“The Sea Is Empty” Fishers, Migrants, and a Watery Humanism

Chapter Two “The Sea Is Empty” Fishers, Migrants, and a Watery Humanism Elspeth Probyn “The sea is empty” (cited in Jacobs 2017): I remember thinking this some years ago snorkeling in the Mediterranean off Sicily. Tourists prodded at a poor lone octopus, seemingly the only life in what looked like a barren moonscape of an ocean. Of course, the sea wasn’t empty. It was filled with memories and material shards of history—of shipwrecks and bodies. On October 3, 2013, one of the worst migrant shipwrecks occurred on the coast of Lampedusa off Sicily when a boat carrying 500 passengers capsized leaving only 155 survivors. Dead bodies wash up on shores. Years prior to this tragedy, in 2006, thirty thousand migrants managed to reach the Canary Islands—with some seven thousand people who drowned trying to make the crossing (International Organization for Migration [IOM] 2018). The lucky ones arrived on Fuerte- ventura, described in travel brochures as “a veritable oasis on the Atlantic. White and luminous, the island boasts huge stretches of golden shiny beaches washed by crystal-clear blue waters that will make you feel as if you were in paradise.”1 They came to the Canaries in cayucos or pateras or pirogues, one thousand miles across open ocean in small wooden boats held together with rusty nails (McAllister and Prentice 2018), migrants fleeing poverty. That poverty has different roots but a major one is the lack of, or more properly, the theft of fish. West Africa has become a global hub of illegal fishing, losing an estimated $1.3 billion a year to the trade, according to a report from the Africa Progress Panel, with Senegal alone accounting for $300 mil- lion—around 2 percent of its gross domestic product (McAllister and Prentice 2018). China’s “distant-water fishing” fleet (e.g., those that fish outside of their two-hundred-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone [EEZ]) is a prime culprit, which targets West African nations; their vessels report only an esti- mated 8 percent of their catch (Jacobs 2017). 27 Book 1.indb 27 1/27/20 12:39 PM 28 Elspeth Probyn A perfect storm: the phrase is overused but perhaps appropriate here. Climate change and overfishing are creating the conditions that send mostly young men from the Global South on rickety boats to try to reach Europe. These are fishers made into migrants by global unsustainable fishing policies. These are all matters that solicit us, call to us to care. They tend, however, to be used to unilaterally interpellate, and constitute, communities of care. The physical plight of the ocean has, of course, risen to the surface in relatively recent times, propelled in part by lush documentaries that combine beautiful photography of marinescapes and marine beings mangled in plastic. Over- fishing has become framed in a cruel scenario that sees commercial fishers painted as the rapists of the sea, and lauds a so-called ethics of refusing to eat fish. As I have graphically argued elsewhere (Probyn 2016), there is a dumbing down of caring about the ocean and her inhabitants. There I argued against a simplifying of the ocean, and urged more attention to the complexity of relations within and of the more-than-human marine. Here I change gears to consider care through the prism of the unequal positioning of the Global North and South in terms of fishing and oceans. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s (2018) figuration of “offshore humanism,” I consider how the visceral prox- imities of (over)fishing, clandestine migration, and the United Nations Con- vention on the Law of the Seas inadvertently set in motion a spatialization of the seas that places coastal nations of the Global South at risk of losing their precious more-than-human marine resources. “The sea is empty”: the words are from Zhu Delong, a seventy-five-year- old fisherman in eastern China. In the economic opening of China from the 1970s, much of China’s development was on its coastline. As Christopher Carolin puts it, “[T]he local marine environment paid a staggering price in terms of pollution, overharvesting, and critical habitat loss” (2015, 136). The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that “some 50 percent of China’s total offshore ocean area is considered severely polluted or unfishable” (Carolin 2015, 136). This has irretrievably damaged China’s domestic fishing industries with 40 to 50 percent unemployment in regional fishing centers in China. In 2013, Tabitha Grace Mallory wrote that the expansion of China’s distant water fishing was “currently driven more by employment concerns than by food needs” (2013, 100). In the years since, the rise of the middle-class desire for seafood in China has further added to pressures on the world’s fish stock. Of the many phenomena that unite fishers across the world, the