Fishing about and about fishing
UPON READING "CONVERSATIONS"
or
HOW TO SUPPORT FISHERFOLK
(An abridged electronic copy of an essay published in SAMUDRA No.36)
Joining a conversation
It is quite late to join a meeting, which had taken place 4 years ago, and was published in a book a year ago. This on one hand. On the other hand, however, while reading "Conversations", I felt several times this absurd wish to intervene in that discussion, and have my say, too.
One reason was this feeling that my point of view would've made this discussion more complete, not because of the "wisdom" of my possible contribution, but because of the sort of person I am, and the way I'd be looking at the discussed subjects. But, I was not there in Accra, back in 1999, hence my late and, thus, rather lame contribution.
"Conversations" is a book published by the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, and authored by 3 remarkable people: Aliou Sal of Senegal, the late Michael Belliveau of Canada, and Nalini Nayak of India, all of them active supporters of inshore fisherfolk's and their communities' struggles to survive and make a decent living. All three are intellectuals, who for personal reasons have chosen this sector as their battlefield for a better world and a more just society. Of the three of them, only Aliou Sal comes from a fishing community, leaving which at a relatively young age enabled him to go his own way to high education. None of them, however, at any time in her/his life has made a living by fishing or other fish related trade. Their experiences and opinions stem from taking active parts and leading roles in organizations of fishing people, and in social and political struggles in their respective home countries.
Why me?
The reason I think that my point of view would be of significance to the discussion is because my background and experience are so different from those of the actual participants, that they present sort of a reverse image of the original participants' perspectives.
I became a fisherman at the age of 22, after a spell as a stevedore on cargo barges at the Tel Aviv harbour, and another one with the Israeli Navy. Soon I became a skipper of a small trawler, which belonged to a whole community (kibbutz), not just to its fishing members. I was also a member of the fishermen's union and, at some stage, also of its executive body. We had our meetings timed with the weather, mainly on stormy days when the whole fleet was in harbours. I drifted out of commercial fishing, because due to my interest and certain achievements in fishing technology I was recruited to be a staff member of the Haifa Fisheries Research Station. In the early 1960s, I worked in Eritrea as a masterfisherman and fishery adviser to the local government. Which is what has set me on the path I have traveled on for four decades as an "intervener", or "agent of change" among people of other nations, cultures, languages, and fishing habits, involved in what is called, often unjustifiably, fisheries development.
Among other things, what I'd like to do in this essay is to examine the question why fisherfolk join, support, are acting in, and quit their various organizations, and how they perceive and look at outsider activists.
It is many years now since I last fished for living, but much less since I helped others to make a living of fishing. Thus, I'm stepping into this " Conversations" exchange with my feet still in water, but a laptop computer in my hand.
Calling names
For reasons evidently important for its authors, "Conversations" starts with a serious and lengthy discourse, with many sages quoted, as to whether people like them should be called "interveners" (Mike Belliveau), "social activists" (Nalini, Belliveau), or "supporters" (Aliou Sal) [see p.9 and on]. All three of them seem right to me. Aren't people from outside the fishing community, who are coming to assist the fisherfolk in their daily or extraordinary struggles, "supporters"? They are. "Social activists"? That too. "Interveners"? Sure they do intervene in the fisherfolks' affairs.
My opinion on this subject is that it little matters how we, the outsiders, call ourselves, or how we are called by others. What really matters is what we actually do, and how others perceive what we do. People who come and work for and with fisherfolk, whether they are volunteers or paid for their efforts, don't need to walk around with the feeling that they have to justify to themselves or to others for being there and doing what they do. For example, the name of Ghandi was mentioned in the discussion [p.26]. So who the great Mahatma was – an intervener, supporter, or activist? What would be his answer to such a question? He'd, probably say that he's just a man trying to help his people.
Another question discussed was how an organization that wants to embrace all the people in fishing communities that draw their income from fishing should call its members: fishermen, harvesters, fishworkers, or what. In my opinion it depends on the desired and actual membership character, or in certain areas, on the public relations value of the name. For example, once in an Asian country I helped to establish a fishermen's school. But, I was asked by my local counterpart: "Please, let's find some other name for the school. Fishing is not a very appreciated trade in my country". Of course, I left it up to my hosts to find a name of their preference. I wonder if they chose "sea-harvesters' school"…
"Fishworkers" is a good term, but in some cases, not sufficiently inclusive. Personally, for a truly encompassing grouping, I prefer the term "fisherfolk", which is more inclusive than the others, covering all the fishing people, owners and crews, and their families, whether they participate or not in any post-harvest activities. It also implies more a community’s or communities' organization, than an association of individuals.
