Traces on the Peruvian shore: The environmental history of the fishmeal boom in Chimbote, Peru, 1940-1980

This dissertation studies the environmental history of the fishmeal boom in Chimbote, Peru. Following World War II, Peru surged to the forefront of the world's fishing nations, with the port of Chimbote as its focal point. Fishmeal is a high-protein fish, hog, and poultry feed that was almost entirely consumed outside Peru. Fishmeal became one of the nation's most important exports, at one point (1970) surpassing Peru's traditional exports like copper and cotton. Many of the nation's hopes and a great deal of the nation's budget depended upon the production and exportation of fishmeal. After two decades of intensive fishing, the fishmeal industry collapsed during the 1972-3 El Nino event, devastating the nation's already struggling economy.;This dependence was felt in Chimbote more than anywhere else in the nation. Until 1940, Chimbote had been a small fishing and farming village; with the development of the fishing industry, it became an industrial center in the north of the country, home to tens of thousands of migrant worker families and, in the proud words of its residents, the largest fishing port in the world. The emergence of Chimbote as the center of the world's largest fishmeal industry had significant ramifications for the environment: once considered a relatively clean and fertile ecosystem, after twenty years of intensive exploitation, it had become an industrial wasteland.;This dissertation chronicles the changes Chimbote underwent and scrutinizes the reasons for those changes, arguing that, rather than focusing on the decline of the ecosystem, there was in fact a new ecosystem produced. This new ecosystem emerged as a result of the actions of the major players in the ecosystem: the entrepreneurs who sought to accrue profits, the state that was mandated to protect the environment but was unable to control the explosive growth of the industry, and the fishermen who due to their unstable work conditions and the culture of fishing, extracted as much fish from the ocean as much as they could.