* Rodolfo Carrizo
Our country has one of the most important maritime and oceanic coasts on the planet. This natural geographical link prompted us to try to understand what are or should be the ways of relating to the sea, its intrinsic resources and humans. Think about our links with the sea. sea in the broadest complexity generated a multiplicity of premises that we internalized as central and determining.
Malvinas in our lives as ex-combatants of the war and as militants of the CECIM (Center of Ex-Combatants of the Malvinas Islands) allowed us to open ourselves to a host of questions in order to understand that the reasons for the conflict should not only be referred to the authoritarian decisions of the military dictatorship but to deep ideological, military and business reasons that generated the 1982 war.
As an organization born under the hard days of war, we could not summarize ourselves in the pain of the events; We needed to look for explanations, to try to know that this complexity of relationships had to be thought about and understood with a deep sovereign sense, assuming sovereignty as the indissoluble and indivisible property of a people and respect for the memory of those who died on the islands of our companions.
The Malvinas war has different and intricate explanations; on the one hand, those linked to the sea and business, two large planes with a colonial and imperialist origin verifiable in the political, military, commercial and expansionist actions of the United Kingdom (UK) and, its strategic ally, the USA; on the other, the explanations associated with the dependent and peripheral nature of our country that determines the way in which our link with the sea is exercised and developed. We must consider that the UK since 1833 has exercised hegemonic colonial control over the Malvinas Islands, the surrounding seas, and the Antarctic projection with direct incidence.
Since 1982, this interference and illegal appropriation of the Malvinas, Georgia and South Sandwich Islands and surrounding islands is verified in an increase in their military forces, which at the same time multiplied business dealings with natural resources, mainly fish and energy resources. Our sea equipped with the most demanded and required species on the planet due to the quality of the fishing resources (prawns, squid, hake and others), it constitutes an attractive economic loot that generates an intense movement of various fishing fleets that systematically invade it without control, carrying out fishing extractive and certainly predatory.
The UK of Great Britain was and is the one that grants the most fishing licenses unilaterally and arbitrarily where the benefits of these licenses allow it to constitute the main income of the Islands. The GDP of the Malvinas Islands, which in the first years of After the war it did not exceed 5/6 million dollars annually, in 2015 it had increased to more than 300 million dollars; fishing being the main contribution, in the order of 39% of its total GDP.
These first figures highlight the importance of the economic representation that fishing has and at the same time understand how it impacts the development potential of an economy and its people. The Argentine commercial fleet - the vast majority of which is foreign - fishes in our seas approximately 900 thousand tons annually, the vast majority of which is destined for export in excess of 2.2 billion dollars, is a volumetric fishing that generates a discard of species of lower commercial value for large fishing companies where the profit remains in the hands of 15 or 20 powerful groups that report in the port of Vigo (Spain).
Now, let us imaginatively develop the magnitude of the fishing business: the shrimp known as orange diamond is one of the most demanded and expensive spices, each ton averages a value that ranges between 7,000 to 10,000 dollars depending on demand since it often functions as a commodity; followed by the Ilex squid, and so on other species. Some of them are even deliberately discarded since, once captured, they are discarded dead without considering that if they were used in the context of a public and manifest policy to fight against hunger, they could Feed 3 million people daily with the best animal protein.
Argentina has power over the Exclusive Economic Zone up to mile 200 according to law 24,543 (ratification of the United Nations convention on the rights of the sea), being the owner of all the mobile and fixed resources of our ocean (Lerena, 2019). When we observe The dimension of these astonishing numbers once again raises hair-raising questions full of unknowns. If Argentina exported an average of 2 billion in the years without a pandemic, after 39 years they would be numbers equivalent to the external debt.
This comparison allows us to measure the size of the fishing resource, which if we took it at market value would increase six-fold, and if we extend it to fishing on mile 201 where there are currently more than 500 vessels from various countries that carry out illegal fishing, we would understand In a slightly more complete way, the reason for the presence of the UK in our Malvinas Islands and its imperial ambition. The absence of a national and sovereign naval industry also has a reason.
Of the five Argentine provinces with a maritime coast (Buenos Aires, Rio Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego), a total of more than 6,500 km, including our Antarctica, outline a long and extremely rich coastline that is deeply wasted since we do not have a shipping fleet. own, only of a few shipyards, among which Rio Santiago is the most important with a deliberate and very low productive activity.
Rethinking ourselves as a maritime country takes us back to our own history.Belgrano, who was a visionary statesman, maintained that a State without fishing can do nothing about the sea; and, except for a few historical periods, we were never able to have a sea fleet with a strategic and sovereign sense.