There's also the problem of what's inshore, coastal, small-scale, artisanal, etc., fishery and what is not. No doubt, a small-scale, inshore fishery of one, especially, Northern country, would be considered "industrial", or medium-scale in some of the Southern ones. What, however, should unite all fisherfolks is their common interest to protect from outside and foreign fleets their traditional fishing grounds and resources, and desirably any fishing grounds that they can feasibly access. This is a common cause to small-scale fishermen in the European Union, Newfoundland, Iceland, W.Africa, India, Chile, and where not.
Science, politics, fishery management, and development
When the discussion is coming to what I'd call the real issues, there's plenty of wisdom in "Conversations". For example, the criticism of the fisheries science for allowing the path of specialization [p.34], and hence, loosing the overall picture of the complex dynamics of systems, in general, and of fishery ecosystems, societal aspects of their management, and of the complexity of development, in particular.
There’re also the social and economic consequences of faulty assessment and mismanagement.
Mike Belliveau throws an interesting light on the history of fishing quotas in Canada, and how they came to being rather to assure and allocate fishing rights than to protect fish stocks from overfishing. The political-economic reality was already there, when the bio-economic stock-management ideology moved in to ride it piggyback and explain away the government's pro-companies allocation preferences, while government scientists have provided a rationale based on mathematical models that hardly reflect the dynamics of the fishery ecosystem, if at all.
In this respect, Aliou’s example of the methodology of the state-associated tuna-centered Senegalese fishery-research [p.123] illustrates of what it was focusing on. No doubt, small-scale multi-species fisheries are more difficult to study and assess, than large-scale single-species ones. Studies must be carried out are under much less comfortable conditions, systems to be studied are much more complex, they don't lend themselves to the simplistic bio-economic models, and dealing with a resource of little interest to big business do not attract sufficient funding.
I'd only like to emphasize that one shouldn't generalize about fishery scientists. There are fishery biologists, oceanographers, and economists and other social scientists, who for many years have been warning and protesting in various ways, although, perhaps, not loudly enough, against the prevailing, mathematical-models based fishery science, so favoured by privatization-oriented management. They’ve been calling the fishery science to return to the real biology and ecology studies at sea, and aboard fishing vessels, and to study and account for fish-habitat inter-relations, major and minor environmental fluctuations, and their effect on fish and other marine life. They've not been heeded, but with the many debacles of that management paradigm, their time may soon come.
I think that we'd all agree that while it is trying to maintain, successfully or not, healthy resources, fishery management is willy-nilly mainly about the allocation/distribution of the benefits derived from fish resources among various interests. The management steps taken by the authorities determine to whom the benefits go, and they choose them according to whose side they're on. Aliou's account of Senegalese legislation includes excellent examples [p.376, 378 ]; a government, which is giving access to its coastal waters to foreign fleets of large trawlers and purse seiners, is banning monofilament nets used by only the small-scale sector, or is closing the octopus fishery for stock-management reasons only to artisanal fishery and not to the industrial sector.
Small-scale fisherfolk's struggle worldwide against those governments, which have been allocating in various manners their traditional resources and inshore and coastal fishing grounds to industrial, outside, and foreign fleets and interests. In some cases they forced the authorities to call off, delay, or diminish such blows to their existence, and all three authors of "Conversations" gave ample examples from their countries. In this respect, I must disagree with Mike, as to the uselessness of litigation to fishermen's organization [p.205]. In past, litigation has helped to change or amend governments' policies and actions.
Quotas and especially ITQs are good for capital-strong enterprises and corporations. As Mike [p.212] quotes a Canadian fisheries minister a promoter of the ITQ system, the excuse is: "Better to have two fishermen do well than ten to starve". We had a fisheries director, who was saying: "We better have fishermen in 30 boats making a modest living, than half of them growing rich in 15 boats". The difference: our fisheries director used to be a commercial fisherman, and I'd bet that the Canadian minister had not.
