My latest home is Port de la Selva, Catalunya. It’s a tiny fishing town – or at least it used to be, but we’ll get to that – on the Costa Brava, 170 kilometers from Barcelona and 20 kilometers from the French border. As I write this, I’m bundled up inside as I listen to a viscous tramuntana that whips the old rickety old boats and bodies that populate the town. I’m here in search of peace, nature, and space, hoping to realize some semblance of good dissertation progress at the same time that I tap Nature’s ever-giving offer of spiritual renewal. As usual with my ventures, I’ve gotten that ‘and more’, and it’s the ‘and more’ unexpected bits that, as always, have turned out to be the most fulfilling.
Perhaps it’s my dissertation on the new urban food (in)security – plus nearly a year spent galloping through big-big-city life at a big-big-city pace – but I seem to have stumbled recently into a narrow, arrogant urban-centric bias. (Surely it’s ‘the city’ that’s so important these days, and that’s why I’m researching it, isn’t it?) Landing here in Port de la Selva for a while has opened – or rather re-opened – my eyes to the less popular side of the less popular side of the contemporary food security challenge. Notwithstanding the tourist brochure that refers to Port de la Selva as one of the Costa Brava’s ‘urbanizations’, it’s certainly not urban, but it’s not rural either: it’s a tiny town (population, about 800). And neither is it an agricultural zone: it’s an aquacultural one. This is the famous Costa Brava, home Escala anchovies, Palamos shrimp, and more Mediterranean sardines, octopus and razor clams than you can shake a fist at – or at least it was, as I started to say.
These days the scene is a bit more depressive. Instead of dozens and even hundreds of fishing boats pulling into Port de la Selva each day, there is a handful. The family-operated trawlers are on what they call an ‘ecological strike’, a biological rest period they hope will encourage reproduction and filling out of the waters. I love the term they’ve chosen: it’s not a rest period but rather a strike, as though they, the family fishermen, are part of Cesar Chavez-led solidarity movement protesting, this time, on behalf of Nature. The big(ger) long-line vessels still go out, but even for them, the conditions are getting worse and worse.
I met Manu by fluke. He’s a stout, sturdy presence just at the tail end of middle age, an old-time rower who now trains a hardy crew of local youth in traditional Catalan sea rowing. I used to be a rower, too, so I stopped by during my daily walk, and we got to talking. Turns out that Manu is also the president of the local fishermen’s confraternity – I take his missing finger joints as proof – and, when I tell him ‘what I do’, he invites me for a follow-up chat at the collective. Manu is outraged – or desperate, perhaps, is more to the point – at what has happened to his waters in recent years.
‘Since 2000, 2002, 2004 … there just aren’t any fish. Do you know anything about fracking? (He doesn’t call it fracking, though – I don’t gather he’s ever heard the term – but rather something like ‘underground sonic gas exploration’.) Ever since they started up about 10 years ago, all the fish are gone’.
And fracking aside, he says, forget trying to make a living these days in competition with the ‘monopolies’ (‘Do you know what a monopoly is?’) and challenged, of all people, by members of ‘ecological cults’ who don’t know where to direct their good intentions.
‘They ought to go after the blasted monopolies, they’re the ones who do the damage, not four poor fisherman from the coast. Look, I’m a trawler. Trawling gets a bad name. But I know fishing and I know these waters, and I know how and where to drag my nets to get what I want and leave the rest intact. It’s not in my interest to destroy Nature, anyway, is it? You know how big the nets of the big monopolies are? Five, six football fields. You know big mine is? A hundred square meters. Traditional Mediterranean trawling is more selective; it just isn’t the same thing.’
So there’s not much money these days in Port de la Selva, and the old saying, it seems, is true: the most endangered species of all is the small producer. The town is down to a handful of operations, and people are leaving the business, the boats, and the town en masse. Manu’s sister and brother-in-law are leaving for Nicaragua this year, to see if they can either sell their boat or find a new fishing livelihood there. Port de la Selva’s confraternity is the only one on the coast that is still fisherman-owned – the rest are no longer able to turn a profit and the collectives are effectively run by government hand and government money – and the only reason it is able to do so is by leasing most of its space to the town’s bank, supermarket, and pizzeria.
Anyway, even if there were fish, the people in the towns don’t have much money to buy it, and the fisherman can’t figure out how to sell it to them in sufficient quantities – ‘we’re fishermen, not marketers’ – and instead turn to bigger buyers and lower margins. It’s evident that the ‘crisis’, here, is only the latest assault on a way of life and wellbeing on the wane. When the grocer advised me to buy the chard right away, because it was the only one she’d bought for that week, I asked why. Was it that people just didn’t have the habit of eating chard here? Ha, she said. ‘People have – or had – the habit of eating chard. What they don’t have is the habit of having money’. It seems she’s right. I noticed that the baker silently charges some of her older customers half-price, and I suppose it’s the kindest, fairest thing to do in the circumstances. The prices here in Port de la Selva are higher than the prices in the ‘big city’, too; they’re not higher than the highest Barcelona prices, but they are higher than the lower ones that smart consumers access, and the thing about living in a tiny town is that you don’t have a choice. If you want chard or bread, you’ll have to buy it from the grocer or the baker.
Port de la Selva has made me reflect quite a bit, then, on people, priorities, vulnerabilities, and the systemic nature of things, just as I’m writing my dissertation about these kinds of ideas. I haven’t stopped believing that the challenge of assuring ‘Food Security in the Cities’ remains important. I just hope that it doesn’t make us lose sight of what’s going on in places like Port de la Selva – and that Food Security in the Non-City stays on the agenda, too.
