The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [208]
Nevertheless, a very recent survey shows that at least in terms of numbers of boats, the traditional sector is still surviving, even if it is not prospering. In all of Kerala there are 4,000 mechanised boats, that is trawlers, 11,000 motorised artisanal boats, and a surprising 28,000 traditional artisanal craft still without motors, these ranging from single logs which provide a precarious perch for some intrepid inshore fisher, to more sophisticated lateen rigged craft.56
These changes have obviously undermined many traditional fishers, or at least made them marginal. Yet they usually lacked the political clout to get local politicians to help, as most fishers all along the Indian coast, and indeed around the ocean, come from low status groups in society. However, the most important fishing group in Kerala, while certainly low status, was also Catholic, and they received support in their protests from radical priests and even members of the church hierarchy. Further north in Goa a leader of agitation against the displacement of traditional fishers in the mid 1970s was harassed by police in the pay of industrial fishing interests, and was given sanctuary in a Jesuit house in Panaji. Sad to say that these efforts were more or less in vain: the process of modernisation and mechanisation was irreversible.
The situation in Gujarat developed in a rather different way. As elsewhere, the number of mechanised boats shot up from 314 mechanised and 3,217 not in 1961, to 15,698 of the former and 8,918 of the latter in 1998. In the same period the number of trawlers rose from none to 6,390. Unlike in most of the rest of India, in Gujarat the artisanal and industrial groups have been able to coexist relatively peacefully, in part because most of the owners of the new industrial trawlers come themselves from traditional fishing communities. Yet there are also less positive changes. The trawler crews are paid in wages now, not with a share of the catch. Much of the gear is now imported – petrol, nylon twine, fibreglass – displacing locally made alternatives. Depletion of fish stocks is a major concern. The huge foreign-owned factory trawlers use smaller and smaller mesh nets, which scoop up marine life indiscriminately, and lead long-term to devastation of fish stocks.57
All this can be seen as the painful, but arguably necessary, process of modernisation, a drive towards greater efficiency based on the use of new technology, which certainly has some winners and some losers. However, over the last two decades Indian Ocean fishers have been confronted by a situation where their fates are largely determined by forces far away and outside their control. This reflects an increased integration of the global market, a process summed up by the term globalisation. To be sure, this was not new. We have shown how one has always been able to write a history of the ocean, looking at connections and processes within its boundaries, yet there also has been, to an increasing degree, a history in the ocean which goes beyond its bounds (hence the title of this chapter). What has happened recently is really an intensification of this process, based on vastly faster communications, and the triumph of open economy and free market notions.
What did this mean for Indian Ocean fishing? We have noted that the Indian Ocean has been relatively underfished. Two processes turned world attention to it. First was the way in which other fishing grounds were being rapidly depleted: as one example, in the mid 1950s around 150,000 bluefish tuna were caught each year in the Atlantic, but by the early