Fisherman, journalist and author Paul Molyneaux has been working for the last year on a book about wild fisheries and aquaculture. He has traveled to Scotland, Alaska, Mexico, Chile, Norway, India, and Thailand to do research for the book. He was recently asked to return to Bangkok, Thailand to participate in a global conference on small scale sustainable fisheries. Paul posted the following story from Thailand about that conference. Molyneaux is the author of two books; A Doryman’s Reflection-A Fisherman’s Life, 2005 and Swim ming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End Of the Wild Oceans, 2007.
 John Kurien, of India, discusses strategy with the delegation from Aceh, Indonesia, a region that took control of its own fisheries after the Tsunami of 2004. While Kurien is a veteran of over 40 years of fisheries activism, for most of the Indonesians, this was their first trip outside the country. Photo © Paul Molyneaux
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An Inside View of Fisheries, Aquaculture, and the Future of Marine Ecosystems and Coastal Communities
The Small Scale Sustainable Fisheries Conference
12 October, Bangkok, What a day at the Civil Society preparatory workshop for the 4SSF. (Small Scale Sustainable Fisheries Conference)
I spent the day listening to all the presentations and discussions. For certain we have all the pieces, we struggle to get the realities, policies, and ideals to match up on one hand, but there are always others that are out of whack on the other. Trying to get those right throws those we have in order into chaos again, and so on.
First came the litany of problems with which we are all too familiar. But delivered in multiple languages, the destruction of habitat, tourism, development, aquaculture, industrial fishing, arrest and imprisonment of fishers, working too close to or across international boundaries.
And worse, a sudden upsurge of academics and policy makers championing ITQs – quota management that will privatize the resources, consolidate the industry, and wipe out small fishing communities. The incidents of this outcome are all well-documented.
Then there are Marine Protected Areas, (MPAs), that impact small fishers, I wrote about all this and more in The Doryman’s Reflection and Swimming in Circles. But there are new twists and new approaches to solutions, an understanding that our message must be unified, it must be tight, and powerful.
Moving toward that means more juggling and refitting of the pieces. In some cases prices should be higher, in some cases lower. While many agree that we should focus on establishing strong local markets as opposed to trying to capitalize on existing export markets. The export markets exist, they are lucrative and impossible to ignore. Women’s roles and women’s rights are being raised as fundamental issues for creating sustainable fisheries. There is a demand for recognition of the value of women’s work in fisheries, especially processing and marketing, and a strong effort to protect women’s access to those sectors.
The following is my contribution to "The Daily Rights" our group bulletin: The Right to Protect Ecoystems
Fish is food; trade is secondary. Ecosystems must be protected. Fishing communities can demand the right to protect the ecosystems that support them. This last statement evolves from my interviews with Pisit Charnsnoh, director of Yadfon, an NGO (Non Governmental Organization) operating in southern Thailand. Pisit sees healthy linkages between communities and their surrounding ecosystems as the foundation of sustainability.
By establishing the right to protect and restore productive ecosystems, fishing communities establish the right to benefit from their efforts, harvesting the surpluses, the interest generated by natural capital. Rather than fight allocation battles over scarce resources, Yadfon helps small-scale fishers fight for the right to increase resource availability. There is real power in taking this position, as fishers in southern Thailand have found. Villagers at the mouth of the Palian River abandoned use of destructive fishing gear, such as the push net, which destroys sea grass beds. They have created sanctuaries, and as their fisheries rebound they are helping to promote the benefits of ecosystem protection to upstream communities.
By putting the ecosystem first, and harvest rights second, fishing communities establish their rights of governance over critical areas, and these in turn become less vulnerable to exploitation from outside interests.
As exemplified by the work of Yadfon, demanding the right to protect ecosystems has high publicity value; consumers can be encouraged to support good work in ecosystem restoration for community benefit by refusing to buy shrimp from farms that pollute the waters communities are trying to protect. They can be encouraged to demand that the global food production system that fosters export-oriented fisheries and aquaculture, not displace local food production systems. This premise of action that Yadfon has nurtured in southern Thailand, offers a useful model for artisanal fishing communities wondering where their power rests. From what I have seen in southern Thailand, fishers’ real power rests in restoring and protecting the ecosystems that sustain life.
October 13, 2008 Bangkok
Let’s cut right to the chase, the process has its ups and downs but is essentially good. It works. At least it worked for the last three days. So here we are in this room full of people from all over the world. How many of us? Somewhere between 50 and a hundred, I should have counted but didn’t.
We have this statement, that we have labored over for three days, and it’s way too long and way too verbose, but it’s our baby and we love it like one, care for it, arranging every word as fastidiously as we would hair on our baby’s head.
 V. Vivekandan of Kerala, India, and Naseegh Jaffer of South Africa, address representatives of small-scale fisheries organizations from 30 countries, including the USA and Canada. Photo © Paul Molyneaux
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Line by line we are giving it the final review, after we have hashed out our ideas in groups divided by language, brainstormed together, and finally brought all our mutual and individual concerns to the table. And here is Thomas Kocherry, booming into the microphone, blasting the ears out of the simultaneous interpreters, who sit in a row of booths in the back translating in English, French, Spanish, Thai and all back and forth, as we sit with earphones listening to the speaker with one ear and the translation with the other.
