'The Slaves of Water': Socio-Cultural Construction of the Community- Based Coastal Resource Management in the South-Eastern
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‘The Slaves of Water’: Socio-cultural Construction of the Community- based Coastal Resource Management in the South-eastern Bangladesh Apurba Krishna Deb 1 Abstract The hereditary Hindu ‘ Jaladas ’ (literally ‘slaves of water’) caste-based fishers, a socio- politically secluded ecological community, developed and reshaped their resource and territorial management practices tuned to ethno-ecological knowledge, hydro-geological conditions, cultural heritage, value-systems and economic well-being through a long interaction with their immediate environment. This study, based on extensive participatory field works in coastal fishing villages of Cox’sBazar district, Bangladesh for around twenty months, examines how locally crafted diverse management institutions survived for several decades, with special focus on ‘faar’ management system. Based on generally accepted values and operational clarities, such age-old institutions manage fishing entitlements through exercising set of rules. ‘Faar’ system is widely prevalent among ‘estuarine and marine set bag net’ (E/MSBN) and gill net operators targeting seasonally available commercial species. The scope, principles, and temporal and spatial variations of fishing entitlements are described. This study also examines the relevant socio-cultural constructions of the rural institutions and fishing in pretty details. Key words: Bangladesh, traditional fishers, fishing entitlement, resource management, artisanal fishery 1. Background: Bangladesh is rich in aquatic resources; it is the uniquely located largest active deltaic region of the world and an expanded floodplain with the confluence and immense influence of three mighty rivers- Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna (GBM) that merge in her plain before entering the Bay of Bengal. Her richness in aquatic ecosystems and resources therein enabled rural ‘working class’ population to be engaged in fishing for sustenance and livelihoods for whole or part of the year since time immemorial. Graced by her huge water body, fishery plays a very significant role in terms of nutrition, employment, foreign exchange earning and food supply. Evidences of fishing are found among the prehistoric artefacts (Allchin and Allchin 1982, Sarker 1984, Reeves 2003), in the artefacts of the ‘Harappan’ pottery, motif and civilization of the Indus Valley (Piggott 1950, Allchin and Allchin 1982, Bagchi 1955) and ‘Asokan’ epigraphical materials (Hora 1950, Thaper 1961). Religious texts also mention of fish and fishing. 1 Natural Resources Institute, Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth and Resources University of Manitoba, 319 Sinott Building, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2 Telephone: 204-275-5492 (Res.)/204-474-9455 (W), Fax: 204-261-0038 Email: [email protected] 1 Artisanal fishery illustrates a unique complex and dynamic case of human-in-nature systems. It is a major concern worldwide (Lawson 1978, Acheson 1981, Kurien 1996, Pauly et al. 1998, Berkes et al. 2001, Bene et al. 2004, Kooiman et al. 2005, Johnson 2006) from the view points of social justice, sustainability, poverty and resource governance, and in many cases, the dwindling status of artisanal fishery threatened biodiversity, livelihoods and food security of the dependent population, possibly irreversibly. In the south eastern parts of Bangladesh, coastal fishers have evolved sets of practices for management of the aquatic resources and maintaining control over the territories that are fundamental to their very existence and livelihoods. For fisheries governance aimed at promoting social and ecological sustainability, artisanal fisheries may be the most useful for political argument at the global level (Johnson 2006). The critical importance of the artisanal fisheries in Bangladesh can be speculated from the fact that almost whole aspects of floodplain fisheries is traditional and >90% of the marine catch is derived from this fishery, while the remainder is contributed by export oriented industrial fishery. The artisanal fisheries in Bangladesh are characterized by both quantitative and qualitative attributes: simple to complex craft and gear operations, almost zero to high capital involvement, individual to group ownership, social or caste identity, social and economic reciprocity and coercive dependence on network relationships and institutions, manual to motorized crafts an highly diverse gears, few hours to few days of operation, highly dispersed fishing areas, seasonality, various degrees of livelihood dependence, household consumption to international marketing, distinct gender roles, cultural and religious rituals, fishing pressures, low to high catch rate and targeted