ith the passing of time, the South Asian
Tsunami of 2004 will fade into memory, life will go on, as it must. Thankfully,
the world’s People have shown that this disaster can become a focal point of a
new way of thinking. Solidarity among all of Humanity, beginning at the village
level. We can see Spirit emerging among the devastation today.
Fishermen and local villagers pulling together, to get boats back on the ocean so the fishermen can bring the harvest home. No one is asking for the owner of the boat to pay for such help, he could not, but all are hoping that his catch will be abundant.
At this propitious time, we should focus on a long term solution to the problems of poverty that still haunt such beautiful places as those islands and peninsulas that lie in the Asian Sea. Most of the food supply must come from the sea, but the sea is overfished.
Deep water species have been decimated almost to extinction, by overfishing using commercial factory ships that leave little behind. The traditional solution has been to allocate quotas or to otherwise limit the catch. This will solve the problem for a while, but will still leave a wake of hunger behind.
What we need to do is to farm the oceans in such a way that the supply of healthy adult deep water fish is ample. We need to let more of the millions of eggs (fry) produced by the females grow into adulthood, by farming the breeding process out in deep water.
This has never been done because those who reap (the fishermen) have not sown (the fry breeders). This is an economic problem, but one that has a systemic solution. We need to set up a global compensation system sponsored, by the UN, that will allow those who fish to pay for the fry that have been "seeded" by the farmers in other waters, possibly years earlier.
No, we do not need to tag every fish with an implanted RF chip! Those consumers in the rich nations will pay a UN tax whenever they buy fish in the supermarket, and that tax will be used to pay the expenses (along with a profit margin) to the ocean farmers. Fish prices will go down eventually, once the supply has reached a balance with the demand. I first posted this idea on the internet on my vantari.com website in 1996, in the article titled Harvesting the Oceans.
The fish fry would be trawled out in micro mesh nets, and allowed to feed on the best and most cost effective food, until such time as they reach enough maturity to survive in the open seas. At that point, the net is opened, and the entire catch is sent out "graze" for a few years in deep water, in those waters that suit the species best. Eventually, they would be harvested using todays’ highly efficient methods.
Pollution can be controlled by simply having the nets take on a funnel shape, and letting the droppings escape off the bottom of the funnel sleeve as the mother ship moves along. Research will show which is the best method, once the "numbers" (funding problems) have been solved.
By dramatically increasing the supply of deep water fish, without regard to ownership, we can solve much of the world’s hunger. This requires the implementaion of a global compensation system, a system best administered by the UN.
Informal fishermen in developing nations would not participate in the UN’s Fisheries program, they simply would benefit from an abundant catch, which they would presumably sell for lower prices in the local open air market, solving the hunger problem at the source.
The Asian Tsunami of 2004 can be a great opportunity to test the viability of this new UN Fisheries system. If we can spend some of the allocated funds on developing and deploying "farmer" ships which would breed the fry in the Asian Sea, we can monitor the success of the fry as they grow into adulthood, and find out under which parameters the process becomes sustainable, and the extent to which it solves the food shortage in the area.
May provide eternal peace to those who died in this disaster, and bless all of the survivors, by granting them strength, patience and understanding. This natural disaster is caused by Vishnu’s natural forces that are not in the faculties of Brahma – the Life Force. We must all respect these forces, and live on as best we can.
Atlanta, GA
January 5, 2005
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