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In a remote and beautiful part of county Sligo in
North West Ireland, I stood in a low-roofed insulated building
looking into one of several dozen large fish growing tanks.
Thousands of fish called Arctic Charr are swimming around and around
growing by the day. Cold, natural, fresh spring water is pouring in
from the mountain. It is circulated, filtered and aerated. Bill
Carty, the owner, casts a handful of feed pellets into one of the
tanks and it churns in a feeding frenzy as this future source of
high protein food gobble up their meal. This sustainable form of
healthy fish farming has to be the way of the future as fish stocks
in oceans and rivers are dangerously declining, some species are
already extinct and others are on the edge due to excessive
unsustainable fishing. There are more and more hungry people to
feed.
Last week Irish fishermen staged
a public protest in Dublin and gave away fish and threw more into
the river Liffy to highlight their protest at the strict European
Union restrictions on the number of boats allowed to put to sea and
the tonnage of fish they are allowed to catch. The price of fish is
soaring along with everything else.
The rising price of diesel has
diminished their earnings and more bans on the use of destructive
fishing equipment curtail their catch but protect the breeding
habitat of sea grass and coral reefs. What has diminished the fish
populations in the once teeming oceans is water pollution and the
deadly destructive fishing practices such as the bottom trawl that
destroys the corals and the use of drift nets—”walls of
death”—as they are called.
The EU bans are saving several
species of fish from extinction and making large-scale ocean fishing
unprofitable. Decades of irresponsible destructive fishing practices
created millions of tons of “bycatch” fish, shrimps and crabs
and other sea creatures which were thrown back into the sea dead and
put some of them on the endangered species list.
The Japanese whaling and shark
fishing is condemned worldwide as destructive and cruel as they
harpoon the gentle creatures and drag them half alive on to factory
ships and slaughter them on board. They only cut off the shark’s
fins and throw back the wounded creature to die in a horrible death.
These destructive practices have given the fishing industry a bad
name. All the more then is the future in sustainable and healthy
organic fish farming, as I witnessed in the Cool Spring Arctic Charr
fish farm at Cloonacool last week. Bill’s wife Mari Johnston
cooked one fresh Arctic Charr in the nearby kitchen and it was one
of the most delicious fish I have ever eaten. All the more am I
convinced that the development of the tilapia fishponds at our Preda
organic farm in Zambales is the right and sensible thing to do.
The greed of money-mad moguls is
one of the driving forces behind the massive rise in the cost of
food commodities worldwide. Wealthy traders hoard their stocks
forcing prices to soar beyond the ability of the poor to buy food.
Since 1992 to the present, the price of rice has risen 74 percent,
soya bean by 87 percent and wheat by an astounding 130 percent. Corn
is up 31 percent in the same period.
Rich nations give their agri-corporations
and wealthy farmers massive subsidies prompting massive
overproduction and the dumping of the surplus in developing nations,
killing off local farming and preventing food security. Rich nations
create import taxes that prevent the farmers in Africa from selling
their lower-priced quality cotton and other products to the rich
nations. Many are facing famine as global warming, created by the
refusal of wealthy industrialists and politicians to curb CO2
factory emissions, and nations like India and China refusing to cut
back on fossil fuel consumption. This creates droughts, massive
typhoons, crop failures and destruction. Director General Jacques
Diouf of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in Rome last
week that an additional 820 million hungry people have been added to
the world since 1996. In Somalia alone there are 2.6 million people,
35 percent of the nation, facing a food crises; none can afford to
buy food. The global injustice of this imbalance in the sharing of
the planet’s resources is the greatest shame of all humanity.
preda@info.com.ph
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