they are inextricably linked to the little fisherman making a living fishing and providing food from a little boat from a little country.
It’s inarguable that Gambian water’s shoals should be firstly protected and managed by the Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau people. But let’s be realists: we can’t count on that.
It’s not that states haven’t before been unduly influenced by wealthy faraway lands — Rome taught this lesson well. What’s changed is the ebbing of previously requisite military factors in negotiations (think Teddy Roosevelt’s big-stick diplomacy) coupled with today’s economic speed.
What these trends allow is multinational corporations — no military but plenty of socio-financial reach —to play alongside governments. The facility with which a powerful entity may, with little ventured, test modern forms of ancient impulse of money and supply chains is concerning. It’s not going to regress.
We’re going to have to take care where and how the big players flex their global reach lest we watch the smaller ends of the international scene lose what little they have to power plays. Lesser states will lose self-determination while the environment (arguably everyone’s environment — and if you doubt this communal concept consider your own reaction to Brazil’s blasé-seeming response to the fires ravaging their rainforest in 2019 and 2020) suffers from the vagaries of whatever latest deal was cut between a multinational and a local government du jour.
It’s meddlesome but perhaps the only route towards elevating the issues to a greater, more objective audience. It doesn’t take elevated faith in average people to think them a better judge of what’s fair in the Gambia than the self-serving politicians and foreign companies exploiting it now.
