Give a Man a Fish

From Patriarchal Productionism to the Revalorization of Distribution

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the world of development and global poverty policy has encountered what is perhaps the world's most widely circulated development cliché. It is the slogan (sometimes dubiously attributed as a Chinese proverb) that reads "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." It is often proclaimed (sometimes on posters) in "helping" agencies of various kinds—from Christian missions to development agency offices to NGO training facilities. The slogan encapsulates a certain development ethos, economically expressing a core belief that the object of development work is transformation, not charity, and that recipients of aid should get productive skills and the opportunity to work, not handouts and dependency.

Critical scholars have for many years now pointed out some of the problematic assumptions embedded in the "give a man a fish" cliché. Those attentive to issues of gender inequality have been quick to question the apparent assumption that the fisher is a man. Those more oriented to political economy have noticed instead the suggestion that poverty derives from a primordial ignorance on the part of the poor and have observed that poor people are in fact far more likely to lack the material means to enter an occupation like fishing (boats, motors, nets, and access and rights to waterways) than they are to be held back by a lack of knowledge. Students of "indigenous knowledge," on the other hand, are likely to be most disturbed by the proverb's apparent faith that the external development worker is the bringer of empowering expert knowledge to benighted locals, when the truth is that people who live in local ecosystems are typically far from ignorant about the practical arts of making a living there—and, indeed, usually can put foreign would-be "helpers" to shame when it comes to such locally grounded and practical knowledge as how to catch fish.

There is, however, an even more fundamental problem with the slogan that generally goes less noticed. This more foundational issue is that the "teach a man to fish" refrain assumes that the problem of poverty is fundamentally a problem of production (not catching enough fish) and that the solution is to bring more people into productive labor (by adding, via training, more fisherfolk). It implicitly scoffs at the importance of distribution ("giving a man a fish") and implies that a durable solution must instead bring the hungry person into the world of production (by catching, and not just eating, fish).

This productionist premise (that "development" is, in essence, about catching more fish and putting more people to work) is located at a deeper epistemological level than the assumptions about knowledge and ignorance, and it is not challenged by the familiar critiques I cited above. Yet it is empirically dubious, even in the case of fishing.

Like much else in the contemporary world, fishing is not what it used to be. The growth area in today's fishing industry is aquaculture, which now contributes nearly half of the total amount of fish available for human consumption (FAO 2012, 26). Like the manufacturing industries that it increasingly resembles, the aquaculture industry is overwhelmingly located in a few countries in Asia (Asia produces some 89 percent of all world aquaculture production—and 69 percent of that is in China [FAO 2012, 27]). It is for this reason that an extraordinary 87 percent of the entire world's fishing employment (fishers and fish farmers) is located in Asia, along with fully 97 percent of the world's aquaculture employment (FAO 2012, 41). Meanwhile, in the most important fishing nations, "the share of employment in capture fisheries is stagnating or decreasing" (2012, 10). This is not because fewer fish are being caught but because it takes fewer workers to catch them when fishing is conducted, as it increasingly is, by highly capitalized private corporations (often on large specialized craft that have been termed "floating factories"). While such capital investment has led to increasing catch rates (and profits), labor demands have diminished even as production has expanded. Indeed, fishing employment in developed countries actually shrank by 11 percent from 1990 to 2008 (FAO 2010). Nor is Africa immune to these trends. The coastal towns and villages of southern Africa's Atlantic coast (for which fishing has historically been the economic mainstay) today swarm with unemployed fishermen. An allocation of quotas in one South African town (meant to increase the size of fishing enterprises to a "financially viable level") resulted in the allocation of permits to just 25 percent of the more than 4,000 applicants. The other 3,000 fishermen (who, let us remember, had followed the productionist advice of learning how to fish) remained, as one press account put it, "lounging about in the centre of [town] and at the harbor."

Teaching a man to fish in these times, then, may be just a good way of creating an unemployed fisherman, or, at best, a marginal hanger-on in an already over-saturated competitive field. It is not obvious that being trained for a nonexistent job would benefit the man in any way, and it is certainly nonsense to suppose that he would, by virtue of that training, be fed for a lifetime. Nor is it at all clear that such training would be beneficial for the fishing industry, the global ecosystem, or, indeed, the fish.

Is the fishing industry really hungering for new armies of trained and ready labor? Or is the problem not, in reality, precisely the opposite—a massive oversupply of labor and an industry utterly unable to absorb it? A recent event in Zambia is illuminating on this point. A fishing company in the small town of Mpulungu on the shores of Lake Tanganyika let it be known that they would be hiring a small number of temporary casual workers. As the owner of the firm (Great Lakes Products, Limited) arrived in Mpulungu to do the hiring, the news spread, and before long more than 5,000 desperate job-seekers had gathered at the company gates (in a town whose total population is only 10,000). A frantic jostling for position resulted in a horrific stampede that killed nine people and injured another thirty-eight.

The "teach a man to fish" slogan seems to come from a world where the labor of poor people was needed by the apparatuses of production...