Women in Fisheries

FOREWORD We organized the Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries through the recommendation made in the International Symposium on Women in Fisheries held four years ago in Chiangmai, in conjunction with the 5th Asian Fisheries Forum. We are pleased to see the number of participants involved in women in fisheries issues growing. The Symposia have also attracted interested men and women who participated actively in the discussions. From women issues at the Asian level, which was the main focus of the Chiangmai Symposium, we have moved towards issues at the global level in the Kaoshiung Symposium. This time, participants from all corners of the earth met to discuss this very important topic. After the failures in many of the development projects planned by international agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, where women were excluded in the planning and implementation phase, experts realized that the sustainability of projects require the participation from both women and men–not as woman and man per se, but as a community. This Symposium and the earlier one, although largely focusing on women, also raised several gender issues, among which were the involvement of communities in the sapyaw fishery in the Philippines, and the vulnerability of fishers and their families to HIV/AIDS. The next logical step is to move towards gender and fisheries (GAF), instead of focusing just on women. The methodology developed in gender and development (GAD) programs could be utilized for GAF studies, so that the constraints and inequity among men and women may be better understood, and recommendations made to overcome the inequity. The next Symposium in Penang in 2004, will definitely see more papers devoted to issues of gender inequity in the fisheries sector and means to address them. This Symposium, like the last one, would not have materialized, if not for the generous support of our sponsors. We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the Department for International Development (DFID), United Kingdom, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade/New Zealand Agency for Overseas Development (NZAOD), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). This Proceedings is by no means the definitive work on women in fisheries at the global level. We feel that such a work is not yet possible given the dearth of data and lack of developed methods for studying the field. Nevertheless, we hope that it will be another waypoint along the road, and it will contribute towards better comprehension of some of the issues. N. H. Chao-Liao K. Matics M. C. Nandeesha M. Shariff I. Siason E. Tech M.J. Williams Co-convenors Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries v WOMEN IN FISHERIES: POINTERS FOR DEVELOPMENT M.J. Williams ICLARM - The World Fish Center, Malaysia All over the world, women contribute in multiple ways to the production, processing, marketing and management of fish and other living aquatic resources. The first ever Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on 29 November 2001 generated the present collection of papers on women in fisheries. These published Proceedings go beyond the actual Symposium in two ways. First, the papers that were initially presented have been revised and, therefore, more detailed and richer in information content than the short, spoken versions. These written versions have also benefited from the discussions during and around the Symposium. Second, two additional papers, from Africa, are presented in this volume, thus increasing the richness of African material on women in fisheries. The reader of this volume will find in it a wealth of information, albeit in a very heterogeneous form, that the authors have had to draw from many different sources. Some are primary research studies whereas most are historical reviews from first hand experience of the authors or derived from other written materials, often contained in reports of fisheries development projects, newspapers and source materials well outside the fish sectors. Such is the nature of our knowledge in the field of women's, and also gender, roles in fisheries that few of the primary sources were actually designed to address the field in a rigorous and analytical way. They rather addressed other aspects of fish and fisheries and incidentally revealed much of value, at least by description, on women's roles. To help the reader better access the wealth of material in these Proceedings, we have assisted in three ways. First, by arranging the papers into different sections, mainly by geographic region. Second, by providing an index to the contents so that topics, e.g., post-harvest processing, countries, localities and projects/initiatives, can be located in the different papers. Third, by providing this overview and drawing out the key pointers for development from all the papers, we provide a short guide to what each paper contains, the approach it takes and, across all papers, the main messages for human development. In the conclusion of this overview, we summarize these messages into 10 key pointers for development. Setting the Scene The Proceedings begin with messages from the co-conveners of the Symposium, the then-President (Dr I.C. Liao) and the then-past President (Prof. M. Shariff) of the Asian Fisheries Society, setting in context the Society's involvement in the issue of women in fisheries. The Asian region, the largest producer of fish in the world, has now strongly recognized the fact that women make very important contributions to fisheries. This is reflected in the Society's sponsorship of the Symposium and to real changes in gender balance of the Society's office bearers. Indeed, I would reflect that the society has sent a dramatic signal with its new woman president and with 5 of 16 women councilors. In a region not noted for leading the world in women's issues, contrast this with, for example, the still nearly all male composition of the Boards of companies in the OECD countries, despite years of efforts to redress this. We then present a short personal summary of the Proceedings by Sunderarajan, who participated in the Symposium and reflected on the major threads from the perspective of a professional working in a non- government organization (NGO) movement in southern India. vii Nandeesha and Tech explore in some depth the sorts of impact women are making in the Asian Fisheries Society (AFS), a scientific society founded in 1984 for fisheries professionals to communicate, share information and cooperate. Noting the genesis of the women in fisheries professional meetings and symposia which the Society has become associated since 1994, the authors conclude that significant advances have been made in raising awareness of the issues. This has been achieved through the publishing of the proceedings, the photography competition at the AFS forums every three years (sponsored by PADEK in Cambodia) and the maturing understanding of the issues, signaled by the shift to a gender and not just a women's focus. Small but powerful signals, such as ensuring that women are included as keynote speakers at conferences and encouraging more women on the Council, have also helped. Several networks at the national level, e.g. in Indo-China countries and in Philippines, have been generated by the AFS action and it is perhaps here that the greatest hope for real impact in the lives of women will occur. This paper also tracks the recommendations of the AFS symposia. Williams, Williams and Choo make a case for the fisheries sectors to follow the lead of other international actors, especially in the development assistance community, and to shift focus from 'women in fisheries' to 'gender and fisheries'. The authors argue that, although gender imbalances remain formidable against women, this cannot be resolved only by focusing on women nor can it be tackled by thinking of women only within the current realities of the sectors but through bringing about change in these realities. Research and research organizations are urged to become more rigorous and aware in their research and data gathering on gender and fisheries. Research is particularly critical at this point in history because real knowledge is hampered by a dearth of basic information and data on gender roles. The authors note that most of those enlisted by the Society in the women in fisheries events are not professional social scientists or gender specialists but have been drawn in variously through personal commitment. The authors are particularly indebted to Dr M.C. Nandeesha (a man and, by training, a biologist) who has been the unselfish catalyst and champion of the issue since the early 1990s when he worked in Cambodia. Asia These above general background papers precede the regional sections, the first of which is on Asia. Not surprisingly, this is the largest section, with eight papers. This section begins with a major overview paper that was coordinated by Professor Ida Siason, the Chancellor of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas and a member of the AFS council. Thirteen other authors from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Mekong River Commission Secretariat contributed to this paper. Due to the scope of the material from the authors, the following 15 countries were covered: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kuwait, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, the Lao PDR, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. Although not complete, China being a notable exception among the large fish producing countries, it does present a very valuable picture of the women (and gender) dimensions of fisheries and aquaculture in developed north Asia, Southeast Asia, south Asia and west Asia. In their overview paper, Siason et al. provide background geographic and demographic material for the 15 countries, grouped as Mekong, Islamic and south Asian countries, Philippines and Japan.

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