Management by input (effort control) can better serve small-scale fishermen and help them to stay in business. Not once I witnessed them not only to co-operate in identification and implementation of effort-control means, but also to prompt and initiate some. The management of the lobster fishery described by Mike [p.246] is an excellent example.
The “tragedy of the common” is an often-cited excuse for the fishing rights privatisation paradigm. In fact that tragedy is one of open access, for commons doesn't have to be a free for all, open-access property.
The problem of open access is still prevailing in most Southern countries and in those Northern countries, whose laws prevent limiting people's right to work of their choice. While the latter sidestep their own laws through complex systems of licensing and quotas, in other, including most of the Southern countries, at least in the inshore sector, access limits, if any, have been a matter of tribal, or community-based traditional management. In the inshore fisheries of those countries, northern-type licensing and similar access limitations in the small-scale sector, are with a few exceptions, non-existent, under consideration, or still in their embryonic state, and altogether don't carry too much promise in the near future.
Nalini's analysis of the social and political situation of the fishing peoples has led her to a very wide-reaching approach: many problems of inshore fisherfolks are one consequence of the expansion of capital-intensive fleets owned by powerful interests that, under an uncurbed free market regime, are trying to privatize fishery resources. I may be wrong, but the conclusions, Nalini seems to be drawing, is that fisherfolks' organizations from all over should join forces on a common cause, extending beyond fisheries - a cause of all poor, exploited, and oppressed people worldwide, endangered by "globalization and its destruction of human societies" [pp.108-9, 128-9, and 340-41].
I had the feeling that Nalini is crying over the spilled milk of a failed promise of a comprehensive alternative to capitalism, and is frustrated by lack of a realistic alternative to globalization. In my opinion we ought to focus our efforts on a corrective to the prevailing uncurbed corporate capitalism and to the globalization, which is biased towards the former. In the fisheries sector, we should support the small-scale entrepreneurs, their families, employees, and communities, whether they're canoe fishermen in Senegal, kattumaram fishermen in India, or lobstermen in Canada.
Most fisherfolks do not employ the intellectual depth of analysis and breadth of approach of political-social thinkers, but rather prefer to worry about their living and survival today and tomorrow. A whole fishing season is a lot. Thus, while it'd be quite difficult to mobilize them to international or global struggles, they're not strange to more restricted politics, for they more than anybody else understand that fishery management is predominantly a matter of access to resources, and distribution of the benefits derived from those resources among sectors. Mike gave examples of such perception [e.g., p.185] and of fisherfolk’s political responses [e.g., p.198].
Mike [p.284] wrote that any development comes at the expense of somebody. Nowadays, this dilemma has become even more complex. Because of the many stocks that are either fully exploited or overfished, development has become in the view of many a manifestation of evil. In the eyes of such people fisheries must be curtailed and reduced, and in some cases closed down altogether. The question to be asked is on whose expense such reductions should come? I have no problem with the development dilemma, when development helps small-scale fisherfolk to recover or improve their access to inshore and coastal waters resources, otherwise fished by fleets from outside their area, country, or even continent.
In my contribution to the India's National Workshop on Low Energy Fishing (Kochin, 1991), I set forth, what I call the MB-Y's Allocation Principle (Fish.Technol. Spec.Issue), p.122):
(i) all fish that can be caught by artisanal fishermen should be caught only by artisanal fishermen;
(ii) all fish that cannot be caught by artisanal fishermen, but can be caught by small-scale commercial fishermen should only be caught by small-scale commercial fishermen;
(iii) all fish that cannot be caught by small-scale commercial fishermen, but can be caught by medium-scale commercial fishermen should only be caught by the medium-scale commercial fishermen;
(iv) only such resources, which are not accessible to any of the above sectors, or which cannot be feasibly caught, handled, and processed by them, should be allocated to industrial, large-scale fisheries.
I recognize, of course, that this sets a rather ideal standard, but it should do as a guiding principle.
Fisherfolk organizations: members and organizers
I think that the gist of the discussion was about the role of organizations and the outsider organizers versus external factors such as governments, sponsors, antagonist interests, and rival organizations, on one hand, and versus their actual and potential members, as well as the people at large, on the other. As to the latter subject, Aliou [p.79], said that he doesn't remember being ever asked by fishermen to come and help them, and asked are the activists as indispensable as they think? …
Here comes the eternal question if it is the calf that is hungry, or the cow that wants to suckle it. It seems that, in our case, there're more cows coming in with their udders full than calves eager to suck. And there're many historical and other reasons for this situation, a wrong sort of milk being only one of them.
