angements for the first sale of fish should be enacted.
Fishing communities have rarely being at the center of attention of civil society. Now that so many of them have been taken away by the sea and thousands are faced with a shattered future, they are the focus of an outpouring of concern. This swell of human kindness – if it is not to take the shape of a tsunami of misplaced concerns and competing priorities – needs to be properly channeled. The proposals above should be seen as a modest attempt to begin a discussion on the medium and long-term issues that need to be factored into any rehabilitation plan for the survivors. If successful, this can form the basis for a master plan for ensuring a secure future for fishing communities across the country.
(* the author started professional life organizing cooperatives among small-scale coastal fishing communities and is currently Professor, Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum- 695 011. E-mail email@example.com) 10 January 2005
By Devinder Sharma
As the first news reports of the devastation caused by the tsunami killer waves began to pour in, a newsreader on Aaj Tak's Headline Today television channel asked his correspondent reporting from the scene of destruction in Tamil Nadu in south of India : “Any idea about how much is the loss to business? Can you find that out because that would be more important for our business leaders?”
Little did the newscaster realise or even know that the tsunami disaster, which eventually turned out to be a catastrophe, was more or less the outcome of faulty business and economics. The magnitude of the disaster was only exacerbated by the neo liberal economic policies that pushed economic growth at the expanse of human life. It was the outcome of an insane economic system – led by the World Bank and IMF – that believes in usurping environment, nature and human lives for the sake of unsustainable economic growth for a few.
Since the 1960s, the Asian sea-coast region has been plundered by the large industrialised shrimp firms that brought environmentally-unfriendly aquaculture to its sea shores. Shrimp cultivation, rising to over 8 billion tonnes a year in the year 2000, had already played havoc with the fragile eco-systems. The ‘rape-and-run' industry, as the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) once termed it, was largely funded by the World Bank. Nearly 72 per cent of the shrimp farming is confined to Asia.
The expansion of shrimp farming was at the cost of tropical mangroves -- amongst the world's most important ecosystems. Each acre of mangrove forest destroyed results in an estimated 676 pounds loss in marine harvest. Mangrove swamps have been nature's protection for the coastal regions from the large waves, weathering the impact of cyclones, and serving as a nursery for three-fourth of the commercial fish species that spend part of their life cycle in the mangrove swamps. Mangroves in any case were one of the world's most threatened habitats but instead of replanting the mangrove swamps, faulty economic policies only hastened its disappearance. Despite warning by ecologists and environmentalists, the World Bank turned a deaf ear.
Shrimp farming continued its destructive spree, eating away more than half of the world's mangroves. Since the 1960s, for instance, aquaculture in Thailand resulted in a loss of over 65,000 hectares of mangroves. In Indonesia, Java lost 70 per cent of its mangroves, Sulawesi 49 per cent and Sumatra 36 per cent. So much so that at the time the tsunami struck in all its fury, logging companies were busy axing mangroves in the Aceh province of Indonesia for exports to Malaysia and Singapore.
In India, mangrove cover has been reduced to less than a third of its original in the past three decades. Between 1963 and 1977, the period when aquaculture industry took roots, India destroyed nearly 50 per cent of its mangroves. Local communities were forcibly evicted to make way for the shrimp farms. In Andhra Pradesh, more than 50,000 people were forcibly removed and millions displaced to ma