bleak present and even bleaker future with fewer and fewer fish is the most salient. Climate change drives fish stock away from their usual habitats as the wa- ters grow warmer, and they move either up north or down south toward the 1/27/20 12:39 PM “The Sea Is Empty” 29 poles. Overexploitation is the other common factor but it is one that needs to be differentiated. It is an abstraction that masks the vast differences between small-scale fishers and the industrial trawlers that comb the seas, often en- gaged in the illegal, unregulated, and unreported theft of fish. As fish grow ever-scarcer and smaller, many of these gargantuan ships are sieving the waters for small fish that are now known as “industrial grade forage fish” (in the Fishmeal and Fish Oil Organization’s2 terminology) capturing the fish that are the staple diet of the poor to be ground into fishmeal. These ships are part of the 3,400-strong Chinese distant-water fishing fleet, out for fish to feed China’s massive aquaculture industry. It is estimated that the annual demand for fish meal in China is 2.5 million tons. As Zhang Chun puts it, “China is catching more fish to feed other fish than the Japanese catch to eat themselves” (2017). To put that into perspective, Japan is one of the major global fisheries. In this chapter, I want to connect the conditions of possibility that render the loss of fish and the loss of human life as intertwined outcomes. The old Chinese fisherman on the shore haunts me as he contemplates the near- complete devastation of China’s domestic fisheries and coast. Does he know that China is killing off the fisheries of developing nations far away? Does he care? News images of “clandestine marine Senegalese migrants” (Ifekwun- igwe 2013) who are un- or under-employed fishers forced to try to enter Eu- rope traveling by fishing boat are seared into my mind. Their livelihoods shat- tered, their possible deaths will destroy families and communities who had hoped for remittances. The Chinese fisherman and the Senegalese migrants are united by the lack of fish, the lack of their livelihoods and ways of life. Moustapha Balde, a young Senegalese man, puts it succinctly: “Foreigners complain about African migrants coming to their countries, but they have no problem coming to our waters and stealing all our fish” (in Jacobs 2017). As Matteo Raffaelli, the director of the recent documentary Mareyeurs (2017) about the plight of young Senegalese fishers, states bluntly, “it is wrong to separate the issue of migration from that of sustainable resource use.”3 Many are the victims of what Paul Zeleza calls “diasporas of structural adjustment” forced on developing nations by the World Bank and other international bod- ies (cited in Ifekwunigwe 2013, 219). As Jeanne Koopman recounts: In 1985, Senegal signed a structural adjustment agreement with the World Bank that compelled the government to cut back on services to small farmers. In 1986, the government stopped subsidizing fertilizer and fuel for irrigated rice produc- tion. Farmers’ input costs jumped from a quarter to a third of the harvest. In 1987, the government stopped providing seasonal credit. This forced plot own- ers to send more male dependents out of the villages so that non-farm earnings could help pay the rising cost of inputs. (2009, 265) 1/27/20 12:39 PM 30 Elspeth Probyn Many of these men headed for the coast to try their luck at fishing, adding to the already crowded inshore and the depletion of fish. Faced with the empty seas, they dream of heading for El Dorado over the seas. OFFSHORE In Wolof, the local Senegalese language, Barça or Barsaax is simple rhyming slang that illustrates the far from simple journey men are willing to embark on to reach Europe. It means “Barcelona or die” and is an apt description of the sacrifice thousands of men make for their families.4 This cry echoes with what Paul Gilroy refers to as “offshore humanity”— those vulnerable, infrahumans torn away from land and stranded offshore (2018, 18). This a gendered situation: it is overwhelmingly men who leave but when the young men leave, they leave behind mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, and wives—who may have helped find the money for the jour- ney. Yayi Bayam Diof, the mother of a son who perished at sea, has formed an association of grieving mothers. As she bluntly puts it, “[T]his is . . . to remind all of those who say ‘Barça or Barsaax’ (Barcelona or death) that we, the women will have to carry the burden of their untimely deaths, day by day” (cited in Ifekwunigwe 2013, 224). They have lost sons, and may be in debt from paying for their unsuccessful journeys. They may have been depending on their sons to send back money. Senegal is the fourth largest recipient of remittance monies in sub-Saharan Africa. Fatou Cisse (n.d.) writes that “the World Bank (2010) estimates that