There’s and ancient instruction to students of medicine. Doctors’ first and foremost duty is not to cause harm to their patients. A similar commandment should be reiterated to outsider organizers and activists: do not cause harm to fisherfolk. Erroneous development project may cause fishing people to invest their scarce resources in money-losing equipment, or infeasible ventures, while adventurous and violent protests may cost them their lives. Those who suffer, economically and otherwise, are the fisherfolk. We, the outsiders, who unintentionally have misled them won't have to reduce our food intake because of our duds, and our children won't have to go to school barefoot. These are our “clients” who have to pay for our mistakes.
Not once, fisherfolk had to tell the outsiders to go away and not to come back, sometimes before and sometimes after they had done damage to them, their cause, or their community. Quite recently, an anthropologist came to a fishing community, was well received, and had very good intentions to be helpful with the fishermen's struggle against government's management methodology leading to their dislocation. But, they were very angry when they found that the anthropologist had co-authored a study alleging that the fishermen's claim to traditional fishing rights is questionable, because it needs more generations to create "tradition", than that fishery can historically claim. As if what's tradition depends on chronology rather than on people's own perceptions.
Sometimes, people get up spontaneously, as Nalini reports from India [p.298], and only then are joined by outsiders, who help them to organize into formal groupings. Spontaneous people's movements are as a rule motivated by actual, tangible needs perceived by the people, hence carry a promise of wide and fast recruitment of members. Such real needs would also determine the membership composition and character, and the agenda and the area reach of the organization.
Models of organizations that may be valid for fishing people vary: trade-union-type organizations, small-owner associations, credit schemes, co-operatives, marketing societies, mutual-insurance groups, etc. Their choice should depend upon the existing social norms, traditions, and culture. Various traditional groupings may successfully become frameworks that assume new agendas. In my view, the organizers' success depends not only upon the sort of organization they settle on, but also on how careful and intelligent was the identification of the respective client-groups.
For example, most small-scale boat-owners, themselves hard-working and low-income sector, are in fact employers with a capitalist outlook. Even if they struggle for or receive off-season dole [p.276], I believe that defining them as "working class", meaning: proletariat, [Mike, p.261] is delusive and unproductive. Their employees, usually, share-fishermen, who are working class indeed, may only partly have "fishing proletariat" interests as against their employers' profit-making orientation, because, especially in the Southern World, some of them may be children or other relatives of the owner. They'd rather stick to their employers than get organized in any group antagonizing them. In many cases, to make a meaningful impact, organizers must concentrate on such small-scale employers. These people, who in some southern countries may be themselves poor, especially be western standards, want to keep their fishing business going, so as to make however scarce living for themselves and their crews.
Fishing people, usually, don’t tend to maintain their organizations just for the sake of staying organized. Whether an organization's demise comes upon the conclusion of core issue, or it keeps acting, depends on specific conditions of the place, time, and people. And, as Mike wrote [p.173], an organization's failure may take a generation to recover. However attractive to outside leaders, association or identification with other groupings, organizations, and institutions that have wider, national or international or non-fishery agendas, may be opposed by local leadership, as according to Nalini [p.339] has happened in India. And I'm in agreement with Mike [p.275] that association with extraneous bodies that may enter in conflict of interest with fishing people, such as "green" NGOs, or any government-associated institutions, may be repelling to some of its potential and actual members. So, whoever comes to support fisherfolk, first thing should ask them which they consider to be the most important issues, arrange those into a working agenda, and just help them to tackle it.
Outsider activists must recognize that they are under a continual scrutiny by the fisherfolk. Some of them are misled by the external appearance and low educational level of so many small-scale fishermen. But, only if they realize that they have to do with people, who are as a rule brave, intelligent, and wise, they have a good chance to be accepted. For, fishermen must be brave to go to sea, intelligent to find and catch their fish, and wise to stay alive and stay in business.
