Review: Local Trails, Lecture 6

From Our Grandfathers' Sea to the Sea of Future Generations

I was born and raised in Busan, a city of the sea, yet I never knew how fishing and fisheries in Busan, in Korea or around the world had developed and been sustained. It would be more honest to say I was never interested. It was not where I made my living, and I thought of the sea as something always given, like 'air.' Or perhaps the media also played a part, presenting the sea and the work done there as something that simply exists, or 'introducing' it as an 'extreme job,' making it hard to feel it was 'my' world. Just as we never need to be aware of air, or as we keep our distance from places portrayed negatively, perhaps I had been made to always stand one step away from the sea and the work it supports.

That is why this lecture's stories about the development of Korean and world fisheries, and about the people focused on sustainable fishing, were all the more interesting. But 'interest' born from an unclosed distance from the sea and its work did not last long. I had always scoffed at hateful labels for Busan like 'the old man and the sea' and rumors that cities 'fall in the order the cherry blossoms bloom,' but the reality of an ever-aging fishing industry became 'real' to me. There are many programs for fishers, yet hearing that almost no one has moved into fishing villages since the 2000s went beyond bitterness — it told me that nearly every coastal city is facing a crisis of reproduction.

We must not accept the failure to 'reproduce' the sea and its livelihoods as simply one industry disappearing. People talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but the collapse of 'fishing' is no different from an urgent signal that the reproduction of our own lives — in Busan or in Korea — is also in crisis. If we cannot leave this crisis alone, it seemed worth looking at Western fisheries, whose structure is built around the rights of Indigenous peoples, unlike Korea's structure of subsistence fishing by local residents. The very complex economic and demographic problems facing Korean fisheries had not occurred there, at least, and Indigenous rights indicators were being upheld based on international sustainable fisheries certification standards.

In short, it was a fishing system made up of:

1. Recognizing marine resources as common property →
2. Allocating individual quotas at a level that meets the maximum sustainable yield →
3. Trading

It looks simple, but this system is said to play a positive role in everything from protecting resources to safety and sustaining livelihoods through fishing. There would be very difficult hurdles to adopting it, but it seemed worth trying. As the title of this lecture says, to transform 'our grandfathers' sea' into 'the sea of future generations,' it is crucial to devise institutional solutions to the forces shrinking the fishing industry and to support its sustainability. In other words, we must recognize that a fisheries crisis puts the lives of future generations at stake.