Who Owns The Sea?

摘要

It takes most of a day to drive from Adelaide to Port Lincoln on the southern coast of Australia. The most prominent building in town is a wheat silo. But this remote outpost has something special: Australian largest per capita concentration of millionaires. Visitors pass through miles of wheat fields before arriving in town, and agriculture has long been the mainstay of the economy. But today the most profitable crop is southern bluefin tuna. The enterprising fishermen working the chilly waters off Port Lincoln have figured out a way to rear lots of tuna in captivity. While previously the southern bluefin were caught and canned, now they're caught and then fattened on California pilchards in some 130 underwater cages. "If I could be 30 again, I reckon I'd give Bill Gates a shake," says Hagen Stehr, the 62-year-old chairman of Clean Seas Tuna. His family is worth maybe $60 million, but, he says, "The future is not the Internet, its aquaculture."