WEEK 50 Dec 3rd to 9th 2001

   OCEAN DEVOID OF LIFE

   A recent report by Canadian scientists, published in the British newspaper The Independent states that the global population of fish will be cut in half by the year 2015. They say that if the world-community as a whole doesn't stop the non-sustainable fisheries, there are small changes for coming generations to be fed by the ocean.
   - These aren't exaggerations or wild guesses, a spokesman says.- We were and are aware of the fact that such predictions haven't come through in the past, at least not for the year they were supposed to come true. But the world's food chambers, including the oceans having been taxed ever harder, and we have seen the heavy signs of decline for some time, of a system, a global eco-system being taxed way beyond endurance. Hundreds of years of misuse and destruction are now visibly catching up with us all. We have been very careful and conservative in our estimates.
   The world's food production has gone awry in the nineties, a few years after Paul Erlich drastic predictions and the fisheries have been dropping, increasingly with an average of 360 million kilos each year.