C O V E R  S T O R Y

N A U G H T   I N   N E T

The seaside view
Far out into the sea you can see a black dot. As it draws close to the shores you can make out that it is a little boat with five people in it. You marvel at their balance as they effortlessly move around on what looks no more than a rickety raft to you.

The fisherfolk have a profound understanding of the winds, tidal currents and lunar forces. They understand the occurrence and movement of fish shoals, the various fishing grounds, the myriad species of fish and their food habits. They go far out into the sea and at night navigate to the shore by the stars.

As they heave to with a flourish you notice that they have brought in the morning's catch - a small motley of little silver fish, gleaming on the net. But it's a catch on which five families have to survive. Strange isn't it, that the vast ocean can offer only so little?

Coastliners
The coastal fisher people have survived by understanding and carefully harnessing the resources of a very niche ecosystem. All along the coastline of India, from Mandvi in Gujarat to Digha in West Bengal, there are more than 1,800 fishing villages, which account for 70 per cent of the total catch. The marine fish industry has been growing at a rate of five per cent, but the fishing villages are becoming poorer.

In the past these communities provided the poorer people of the village with a cheap and abundant source of protein to supplement their diet. They also evolved traditional techniques to catch fish. Fishing was a labour intensive activity and the capital investments made in boats and fishing gear were little. The fisher people who made their own boats and fishing tackle were self-sufficient. Though most of the technology was indigenous it was not as if these people were not adaptable to change. Over the years the y had assimilated and adapted many foreign techniques that helped them to bring in a better catch - the dugout canoe came from the Arabs and the catamarans so common in Kerala was a Polynesian influence. But nothing had prepared them for the sweeping changes that were to come.

Today the catches are low and the price of fish is prohibitive in the coastal areas, denying them their protein source. All this started when the new modernisation drives began.

Big time business
By the early 1970s the regular fishing grounds of the US and Japan were already depleted. At the same time the global demand for fish was rising sharply. For India this meant a great opportunity to earn foreign exchange through export. So newer grounds needed to be explored to meet the growing demands. The Indian Ocean that covers an expanse of 74.917 million square kilometres has an estimated capacity to yield 14.39 million tonnes of marine products. Most of this would come from the narrow strip of water that borders the land or the inshore waters.

So in 1977, the Indian government declared a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Indian Ocean. This declaration gave it the sovereign rights to exploit the resources of the sea commercially. At that time the government said that the vast economic zone had remained untapped because of lack of modernisation and technology. And so the government began to introduce mechanised trawlers.

A fishy business
Under the new scheme the government collaborated with Norway and introduced trawlers and new types of nets. The goal was dual - to increase the yield and to improve the lot of the fisher people. So how did the opposite happen? Why was the already poor fishing community pauperised?

To understand this we need to go into the economy of the fishing business. This involves three stages - production, marketing and consumption of fish. In the earlier days all the three operations could be controlled by the fisherfolk, as the demand was local. The scale of operations was small but enough to meet the demands and little investment was needed to go out to the sea. Even then many of the fisher people had to borrow capital to make their boats and buy their nets.

With the new technology, the catches promised to be huge, but the production far exceeded local demand. The scale of operations widened and the market became bigger and fish began to be sold further afield. This required better preservation technologies, which were available through financers. The poor fisherfolk could neither afford mechanised boats nor the preservation techniques. So the middlemen stepped in. These were the people with the money. They bought boats and they controlled the market and thus the profits. The traditional fisher people were left out of the new system.

Surf war
The volume of export of marine products has increased several-fold in the past five ecades.. An elaborate infrastructure with middlemen and financers was created to support this huge industry. And they became indispensable. The old methods that had served the fisherfolk so well were suddenly considered primitive, unorganised and ill equipped and the government concentrated only on implementing the new technology. In the ensuing years there was a phenomenal increase in the number of mechanised trawlers as the middlemen invested hugely. But lack of capital kept the poor people tied to the traditional techniques. Then the turf war began. The old craft were not sea worthy enough to be taken into deep sea. As a result the fisher people could only fish in the inshore waters. But as productivity inshore was higher, the trawlers,too, operated close to the shore too the propellers cut the nets of the poor folks. While the trawlers raked in fish, the catches dwindled for the traditional fishing community.

Caught in the net
The ecological price of mechanisation was high too. Trawlers use a fishing method called bottom-trawling in which the nets raked up the ocean floor. This is done to scoop up the shrimps and other crustaceans that inhabit the shallow inshore ocean floor. Bottom trawling destroys fish eggs and larvae, breeding in the sandy sea bed. It also makes the seawater turbid and most fish avoid this murky water. This, of course, affects the fish yield.

Another instance of ecological destruction is purse-seining. In this method, the trawler chases a shoal of fish, throws drawstring net around it and lifts the catch. The nets used are so fine that they do not allow the baby fish to escape. This was not the case with the nets traditional fishermen used. Their nets had bigger holes and fish eggs and baby fish escaped to restock the ocean. The marine ecosystem can be replenished each year if given the chance. But mechanised fishing does not allow the ocean to replenish itself. And so the fisherfolk return with empty nets.