remittances sent through formal chan- nels increased from US$344 million in 2002 to US$1,288 million in 2008.” Families need the remittance from offshore migrants, and, as we will see, the country trades its fishing resources for remittance. Such is the pressure that migrants who have been deported back to Senegal will make the journey again and again, often without telling their families. In Luna Vives’s study, they told her they were “‘ashamed’ to face their families, and in particular their mothers” who had taken loans to pay for their sons’ trip (Vives 2017, 190). In 2015, Gilroy gave the Antipode talk to the Royal Geographical Soci- ety and the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) annual conference, where he expanded on the figure of the offshore migrant. It was an incisive and tough call to geography, and cultural theory more generally. He punc- tured what he called “high-altitude theorising” that under the “enthusiasm for the Anthropocene . . . must be appreciated as part of the contemporary crisis of radical thought and imagination” (2018, 10). 1/27/20 12:39 PM “The Sea Is Empty” 31 Gilroy is, of course, one of the great forces behind British black cultural studies and ethnic and African-American studies, and a key analyst of raci- ology. Gilroy uses theory, literature, histories, and ideas with erudition and deadly grace. I sat in the auditorium thrilled by the span of Gilroy’s erudition, his politi- cal sensibility, and his insistence on a “lowly watery orientation” (2018, 10). Gilroy’s grasp of history and politics is legendary, and the cut and thrust of his argument against much of Anthropocene thinking was electrifying, es- pecially perhaps in a room full of scholars gathered under the conference’s rubric of “Geographies of the Anthropocene” (Gilroy 2018). Gilroy’s argument in the published version of that talk (Gilroy 2018) ex- tends many of the themes he has developed over the years. For instance, one can feel the pull of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which has been an im- portant source for Gilroy as well as for the venerated Trinidadian writer and activist C. L. R. James who has long influenced Gilroy’s thinking. As Gilroy writes, “For James, Melville’s relationship to the sea and its global commerce had enabled him to see the future of capitalism more clearly than any other writer of that time” (2018, 6). James was in prison on Ellis Island, awaiting deportation when he wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953). He variously described himself as a Trotskyist, Leninist, and humanist-Marxist, but he saw in Moby Dick a cutting indictment of American capitalism. We can hear James’s inspi- ration in his description of how Melville brought together disparate themes: Nature, technology, the community of men, science and knowledge, literature and ideas are fused into a new humanism, opening a vast expansion of human capacity and human achievement. (James, cited in Gilroy 2010, 623–24) It is clear that Gilroy’s insistence on building a new vision of humanism is deeply inflected by James. Over the years, Gilroy has progressed this project through several books and articles. As he says elsewhere, “I’ve got very much drawn into thinking about the technological processes, objects and systems that mediate our relationship to the constitution of racialized bodies” (cited in Bell 1999, 28). In his Antipode lecture, the “planetary humanism” inspired by Fanon and Césaire becomes an “offshore humanism”: My hope is that it can be excavated from the unique conceptual space in which combative antiracist humanism has repeatedly confronted colonialism, racism and nationalism . . . with the performative, infrahumanizing potency of that troubling neofascist and racist rhetoric [on the issue of migrants] in mind, we should be prepared to ask what we might now imagine to distinguish ourselves, 1/27/20 12:39 PM 32 Elspeth Probyn our vulnerability and our precarious relationship with one another as human beings? (Gilroy 2018, 16) Gilroy’s article recursively engages with the case of Antonis Deligiorgis, the Greek soldier who rose to fame on the front pages of British newspapers as the hero who saved twenty drowning Syrian and Eritrean migrants in one of the many boat arrivals to Greece in the summer of 2015. The UN’s Interna- tional Organization for Migration (IOM) states that 3,771 died in attempts to enter Europe via the Mediterranean Sea in 2015 (IOM 2018). The vast major- ity in 2015 were from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, many of whom traveled to Greece from Turkey on inflatable boats. In an astonishing feat of logistics, the nongovernmental organization United for Intercultural Action compiles lists of deaths since 1993. From 1993 to May 5, 2018, 34,361 died trying to get to Europe. The Guardian recently republished their “List” along with