species, low earnings and general prevalence of poverty among fishers. In both academic and policy level arena, artisanal fishery and fishers remained widely neglected for decades. These artisanal fishers can be termed as a 'repository of valuable knowledge about the dynamic nature of fisheries resources and ecosystem'. The economy of these fishers is mostly subsistence 2 oriented, though a section of them run on commercial venture. The coastal ecological communities of the Bengal delta have developed and reshaped their cultural heritage, value-systems and economic well-being through a long interaction with their immediate environment. The fishers as an ecological community depend largely on the freshwater and marine fisheries resources for survival and for that they developed unique heritage of ethno-ecological knowledge base that remained largely ignored by the fishery scientists. This study will reveal that ethnicity and hereditary experience still plays an important role in resource conservation and management. One of the root- causes of management and institutional inefficiency in fisheries is attributed to the fact that knowledge of and links with the complexity of the real life of recipients were virtually minimal or non-existent in most of the development efforts. There is a serious need for 2 Subsistence fishing or fishers are little known as fishing literature largely dealt with biological issues avoiding human dimensions, and are largely ignored or blithely acknowledged by policy makers also. Subsistence itself is a magic word with multiple connotations and contextual meanings. Schumann and Macinko (2007) argue that defining subsistence is difficult and must be a context driven exercise. In the context of rural Bengal, I define subsistence fishing as a mode of production intended to fulfill basic survival needs usually with typical coercive or reciprocal production relations and cultural orientation mediated within complex social-nature relationships. Both subsistence fishing and fishers are characterized by resilience, labour-absorption, indigenous knowledge, poverty and chaotic management. 2 exploring ‘indigenous knowledge’ (IK) which is deeply anchored on the down to earth local socio-economic fabric and hence enjoys wide social acceptability. Human civilization in the last two decades witnessed a heightened interest in knowing and seeking support from the rural people, who are now labeled as ‘indigenous knowledge holders and practitioners’. Once known as the domain of ethno-biologists and cultural anthropologists, scholars from multiple disciplines have started exploring people’s knowledge for fulfilling objectives like documentation, indigenous rights movement, community based natural resource management, empowerment, political and institutional structures, policy revision and bottom-up rural development (Ostrom 1990, Bromley 1991, Grenier 1998, Sillitoe, 1998, Uphoff 1998, Berkes 1999, Johannes 2002, Ramkrishnan 2005 ). The approaches and objectives of exploring common people’s knowledge and practices are not only ‘human-centered’, but also ‘humanity oriented’. We are now in a historical interface when the growing challenges of social and economic sustainability of natural resource management and embedded livelihood dependencies of user communities are manifested globally. The intimacy of the human- nature relations and the means of livelihoods centering the nature are such that resource users develop a peculiar set of knowledge base on attributes like the resources, ecological conditions and dynamics therein in a given socio-cultural context. There are inherent capabilities of local knowledge to be translated practically and fundamentally into alternative approaches to relations with and management of natural resources with a much greater capacity to self-direct and self-manage, thereby empowering them through provision of control over core factors in their lives and livelihoods (Davis and Wagner 2003). The use of local knowledge in development planning has only been registered in recent years ( Raychaudhury 1980, Warren et al . 1999, Grenier 1998, Berkes 1999, Berkes and Folke 2000, Mathooko 2005). The use of IK in fisheries lags behind that in agriculture, but has a 25-year history (Johannes 1982). It has been used in a number of coastal/marine areas in the Asia-Pacific region (Johannes 1982, 2002; Ruddle 1989,1989; Aswani 2005), and is increasingly seen as a legitimate source of information for participatory management (Berkes et al. 2001, Davis and Wagner 2003 ). Impressive practical results about fish stock, migration and spawning have been obtained from the use of IK for fishery development in the lower Mekong basin, which is also a floodplain area (Mekong River Commission 2001). Baird (1999) describes how the local ecological knowledge of Mekong basin fishers played an important role in framing management