Off the scale.

• Author: Kane, Hal
• Position: Rising prices of seafood

The South Pacific island nations of Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Tuvalu recently told Japan, the United States, and other commercial giants to get some of their trawlers out of the islanders' waters. Because fish have become too valuable to allow intruders to continue taking them, other countries are likely to join the South Pacific nations in restricting foreign access to their waters.

The evidence of that value can be measured in dollars and demand. Worldwide, people eat more fish than beef and chicken, combined. In some low-income countries, fish provides most of the protein people get from animal sources. But scarcity and rising prices are pushing this traditionally inexpensive source of protein out of reach of many of the world's poor.

Seafood sales are a textbook case of the law of supply and demand. With the harvest of fish and shellfish per person in decline and demand continuing to rise, prices have mounted stcadily. In the United States, seafood cost 40 percent more in the early 1990s (adjusted for inflation) than i ii 19 5 0. Meanwhile, the price of beef during the same period fell by one quarter and poultry by more than half.

Although the most reliable data for seafood price trends come from the United States, these numbers are an effective barometer of the worldwide situation. The same pressures that have meant fewer fish per person in the United States - lack of growth in fish stocks coupled with growing populations and demands - are at work in almost every region of the world.

What is unusual about the rising prices for seafood is that with the dramatic improvements in fishing technology that took place over the last 40 years, prices would ordinarily have come down as supply rose. However, a threshold was crossed during the same period in many of the world's seas: fish were harvested faster than they could reproduce, and their populations actually declined.

Overfishing and the higher prices that result are reshaping the global diet. It's becoming clear that seafood is a commodity that follows the pathways to the highest bidder. In poorer countries, the export of seafood may help balance trade deficits in the short term, but it could ultimately mean less access to this food source at home, especially in those countries where many people's diets lack protein and where traditional fishers have fed their families and supported their communities through the ages with fish.

Indeed...