an infographic that represents those 34,361 deaths as a sea of red and blue dots, which include the 27,000 drowned. The “List” counts fifty-six pages of tightly framed tables that include columns for names, destination, cause of death, and source of information. For example: 29/04/1819 N. N. (1 man) Africa 16 drowned in shipwreck off Cap Falcon, Oran (DZ) on way to Spain; 3 missing, 19 rescuedObsAlgerie/Caminando/EFE/Réf/ QUOTI/IOM (www.unitedagainstracism.org) Gilroy carefully describes Deligiorgis’s action to save all those he could from drowning that day in Crete. He offers Deligiorgis’s example as a spring- board for a wider thinking about how “his bravery could have something to teach the rest of the EU about primal, humanitarian responsibility to and for others less fortunate than oneself” (2018, 18). Acknowledging the pitfalls of focusing on one man, Gilroy (2018, 18) argues that “there are other things going on in this shoreline drama”: Deligiorgis and the people he saved were all soaking wet. The rescuers had to battle against relentless waves that “kept coming and coming.” Their salty saturation communicates something of the way that being human is transformed when the solidity of territory is left behind. We are afforded a glimpse of vulner- able, offshore humanity that might, in turn, yield an offshore humanism. (18) Of course this was but one situation, and the pages and pages of names of those who have died trying to flee catastrophic circumstances at home can dwarf this lone heroic figure. But Gilroy’s tactic is to draw attention to “small acts” (Gilroy 1993) of humaneness which might spark a “creative re- enchantment of the human” (Gilroy 2018, 19). 1/27/20 12:39 PM “The Sea Is Empty” 33 Perhaps because of his less than laudatory comments about the state of An- thropocentric thinking, Gilroy was roundly attacked. Andrew Baldwin didn’t wait until the talk was published before he went on the attack: That Gilroy locates his new humanism in the spontaneous act of rescue is laud- able; recalibrating what it means to be human amid the tragedies of contempo- rary migration in the Eastern Mediterranean is a pressing task. I am, however, less convinced that this humanism can be applied uncritically to the plight of climate refugees, our yet-to-come Other par excellence, without at the same time giving full heft to the colonial and racial histories that mark its body. (Baldwin 2017, 301) It seems astonishing that this critic—a white, Canadian geographer based in the United Kingdom—could not be aware of Gilroy’s continuous contri- butions to new ways of reading “colonial and racial histories,” and gleaning from them the seeds to rework the politics of the present. As Sindre Bangstad puts it: Gilroy’s work speaks to practically anyone interested in the vexed questions relating to “race,” racism and nationalism in our time, and offers a trenchant multi-pronged critique of various forms of essentialism from the point of view of an engaged postcolonial scholar long committed to anti-racism and anti- colonialism and the furthering of multicultural cultures of conviviality. (Bang- stad 2019) Perhaps what got to this academic was Gilroy’s commanding call to replace the high theory wrangling about human exceptionalism with a “de- termination to destroy the bitter stratification of that species along the lines specified by race” (2018, 11). I admit that I squirmed at times during Gilroy’s talk. The manuscript of my book, Eating the Ocean, was trundling its way through publication. And it was much too late to rectify my superficial engagements with race. I could but blush inwardly at my obsession with “more-than-human fish” (Probyn 2016) ignoring that the entire history and present of “eating the ocean” is riven by role of “the infra-human”: “the slaves from many parts of Africa who were exchanged for rum, cloth, salt-cod and other commodities” (Gilroy 2018, 5). How had I avoided the fact that the “belligerent, oceanic operations [of the economic infrastructure of Atlantic modernity] were possible only because those vulnerable people were, and often still are, judged to belong to nature rather than to history, society, or culture”? (Gilroy 2018, 5). In what follows I want to consider how the degradation of fishing results in “clandestine migration.” This is to consider how some boat migrants are bound up in the local manifestation of global politics and problems around 1/27/20 12:39 PM 34 Elspeth Probyn fishing rights. Climate change exacerbates, of course, the precarious state of oceans and fish. But less nebulous forces are also stripping the ocean bare. GUEDJ AMOUL BANKASS (“THE SEA HAS NO BORDER”) (BEATLEY AND EDWARDS 2018) Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe’s account of the Africans “dying to go to Europe” places them as “the latest geopolitical manifestations along the intercon- nected historical