Social stratification
A reality, which social scientists and activists, whether researchers or intervening "agents-of-change" often meet in fishing communities, and which they often "don't like", is social and economic stratification among the fisherfolk. Nalini has been talking about its development in India, following the introduction of modern technology, especially, fishing craft motorization [p.153 and on]. Mike told about another reason for stratification: exclusive access to a rich snow-crab fishery by relatively few, but influential boat owners (p.231 and on).
Stratification forces organizers to face intra-community conflicts of interests and resulting deterioration of solidarity, and even hostility. Such stratification has frustrated many fishery and community development projects, as well as fisherfolk organizers everywhere. More often than not, the "bigwigs" assume the role of speakers for and leaders of the whole community, and outsider activists looking for in-community "counterparts" fell their easy prey.
Not less dangerous to innocent activists are internal frictions within and between fishing communities, stemming from frequently old, clan, tribe, or extended family conflicts. I saw whole fishing villages burning for reasons that had nothing to do with the social, economic, and political problems the organizing efforts, or projects intended to solve,
but in result of inter-religion, inter-tribal, or intra-community strives.
Cherchez la famme
I think that the discussion about the role of women in fisheries [p.81 and on] could have been more fruitful, if not the attempts to generalize. Here I fully agree with Aliou, who opposed such generalization, insisting "that the participation of women in the process of social movement and organization, and their capacity to participate, depends on the role they actually play in the fishery", and on the "general social condition of women”, which doesn't have to do with fisheries directly.
Take, for example, West Africa's famous "fish mammies" – female fish processors and fishmongers. Although, their standards of life and working conditions are on the whole much lower than those of the women in Canadian fishing communities, their relative status versus the mainly male fishermen is, in my opinion, stronger. As soon as the fishermen are beaching their canoes, those are the women, who carry the fish for smoking in their homes. They not just smoke the fish, and take care of firewood supply, but also carry the fish to sell on the market, or otherwise sell them to "wholesalers". Women help to finance fishermen's gear and fuel, and in general, fishermen are indebted to their own wives, sisters, or any other women, who thus “buy” the right to take care of their catches. In short, those are the fish mammies who hold the purse.
From the social point of view, every one of them is or tries to be an independent entrepreneur, a small-scale working capitalist. Some of them succeeded, by owning one or more canoes, or even larger fishing craft. When they deem it necessary, they organize into such groupings, as "market-women associations", which, usually, have strong leaderships, and concentrate on narrow, well-defined objectives. Nalini reports from India [p.303 and on] about similar associations, and Aliou wrote how women worried of supply of sardinella - a fish, which is a mainstay of their processing-marketing activities - forced a general union to stand up against the Senegalese government's granting EU fleet access to the sardinella resource [p.368-9].
Most of those women, however, are working under appalling conditions while handling the fish over open smoking kilns. The whole operation carries the danger of fast spreading fires, which have devoured many African huts, houses, and whole villages, and health risks, such as frequent eye ailments and eventual blindness, and lung diseases.
No one organization has done for the fish mammies more than the women of the Ghanaian village of Chorkor, who back in the 1960s, introduced into wide practice a smoking kiln designed by Bentzion Kogan, an FAO fish-processing expert from Israel. This kiln, now well known all over the West African coast as the “Chorkor” kiln, ingenious in its simplicity, has to a large degree eliminated the above troubles, and additionally, has reduced very much the firewood consumption per a unit of smoked fish, and improved the product quality. Based on the simplest local technology, it did what a whole array of expensive, imported smoking kilns couldn't – improving the working conditions, health, and income of its operators. It had been very fast perceived by the users as “appropriate technology”, and widely taken in. Credit-schemes that would provide fish-smoking women with small loans to construct such kilns in their own yards, after well-executed demonstration have had many takers, to give an example of an organization for women, for concrete, achievable goal. Joining a general organization with membership of both genders won't help the fish-processing women. Their needs are different than that of the male fishermen, and their interests often conflicting.
As one example, also from Africa, may serve the establishment of fishermen’s co-operatives, widely supported by both, international aid agencies and NGOs. But, some of those co-operatives have taken over the marketing function from individual small-scale businesswomen into the hands of the men who run those coops. I found that at least in some cases, as on the shores of Lake Victoria, this had been a hidden agenda of the local (male) co-ops activists and managers.
The advancing technology and how to go about it?