Thomas has warned us that time is of the essence, and the clock is ticking, but nonetheless we have to get it right. When it comes to Marine Protected Areas we get bogged down, as one guy wants to include professional organizations as having a right to fish in MPAs. No way! There is a visceral reaction throughout the room. We smell fleets, industrial interests. No, no, no.
Then wave upon wave of details: women’s rights, children’s rights, human rights. Fortunately we did not get into fish rights, as this would require a long bout of thinking, and we did not have time.
“Further details included protecting ourselves from tourism, wetland reclamation, demanding our right to participation in regulatory process, get out of jail free cards for all fishers in custody for fishing across borders and other infractions. The right of small-scale fishers to fish across borders. And on and on, thirty-seven items too numerous to mention, but all valid, all important.
There’s a lot in it I’m not too keen on but I say nothing because I want to save all my energy for Article 22, which I had thought we agreed would say we do not want eco-labeling schemes. But there in the draft is a qualifier, we don’t want eco-labeling that does not come from a participatory process, etc. etc. etc. And I am dead set against this because I thought that those of us on the committee that drafted the language were unanimous, but we were not.
When I asked for the change back to no eco-labeling, period, one member was very adamant that the language stay in there. It almost did. Thomas asked, are we happy with this? And one person said yes and he said, okay let’s move on, and I said, “wait a minute, one person said yes.” I then had to go to the mic and explain why I was so adamantly against endorsing any form of labeling other than point of origin. It’s because it is a tool of industrial fisheries, and designed solely for export fisheries. Essentially, eco-labels keep the door open for powerful countries to exploit fisheries in less powerful countries.
 97 representatives from 30 countries, attended a preliminary workshop to form a consensus statement and present it at the 4SSF Conference. Photo © Paul Molyneaux
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Coming to the end of the day.
At a time when everyone wanted to go I hung on, and gradually an understanding spread through the room that eco-labels did not serve the small scale. Thomas hollering at me that I was holding up the process, “It’s all your fault Paul,” and I can hear in his voice that he is having fun, almost ready to laugh, many of us are anyway, and I am shouting back, “put it to a vote put it to a vote.” He does, it passes, and I feel so relieved.
This is what I came here to do, to make sure the language does not get watered down with qualifiers that turn strong positions into pudding that the interests which want to literally kill us, will eat up with pleasure.
So it stuck, and I went to resolve the issue with the person most insistent on qualifiers, and it turns out she works for an NGO that is linked to an organization that does eco-labeling of, among other things, farmed salmon!
But it sticks, and I was exhausted from the adrenaline. The statement has lots of trouble spots but it’s done, and the vast majority of us are willing to sign it.
We did it!
14 October 2008, Bangkok
Access To What?
Nearly 200 people listened to a series of informative speakers at the opening of the Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries Conference, in Bangkok yesterday. But one speaker in particular deserves particular attention: Cosme Caracciolo, secretary of the Confederation of Artisanal Fishers of Chile (CONAPACH). pointed out a long ignored, yet extremely important, fact in the fisheries discussion. “Here today we cannot ignore the economic crisis that is going on in world, said Cosme. “The economic model has failed, and yet this same model is being used in fisheries in the form of ITQs and aquaculture.”
While the failure of the neo-liberal model is now evident, academic missionaries, to use a phrase coined by another speaker, continue to promote it in fisheries. Cosme went on to explain that fishers around the world try in many ways to tell their respective governments how this model has failed. But governments listen more closely to others, he said.
What works is the collective approach, Cosme asserted, and he speaks from experience. In Chile artisanal fishers have formed almost 1000 collectives that have gained jurisdiction over local fishing grounds for benthic resources, and managed to restore local ecosystems and increase production and profits from several important species.
Small-scale fisheries are the solution, said Cosme.
“Once fishing became a solely commercial enterprise it was trapped in an endless quest for growth, always seeking greater efficiency to increase production, and this has had an inverse effect on sustainability. The failure of fisheries is 100 percent the result of Capitalism,” said Cosme. Examples of truly sustainable fisheries in the world support this claim. Most are sustainable because they limit the Capitalist mode’s ability to function.
One of the best known sustainable fisheries in the USA, the Maine lobster fishery, forbids absentee ownership of boats, the Captain must be the owner, and must be on board when the boat is fishing. In addition to this and other regulations, Maine lobster fishers are limited in the number of traps they can fish, and the horsepower of their boat engines. There is nowhere for the capitalist model of increasing efficiency and consolidating resource access under absentee owners, to gain a toehold in this fishery, and that is the fundamental reason for its sustainability. While a state enforcement agency oversees the Maine lobster fishery, fishers themselves enforce these regulations, and the social stigma of getting caught breaking the rules is worse than any punitive fine.
The collectives of Chile operate in a similar manner. For those of us for whom fishing is a way of life, sustainability is top priority, said Cosme. He believes as many here do, that traditional modes of regulating fisheries hold the keys to sustainbility. And based on the crashing of industrial fisheries and the success of the ancient anti-capitalist system, one wonders when the governments and regulators will get it.
