The State and Small-Scale Fisheries in Puerto Rico (review)

Using the tools of ethnography, Ricardo Pérez illuminates the lives of the fishers and fishing households of three small fishing communities on the south coast of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. He situates them in the context of the specifics of Puerto Rican history, policy, and environment.

The beginning chapters take on various theoretical issues in the anthropology of fishermen. For example, are people who fish for a livelihood deserving of a special socio-economic category, in a set that might include "hunter-gatherers," "peasants," and "industrial workers"? Is the level of risk and uncertainty so high, are their economic patterns and social relations so different, is their relationship to natural resources so distinctive that they should be thought of as special? Pérez says no, the Puerto Rican fishermen he knows are like other "small-scale commodity producers" and should be analyzed as such. His main point is that as a form of economic organization (rather than just labor process) fishing may be seen as an alternative to capitalist exploitation and domination. This approach follows other recent analyses of fishing in Puerto Rico which have identified the culture of fishing as "therapy" in the context of insecure and difficult ways of participating in industrial livelihoods.

The focal thesis is that Puerto Rico's small-scale fishers are small-scale and poor because they have few opportunities to create and accumulate capital. State intervention reduced their reliance on middlemen, but it simply increased their dependence on government assistance, finding work in other sectors of the economy, and labor migration. Pérez presents information on the history of development and modernization processes and policies in Puerto Rico that shows how inconsistent and ineffective they have been for the fisheries, in the context of policies oriented toward industrialization. He untangles the web of commonwealth and federal government programs and agencies and briefly introduces us to the post-1970s system of fisheries management.

Another contribution of the book is its comparison of the communities studied, using a household survey, the discourses of people interviewed, and other information. One of the communities has a relatively successful fishery, mostly diving for lobster and conch; success is linked to a viable fishermen's association. Another has a history of failed collective action and is much in decline, and the third is one with no experience of government programs, such as supporting fishermen's associations, and hardly any real involvement in fishing. This analysis is important as a vivid reminder of the perils of generalization without knowing the specifics of people's lives and institutions, even if, as in this ethnographic study, much relies on "fragmented personal memories." At places Pérez gives considerable space to synopses of research among small-scale fishers in other parts of the Americas, particularly St. Lucia and Brazil. He shows that in their discourses and actions, the fishers of the south coast of Puerto Rico view industrialization as an ambiguous terrain, promising so much but destroying much as well, including the marine environment.

I highly recommend the book, with the qualification that this conflict between "development" and "conservation" deserves more attention. At first, Pérez claims that the failure of efforts to "modernize" small-scale fishing was not due to ecological constraints but to the lack of government support. However, the rest of the book includes many references to the fact that fish and shellfish stocks around Puerto Rico are sparse and declining, and more specifically that the poor returns from fishing are a major reason for failure of development programs: fishermen could not catch enough to pay off loans and make new investments. That apart, the book is a valuable addition to the literature on coastal fishing communities of the Americas.