Bloggers' Marine Aquaculture Farm

How may bloggers lead all humanity in ending 3rd World poverty? The best way is thru the profit motive. Everybody flocks to any activity that brings in great wealth for themselves. Therefore, bloggers have to build model businesses so profitable that 3rd World employee masses will copy them. Employee masses are familiar with business and therefore most qualified to run such copycats that bring wealth to the masses rather than to the usual few entrepreneurs.

Okay, so what’s our model ‘wealth democratization’ project? This time it’s a marine aquaculture farm in the Philippines. A million or so bloggers contribute $5-up each over several months to capitalize a Philippine sea farm. The farm hires a team of Philippine aquaculture expert consultants to design operational procedures on 500 hectares of denuded sea shallows leased from state. All the farm’s sea bottom (up to 60 meters depth) gets studded with artificial reefs. Our reefs are pyramidal steel frames onto which are tied thin concrete tubes of various sizes, one tube atop another criss-cross fashion. The reefs become breeding places and refuges for all manner of marine animals. Ability to hide from predators or escape to shelter raises survival rates from 1% in reefless seas to 20% or so. Survival rates further rise thru coastal tank breeding of selected commercial breeds. At juvenile stage, the bred fish are transferred to submerged cages between reef ‘island forests.’ The caged fishes are fed non-commercial fishes harvested thru traps between reefs or thru surrounding-net boat teams that capture schooling fishes and fishes attracted by floating rafts of bamboo and leafy mangrove branches (fish aggregation devices). At the right sizes the fattened fishes, shrimps, and lobsters are sold to sea food restaurant chain buyers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Coastal China who all pay premium prices (up to six times local prices) for live fish. A sea foods processing plant fillets, flavors and deep-freezes fishes, squid, and shellfish for export to Japan. Another processing facility produces ground fish meat (surimi) and fish balls for the Korean and Japanese markets.

At sales prices that rise to the roof, bottom-level costs and 500-hectare production volumes, profits rise to seven figures weekly. Our farm should reward blogger and non-blogger investors with dividends that are way above average financial market returns. Majority of profits should be recycled to set up another sea farm module so doubting employee groups build unassailable courage for copycat adventures.

So how does our farm address mass poverty? High profits from our model farms should encourage Philippine employee groups to set up similar farms on some 200 million hectares of Philippine seas. The country’s territorial waters are currently 85% denuded of corals. Local fishermen’s catches get fewer and smaller each year even as their boat fuel costs shoot up in order to access increasingly farther waters. Result: subsistence fishermen’s families are among the Philippines’ bottom poor. The misery should begin to end once Philippine employee masses eager for our type of stratospheric profits pressure government to pass a Loans for Mass Entrepreneurship (LME) law. The LME law grants loans to thousand-employee groups that set up agribusinesses thru joint ventures with 1st World companies. Joint venture partners usually triple or quadruple local capital thru cash infusions and equipment loans. The employee groups will thereby get their expensive work boats, fish cages, freezers, breeding facilities, diving equipment, filleting plant, etc., without making additional investments. Laws are forever unless repealed, so all Philippine sea shallows eventually get ‘forested’ with artificial reefs. Millions of Philippine coastal poor get regular high-paying jobs. Billions of dollars in stock shares and dividends flow among local employee masses, for all time. If the model gets copied throughout the coastal tropics, much of the world’s bottom poor gets redeemed for good. And an ecology-rebuilding bonus ensues: new tropics-wide reef phyto-organism populations absorb untold volumes of carbon dioxide in the water, thereby arresting the acidification of seawater which can wreak havoc on sensitive marine populations. Preservation of endangered marine species comes with creation of mass wealth. The world will perpetually honor our vanguard model-building blogger army for such heroism.