Bangkok Post July 23 1999
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Wasant Techawongtham There is calm in the southern seas, but it's a calm before the storm. Faced with a precipitous drop in their catch, thousands of small anchovy fishermen decided it was not worth going out to sea while larger trawlers with strong floodlights hogged up the fish at night. They staged a 12-day blockade of Songkhla Bay last month to demand a ban on night anchovy fishing. Officials claimed it caused a 100 million baht in economic damage. After authorities adopted a menacing pose, ready to pounce if the protesters refused to disperse voluntarily, the fishermen lifted their blockade but not before the government promised to take up their grievances and come up with a fair solution soon. The four-month lull will allow an ad hoc committee to find facts and make recommendations to the National Fishery Policy Committee, which will make the final decision. Meanwhile, night fishing continues. But whatever decision the fishery policy panel makes, it must address the long-term problem-how to fish sustainably-if we want to avoid disaster to our marine resources. The anchovy conflict is just a symptom of the crisis affecting Thai seas which will not be solved by an ad hoc solution. The fish themselves are a good indicator of the state of the Thai seas. Their abundance in the past, which spawned the great number of night fishing boats, ironically resulted from the depletion of larger fish species through decades of overfishing. Because anchovy, a small fish with a big economic value, is on the lower rung of the food ladder, the decreasing number of predators allows its population to thrive. Another reason for its abundance, strange but eerily true, is the large volume of wastewater flushed into the sea from factories and households. The nutrients in the wastewater feed the plankton, which in turn is eaten by anchovy, perpetuating its population boom. Their number would have been enough to satisfy both small and commercial fishermen had fishing been carefully controlled. But the commercial fishermen with their destructive gear went on the rampage after the big fish, and when their number dwindled, went after the small ones. And what have our policy makers done to control this destruction? Precious little. In fact, they have encouraged it by legalising the use of lights and fine-mesh nets for anchovy fishing. According to fishery experts, no other country in the world allows the use of lights for night fishing. Most, particularly the developed, countries try to protect and conserve their marine stocks because they provide food security. Thailand has even more reason to keep its seas in shipshape; not only do they provide a source of protein but help to sustain the 60-billion-baht-a-year seafood export industry. The collapse of the Thai seas will destroy this industry and lead to social unrest resulting from the scrambling for the remaining limited resources. There is now a kind of consensus that the exploitation of marine resources needs systematic management which so far has been lacking. Even big trawler operators and seafood industrialists who have been responsible in large part for the depletion of fish stocks have now agreed that fishing must be controlled. But top policy-makers continue to be ignorant about the mounting evidence of the impending doom. I remember asking PM Chuan a few months ago what to do to protect our marine resources from being wiped out. He replied: "There's nothing to worry about. There are plenty of fish left in the sea."I wonder whether he has changed his view now that the battle over anchovy has flared up again and again, practically in his front yard in Trang, and many of the small fisherfolk have returned their Democratic Party membership cards. - Wasant Techawongtham is Deputy News Editor for Environment and Urban Affairs, Bangkok Post. © Copyright The Post Publishing Public Co., Ltd. 1999 Comments to: Webmaster |
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