We have to face the reality of the irreversible development of more and more efficient technology, based on unstoppable scientific and technical progress. We need a new strategy that, without ignoring, or attempting futile Luddite-type struggles, would enable the preservation of coastal communities and the well being of inshore fisherfolks.
I'd divide the problem into two: one is about the perfusion of modern technology throughout the artisanal and other small-scale sectors, and the other is about resources allocation.
There's been a lot of discussion during the second half of the past century about what is appropriate technology. Various agents-of-change, technologists, social scientists, development experts and consultants, and political activists were having the time of their lives writing books and learned papers, arguing with each other, and attacking each the others' approach, the fishing people were quick to make their choices. Their criteria appeared to be quite different of those of the outsiders both, those who tried to introduce new equipment and methods, and those who opposed modern technology.
Fisherfolks had quickly recognized and absorbed, in particular outboard motors and nylon netting, because both boosted returns on their investment, and increased their income. Outboard motors, as Aliou also writes [p.344], have revolutionized the artisanal fisheries in Southern countries, and "permitted the artisanal fishermen to extend their territories and compete with the industrial fishermen". Other examples of up-to-date technologies that are considered appropriate by many Southern wold's artisanal and small-scale fishermen are echo sounders and GPS, not to speak of cellular phones popular in India even over the kattumaram fleet.
Those manufacturers, who were able to supply reliable machines and reasonable or at least best available level of support services for their makes, enjoyed the development of extensive markets. The discussions whether outboard motors represent appropriate technology or not quickly lost its relevancy. The real problems have been how appropriate has been the manner in which these technologies have been introduced, maintained, financed, and serviced, and how to minimize their negative social consequences.
I don't believe that there is any ideology and realistic strategy, able to arrest this march of modernization, strongly supported by the younger and better-educated fishermen, into the small-scale fishery sectors. Fisherfolk's organizations and their outside supporters should therefore focus on two issues: one – how the improved technology should best be used for their users benefit, and two – how to improve the financial and technical conditions of their acquisition and maintenance.
I’ve seen several ways how new technology spreads over artisanal and small-scale fisheries in Southern countries. In too many cases fishermen must pay very high interest rate for the money they need to acquire the desired equipment. They sometime return their debt by cash payments, but most often in nature, by delivering their catch to their respective moneylenders at prices below those they’d be able to get on a “free” market.
Outsider supporters may not like the “march of technology” into fishing communities, but by leaving the things as described above wouldn’t stop the technology, but only to maintain the tough conditions of its acquisition. Therefore, one way of supporting fishing people would be to help them organize for regular, official banking rates financing of their technical advancement, on the one hand, and to assist them in their competition over access to fishing grounds and resources against outside, large-scale fleets, on the other.
Going global
The process of globalization seems unstoppable. More and more countries are going to participate in it, and it is going to be more and more profound. Its character would most certainly keep changing, while the self-serving approach of the powers represented by WTO and its neoliberal economics, kept at bay at the moment by Southern countries and in-house opposition, would eventually give way to more equitable strategies. Trying to stop globalization is like trying to stop technology, all the more that they both successfully interact. One of its more important components, the Internet, enables world-reaching new personal, business, and political bonds, and free exchange of information, knowledge, and opinions. It is one of the mainstays of globalization, and at the same time, bears the seeds of its constant change and further development.
Is there a way in which various national and sub-national fishermen, fishworkers, fisherfolk, etc., organization could go global, too? As it is well known, the former attempts eventually failed, for reasons already described in former issues of SAMUDRA Report. My feeling is that the schism was apart from South-North leadership argument, due to excessive expectations as to the degree of unification, and agenda specifics. So, is such worldwide co-operation really needed, and if yes, what should be done?
No doubt, wherever issues involving fisherfolk’s interests are dealt with on the global arena, a united, multinational body could assume an important position, as a supporter of their causes. Such a body can be, at least initially, a loose federation of national and international groups and organizations, centered on an agenda, which is vague enough to enable the various groups to feel comfortable under its umbrella. It can have a coordinating secretariat composed of representatives of all member organizations with a revolving chairmanship, etc. Such structure would eliminate most potential points of friction, and enable all members have an equal position, say, and appearance, on one hand, and keep its full independence, on the other. It even may survive and be active for many years.