continuum of transatlantic slavery and mercantile imperial- ism” (2013, 218). She connects Africans “crammed like sardines into vessels and transported across hostile waters” within a history that spans “more than five centuries and [that is] still unfolding” (2013, 220, 229). This has pro- duced and continues to reproduce a “Living Africa [as] vast, heterogeneous, complex, and contradictory and thus can be partially . . . reduced to the lowest common denominators of AIDS, corruption, tribalism, wars, ethnic cleansing, poverty, famine, and political violence” (2013, 229). Ifekwunigwe places today’s young Senegalese men, these “clandestine boat migrants,” as part of this historical present, but not as “synonymous with the inhumanity of transatlantic slavery” (2013, 229). As she puts it, African slaves “were un- desired but desirable commodities” whereas present-day clandestine African migrants are “unwanted and ‘officially’ unnecessary” (229). In Spain, as that country’s unemployment rate soared there were fewer and fewer jobs that the Spanish wouldn’t do—the previously unwanted, badly paid, and insalubrious ones that Senegalese migrants had been happy to take. In 2005 and 2006, the preferred route of Senegalese men trying to get to Europe was by sea: The distance between Dakar, Senegal’s capital, and the Canary Islands, is 938 miles. In the flat-bottomed wooden boats of 14 to 18 meters this trip takes be- tween five to eight days, depending on weather conditions, the navigation skills of the captain and the quality of the boat. The boats in general have no roof and hold a capacity of 50 to 80 persons, depending on the smuggler and the size of the boat. (Poeze 2013, 25) The boats would have traveled along the Canary Current, a wind-driven sur- face current that unites Senegal and the Canary Islands. This current causes upwellings where the nutrient-dense cooler waters are brought to the surface. This is what makes the coast of western African so fecund with marine life, and provided the once plentiful fish for Senegalese fishers. From Poeze’s research, Ifekwunigwe quotes a man who attempted this route: 1/27/20 12:39 PM “The Sea Is Empty” 35 We were on the open sea for eight days. The fourth day, water started to enter the boat. At that time, food and water was also finished . . . the fifth day, we encountered a big European ship that was fishing for tuna. They gave us bread and milk and a little bit of water, but they refused to take us with them. (cited in Ifekwunigwe 2013, 229) What tragic irony: a large industrial tuna boat passes by the noses of for- mer fishermen in their small pirogues, men who could have only dreamed of catching such a valuable fish. The fish they would have previously caught was the small sardinella, the staple of Senegalese diets. But now foreign- based industrial fishing take this once plentiful fish meal and grind it into fishmeal in the many Chinese-owned factories in neighboring Mauritania (Tacon and Metian 2009). This small fish was especially important for the forty thousand women processors who used to cure the fish for sale across the entire country. This labor-intensive production and trade of low-quality fish products is crucial to the food security of not only Senegal but much of western Africa (Béné, Lawton, and Allison 2010). LINES IN THE SEA The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is a key player in the changing fortunes of fishing nations. It is hard to believe it was only in 1982 that this global convention set out the jurisdiction of the oceans, effectively nationalizing what Hugo Grotius referred to in 1608 as Mare Libe- rum, “the Freedom of the Seas” (Grotius 1916). It took another twelve years to ratify it. In an article published in 1981, Parzifal Copes set out the terms that were to be agreed on in the 1982 Convention: The fisheries provisions . . . are defined with reference to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) extending beyond a 12-mile territorial sea to a distance of 200 nauti- cal miles from a coastal baseline. Article 56 of the Draft Convention accords to each coastal state in its EEZ “sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources.” . . . Article 61 makes the coastal state responsible for conservation of the living resources (i.e., fisheries) in its EEZ, and Article 62 requires it to promote the objective of optimum utilization of these resources. (1981, 218) Copes states that by “the beginning of 1981 nearly all the world’s 200-mile coastal zones were attached by national claims to fisheries jurisdiction” (1981, 218). With the hindsight of the decades since then, it becomes clear what an entangled mess these Articles set in motion. As Elizabeth Havice puts it, UNCLOS “at once demarcated and blurred the territorial bounds of 36 Elspeth Probyn state” (Havice 2018, 1283). While Article 56 sets out that all coastal