The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem

Abstract

In 1953, fishing yields in Peru were 28th highest in the world. Less than ten years later Peru had vaulted to number one. The registered capacity of the country's fishing fleet increased 39-fold, and the processing capacity of its fishmeal factories grew by a factor of 19. The subsequent collapse of Peruvian fishery in the early 1970s was almost equally as vertiginous.Kristin Wintersteen's The Fishmeal Revolution sets the fantastic story of the rise, fall, and partial rise again of Peru's fishery in a larger, ecological context that considers the industrialization of fishing not in one individual state or of a single species of fish but across the Humboldt Current ecosystem as a whole (including both Chile and Peru). The book is, in the author's words, a “translocal” history. In the best traditions of environmental history, The Fishmeal Revolution describes the effects of climatological oscillations on how humans have lived in and interacted with their physical surroundings. The result is a work that is not reducible to a single overarching argument or analytical intervention but instead emphasizes and underlines the unique contingencies and conjunctures of individual historical processes.The short text has exceptional thematic, historical, and geographic breadth, informed by a diverse source base. The author notes in the acknowledgments that work on the book took place in thirty-two cities, across eight countries and three continents, and this becomes quickly evident to the reader (p. ix). This speaks volumes to the author's dedication as well as patience in working through copious and frequently dry documents on fisheries and fish.The book begins with a “deep” historical background of the Peruvian and Chilean coasts from prehistory to the early nineteenth century, in which the author stresses the long history of climate's influence on human society. From there the story pivots to an overview of changing farming and livestock technologies in North America and Europe up to 1930 and the scientific work that served as a catalyst for fishmeal's incorporation into global circuits of industrial agriculture. The heart of the book recounts the industrialization of fishing in Peru and Chile. In Peru, the fishing industry experienced exponential growth in the 1960s based on exploitation of a single species, the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), and around a single boomtown, the city of Chimbote. The fishery collapsed, with drastic ecological and social consequences, in 1972–73. Chile's fishery, while hit with some of the same climatological oscillations and exhibiting many similarities to the Peruvian industry, adopted a multispecies fishery and was thus less vulnerable to population changes in single species. Throughout the author fluently discusses biological and physical natural science literature on the Humboldt Current.The decision to ground the analysis in biogeography and climate oscillations rather than political, social, or economic structures of Peruvian and Chilean history, however, has trade-offs typical of much scholarship in environmental history. Interestingly, in a book about industrialization and economic development in postwar Latin America, dependency theory and economic development strategies are not mentioned; these might have fruitfully informed the analysis of fishery development. The priorities of dependency theory, for instance, might have framed with more nuance the question of whether southeast Pacific fisheries would be used to satisfy social needs (addressing malnutrition) or private greed (exporting via high-paying international commodity markets). Could it have been that export by private actors aided hard currency reserves (on the eve of the anchoveta collapse, some one-third of Peruvian hard currency earnings were due to fishmeal and oil) that were in turn deemed essential to import capital stock for Peruvian development? Indeed, the book's focus on close reading of qualitative, local archival sources, coupled with limited engagement with secondary literatures, tends to reveal more about historical actors' feelings and thoughts about historical events, trends, or policies than allow for analysis of these. Thus the reader learns, for example, about industrialists' thoughts on economic policies and fishing regulations rather than what those policies and regulations actually were. Similarly, the chapter on Chimbote scratches the surface of a fascinating Peruvian melting pot and social experiment. The narrative, however, engages minimally with Peruvian social and political history and thereby does not pack as much analytical or historiographical punch as it might have. The book compares Chilean and Peruvian fishery development but without systematic consideration or analysis of national-level policy or regulation. The reader thus gains little insight into why Peru and Chile developed fisheries with different characteristics, beyond factors of geography and climate.In short, The Fishmeal Revolution provides an excellent overview of a dizzying array of primary source material in a concise history based on a well-informed discussion of the Humboldt Current region's natural properties. It is a welcome addition to literature on resource extraction and human-environment interactions in Latin America.