ABSTRACT
There are many tricks in the trade of fish when they become a commodity. Seafood was on the way to becoming a mass commodity, a kind of nameless and uniform product identified with a corporation, a brand, and sometimes a region. Critics of globalization and the industrialization of food production have pointed to a general problem of extending the logic of the market, that everything should become property and be given a cash value, to the natural world: externalities. Large commercial fishing boats have powerful engines, radar, sonar, and global positioning system navigation. The fishers who survived had to borrow huge amounts of money for larger boats and better technology, and they concentrated on fish like tuna and sardines that they could sell in the global market. At an industrial scale, the fishing industry has a long history of exploiting a very low-paid workforce, at sea and in the processing factory, which is hired and fired as needed.
