  We show that the fermion mass spectrum may naturally be understood in terms
of flavour democratic fixed points in supersymmetric theories which have a
large domain of attraction in the presence of "strong unification". Our
approach provides an alternative to the approximate Yukawa texture zeroes of
the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism. We discuss a particular model based on a broken
gauged $SU(3)_L\times SU(3)_R$ family symmetry which illustrates our approach.