nations receive their entitlement to their EEZs, Article 61 puts the onus of protect- ing those resources to nation states, no matter the extent of their economic or coastal security development. Then Article 62 provides a kicker—coastal states have to authorize other states to catch the “surplus” resources they do not have the means to exploit. As Copes states, “essentially, the rules con- stitute a commandment that ‘thou shalt not waste fish,’ imposing a moral obligation on the coastal state to be reasonable in sharing resources in excess of its own capacity to utilize them” (1981, 218). At the time, many commentators in the Global North considered that this would be to the benefit of developing states. As Copes stated in 1981: For the time being a good case can be made for extensive co-operative arrange- ments between distant-water countries and developing coastal states. The latter are often not in a position, technologically or economically, to utilize fully their fish resources. . . . [T]hey may obtain much needed foreign exchange from ac- cess fees they charge. (1981, 224) In 1981, Tony Loftas also saw the potential for benefit: “as part of its mandate to assist in fisheries development and management, the UN [FAO] focused at the time on helping the countries of the Third World to secure the maximum benefits from the new ocean regime” (Loftas 1981, 229). However, distant-water fishing nations are generally countries with large domestic market requirements for fish that cannot be met from their own coastal fish resources (Loftas 1981, 223). At the time, those distant-water fishing nations consisted of the countries that now constitute the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and the Soviet Union. No one would have en- visioned China’s present might. Copes was hopeful that the arrangements between developing coastal nations and these powerful players would result in the distant-water country supplying “fish [to the nations who owned the EEZs] for their domestic market at a reasonable cost, and to help the coastal country to develop its own fishing industry in the longer term. The require- ments may include the construction of port, handling, and processing facili- ties, the supply of equipment and the training of local labour” (1981, 224). Unfortunately, according to Pierre Failler and Thomas Binet, even the relatively well-regulated European Union has “failed to meet their stated aim, improved management of fish stocks—indeed, they have contributed to fisheries’ degradation” (2011, 168). It seems hard to believe that at the time of the Convention it would not have been obvious what might happen with the provision that states unable to fully exploit their resources should turn to distant-water fishers. As Failler and Binet point out, “the technologically 1/27/20 12:39 PM “The Sea Is Empty” 37 advanced EU vessels compete with partner-country fleets, particularly small- scale artisanal fishing boats for increasingly scarce fish stocks” (2011, 168). There are no prizes for guessing which side wins.5 In addition, countries in the Global South deal with an uneven playing ground whereby the European and Chinese fishing fleets are massively subsidized. The Chinese government spent $22 billion on subsidies to the fishing industry between 2011 and 2015 (Jacobs 2017). But all countries have to play within the World Trade Organi- zation (WTO) guidelines on subsidies. In a twist “on the new green” (Green 2019), the EU subsidies that go to restructuring the European fishing industry and reduced fishing intensity are dubbed “green” by the WTO. However, once ships arrive in a partner country’s or subregion’s waters, they increase fishing intensity and participate de facto in overfishing. From the European point of view, they are “green subsidies,” but for the partnering developing nation, they are regarded by the WTO as “red” and bad subsidies (Failler and Binet 2011, 168). As Failler and Binet conclude, “the surplus issue disappears, despite its intended centrality in states’ decision-making” (2011, 168). The provisions of the 1982 UNCLOS, however well-intentioned they were—and it has to be remembered the immensity of formulating and ratifying UNCLOS—have resulted in the current situation. As Failler and Binet put it, this “perfectly illustrates a short-term view of the situation: financial contributions from fisheries licenses and sales contribute greatly to public revenue in partner countries, even as they harm national fleets and marine ecosystems” (Failler and Binet 2011, 169). Senegal, like many African governments, has tended to prefer short-term financial compensation from fisheries access agreements over developing its own informal domestic sector in part because, as a result of its somewhat cha- otic nature, it is harder to extract revenue from local fishermen than from state governments and multinational