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SD Conferences
Missing Links in Sustainable Development: South Asian Perspectives
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AbstractsSub-theme: Globalization Panel 3: Trade and sustainable development: The WTO needs a new face Session: Marine fisheries: Compliance, sustainability and livelihoods
Resource Rights: Ensuring Livelihoods for the Coastal Communities The study focuses on Pakistan’s marine fisheries, which span a 700-mile coastline and include the territorial waters of two provinces, Sindh and Balochistan. The analysis addresses the scope for compliance with international food safety (SPS) and sustainable harvesting (MSC) standards. Food safety standards cover both pre-processing and processing activities. Compliance with such standards is key to Pakistan’s fish exports and foreign exchange earnings and to ensuring livelihoods for the coastal fishing communities. A gap analysis illustrates that processing plants tend to comply with food safety standards, primarily due to the threat of loss of market share. However, exporters/processors have less control over pre-processing and harvesting activities further up the supply chain, even though these activities, ultimately, affect their ability to export. Pre-processing is the responsibility of the harbor authorities and entails food safety interventions at three stages: on board the fishing vessels; at the fishing docks and in transit to the processing plants. Compliance lapses at the pre-processing stage are frequent. Moving further back in the supply chain to fish harvesting highlights even more complex issues. The policy, social, economic and ecological dynamics are difficult and the perverse interplay of these variables has led to a sustained degradation of Pakistan’s coastal fisheries, extending well beyond its territorial waters with adverse consequences for the livelihoods of coastal fishing communities. Degradation, here, refers to stock reduction due to both over fishing and to habitat destruction. The problems at this stage underscore the need for sustained remediation. A first attempt would entail harmonizing federal and provincial fishing policies through a consultative process involving all the important stakeholders; in particular, the representatives of the fishing communities who have first hand knowledge of the problems and issues which affect their livelihoods. * Dr. Shaheen Rafi Khan is a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Columbia University, USA. The Stake-net Fishery Association of Negombo Lagoon, Sri Lanka: A Case Study Fisheries are key to the livelihoods of up to a million poor people in Sri Lanka–although the recent tsunami has destroyed up to two thirds of the fishing fleet. This paper focuses on a fishery in the Negombo lagoon. In this lagoon, the main challenge is the well-known fishery management issue of open access. One example of a long-standing collective arrangement for successfully limiting open access is the Kattude or Stake-net Fishery Association. The stake-net is a traditional fishing net used by small scale fishers to harvest shrimp, as they migrate from the estuary back out to sea. This membership-based organisation has been in existence for over 250 years and was codified in a government regulation in 1956. Members own a pella, or share of the fishery, which is a written document recognised by the courts. The pella is limited to one male owner per household and can only be transferred through inherence, with sale forbidden. The four stake-net societies have about 260 members. The members of these societies trap prawns during evening tidal movements. While still poor, members of the society have through access rights to the fishery been able to gain incomes higher than the average incomes of Negombo lagoon fishers. The nighttime nature of the fishery allows many members to have other jobs during the day. The Society’s success rests on its ability to exclude non–members from the fishery and prevent free riding and cheating by members. In addition, the Society appears to have managed the prawns in a way that is equitable for its members with reduced social conflicts and without noticeably depleting the resource. This membership-based association has been helped by characteristics of the prawn resource, by cultural and political factors through close affiliation with the Catholic Church, a culturally distinct membership group, and in the last decade a strong leader of the overall society. However, the Society is now facing challenges due to declining productivity of the fishery and other external threats to the lagoon. This has stimulated the Society to try to work with other fishing groups in the Negombo lagoon to limit access to the wider lagoon as a whole. This attempt to replicate the Society’s success within the stake-net fishery across the many diverse fisheries of the lagoon is a major undertaking whose success or failure may determine whether the Stake-net Fishery Society can continue to provide benefits to its members in the future. * Asha Gunawardena and Paul Steele work with the Institute of Policy Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka. The authors wish to acknowledge the cooperation of Ms. Dinuha Dharmaratne, Mr. Sebastion, the President and other members of the Stake-net Fishery Association of Negombo Lagoon. Balancing Market-Induced Polarization: The Need for a Sustainable Fisheries’ Policy Pakistan’s marine fisheries sector is in dire need of a sustainable fisheries policy. While a federal policy prevails to govern international activity, there is no countervailing provincial policy to balance the concerns at the federal interface with those of local stakeholders. While foreign trawlers interact and negotiate offshore activity with national ministries and regulatory councils, there is no recourse or legally recognized forum that fisher folk communities can table their concerns at to counter such federally facilitated forces. The result is over-fishing and habitat destruction, which further perpetuates the vulnerable position of marginalized communities. This paper outlines the policy environment within which the dynamics of the fishing industry play out, between large trawler-oriented firms and small fisherfolk communities. The absence of effective legal and policy instruments at the provincial level is drawn attention to and examples are drawn from South and South East Asia where governments are struggling to balance the needs of traditional fisher folk livelihoods with the demands of international stakeholders. The paper outlines how recent research and expert-oriented advocacy by community based Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PPF) demonstrates the features and benefits of a consultative policy development process that serves to harmonize provincial and federal legal instruments and create space for the concerns of vulnerable groups such as the traditional, indigenous fisher folk communities, to be presented. * Faisal Haq Shaheen is a Visiting Research Associate with Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). |