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Caught in the Net

The Global Tuna Industry, Environmentalism, and the State

Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas Constance

346 pages, 3 photographs, 15 tables, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-0738-9, $40.00
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-0739-6, $19.95

Book Cover ImageThe 1973 Marine Mammal Protection Act at first appeared to be a major victory for environmentalists. It banned the use of oversized fishing nets in an attempt to save thousands of dolphins killed each year in tuna harvests. But hampered by exemptions, extensions, delays, and quotas, MMPA has instead created international turmoil in the tuna industry while still allowing some 20,000 dolphin deaths each year.

In this revealing book, Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas Constance use the tuna-dolphin controversy to explore the rapidly increasing effects of globalization on agricultural and food production. Illustrating how private industries, political institutions, national economies, and social movements have been swept into a global arena, they reach some intriguing and important conclusions about the complex and sometimes bewildering future of industry and the environment.

Analyzing the controversy's outcome, they show how relatively small groups can, with effective organization, pass legislation that fundamentally changes the way corporations do business. The globalization that often results, they contend, can have wide-reaching consequences--many of them unintended and unpredictable. Following passage of MMPA, U.S. tuna processors turned to foreign suppliers of "dolphin-safe" tuna while U.S. tuna fishing corporations deserted the U.S. market--circumventing MMPA altogether. Bilateral international agreements, GATT, NAFTA, and the U.S. federal courts have intervened in the chaos and have been challenged from all sides--from the Bush Administration to Bumble Bee Tuna, from Greenpeace to the European Economic Community.

Through it all, independent owners of fishing boats have been forced out of business, U.S. processing jobs have moved overseas, and environmentalists have continued their dolphin campaign. Even those who appear to be benefiting may not be, the authors demonstrate. Despite increased opportunities for some foreign labor forces, the weakest segments--especially in developing countries--continue to be exploited.

Stressing the limits that individual nations face in the current socio-economic climate and the conflicting agendas of a variety of labor and environmental movements, Bonanno and Constance argue that the regulatory ability of any national government--even one with strong society support--must be rethought and redefined.

"An extraordinary volume. Bonanno and Constance have succeeded in using the conflict over dolphins caught in tuna fishing nets to shed light on the transformation of the world economy that is underway--a complex struggle among labor, environmental groups, and transnational corporations over the forms that the new global economy will take, what technologies will be used, where factories will be located, and what powers nation-states will have. In short, they have synthesized and clarified the key debates of the decade. No one interested in the globalization of the world economy can afford to miss this book!"--Lawrence Busch, author of Plants, Power, and Profit: Social, Economic, and Ethical Consequences of the New Biotechnologies

"A compelling contribution to the debate over globalization. This book will be both influential and controversial. Each of its two parts--the review of regulation theory, the fordism-postfordism debate, and globalization, on the one hand, and the detailed treatment of the tuna-dolphin controversy, on the other--is by itself worth the price of admission."--William H. Friedland, author of Manufacturing Green Gold: Capital, Labor, and Technology in the Lettuce Industry

"This excellent book could become a benchmark for readers interested in the transformation of the State and global post-Fordism. First rate."--Louis Swanson, editor of Agricultural Policy and the Environment

ALESSANDRO BONANNO, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri, Columbia, is author of Small Farms: Persistence with Legitimation and coeditor of From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food.

DOUGLAS CONSTANCE is a research associate at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and the author of "Transnational Corporations and the Globalization of the Food System" in From Columbus to ConAgra.