fishing concerns (Brown 2005, 2). But as Mario Alberto Da Silva, a West African artisanal fisherman states, “[F]or us, it has no sense or benefit because the industrial fishing boats don’t leave us any chance of survival. They fish right up to the coast without being stopped and the government doesn’t have the means to control their activities. If the government would listen to us, we wouldn’t sign an agreement with people who catch everything, even the small fish” (in Brown 2005). As I mentioned before, the biggest threat to global fishing stocks, China, was not even envisioned in the 1982 Convention. As a 2012 European Par- liament report states, “[T]he beginning of Chinese distant-water fishing is relatively recent, starting in 1985, in an attempt to restructure the capture fisheries sector by moving fishing capacity from Chinese coastal waters to the open oceans. This process started when one of China’s state-owned fishing 1/27/20 12:39 PM 38 Elspeth Probyn enterprises expanded outward, notably to Africa” (Blowmeyer et al. 2012). Since then, Chinese distant-water fishing fleets have become the elephant in the sea when it comes to sustainability. But many other nations benefit from its tremendous fishing power: “[T]he EU imported €1.5 billion of fishery products from China in 2010, about 6% of all fish consumed” (Blowmeyer et al. 2012). This plays out in diverse and destructive ways: for instance, along the Senegal-Mauritania border competition over dwindling fish pits Saint-Louis fishermen against the coast guard of their northern neighbor. In Mauritania, the Chinese have built twenty fishmeal factories. These are the last straws for overfished seas. A 2018 report states, “The hungry machines of [the Chinese owned] Africa Protéine are producing fishmeal—a nutrient-laden powder that fuels the $160 billion aquaculture industry” (Green 2018). As Abdou Karim Sall, president of an association of small-scale fishermen in Senegal, states, “in four or five years, there won’t be any fish stocks left; the factories will close, and the foreigners will leave. We’ll be left here without any fish” (Green 2018). The sea really will be empty. If you don’t have any fish, where do you go? On small fishing boats to Europe. Thus, the figures with which I started this chapter meet: the Chinese fisherman contemplating empty oceans, the desperate Senegalese former fishers aboard their small pirogues heading for the distant coasts of Europe. And underlying them is the scaffolding of the sea that UNCLOS released. Article 62.2’s dictate about ensuring the exploitation of a national surplus of fish unleashed a tsunami of overexploitation that leaves everyone high and dry. Sustainable fishing makes the difference between staying and leaving in Senegal and in so many coastal nations in the Global South—and North. Are those leaving to be labeled greedy economic migrants and treated with disdain? Or are they climate change refugees—what Baldwin calls “our yet- to-come Other par excellence”? (2017, 301). Both labels are abstractions, taking us away from the racialized historical conditions that produce them. And, as I argued at the outset, the language of care can distance us from the visceral intersections of climate change, migration, and unequal North-South relations. However, beyond the terms we use, what matters is rendering those conditions visible so that we recognize that unsustainable fishing practices and regulations will continue to force people offshore—caught adrift in a rapidly warming ocean. It is connecting the dots—be they the ones that mark migrant deaths at sea, or the flaunting of national EEZs, and the precise ways that climate change affects differentially—that needs to be the basis of a watery humanism. “The Sea Is Empty” 39 NOTES 1. H10 Hotels, “H10 Ocean Dunas.” https://www.h10hotels.com/en/fuerteventura- hotels/h10-ocean-dunas. 2. In 2012, IFFO changed its name from IFFO The Fishmeal and Fish Oil Orga- nization to IFFO The Marine Ingredients Organization. “The Fishmeal and Fish Oil Industry: IFFO’s History.” http://www.iffo.net/fishmeal-and-fish-oil-industry-iffos- history. 3. “Senegal’s Migrants: The Lure of ‘Somewhere Else,’” DW (May 12, 2016). https://www.dw.com/en/senegals-migrants-the-lure-of-somewhere-else/a-36590613. 4. “Senegal’s Migrants.” 5. See Havice (2018, 1290) for a compelling analysis of how in certain cases such as tuna fishing in the western and central Pacific Ocean, negotiations have “resulted in an unprecedented expression of power of the smallest states—states generally un- derstood as vulnerable to and marginalized by global economic relationships—over the largest and most powerful.” REFERENCES Baldwin, Andrew. 2017. “Climate Change, Migration, and the Crisis of Humanism.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 8, no. 3: e460. 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