Gender agenda, women in fisheries: a collection of articles from SAMUDRA Report Item Type monograph Publisher International Collective in Support of Fishworkers Download date 25/09/2021 11:39:18 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/1834/18222 SAMUDRA Dossier Gender Agenda Women in fisheries: a collection of articles from SAMUDRA Report International Collective in Support of Fishworkers 27 College Road, Chennai 600 006, India SAMUDRA Dossier Gender Agenda Women in fisheries: a collection of articles from SAMUDRA Report International Collective in Support of Fishworkers 27 College Road, Chennai 600 006, India Gender Agenda Women in fisheries: a collection of articles from SAMUDRA Report SAMUDRA Dossier Published by International Collective in Support of Fishworkers(ICSF) 27 College Road, Chennai 600 006, India Tel: +91 44 2827 5303 Fax: +91 44 2825 4457 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.icsf.net March 2004 Edited by KG Kumar Designed by Satish Babu Printed at Sri Venkatesa Printing House Chennai 600 026, India Copyright © ICSF 2004 While ICSF reserves all rights for this publication, any portion of it may be freely copied and distributed, provided appropriate credit is given. Any commercial use of this material is prohibited without prior permission. ICSF would appreciate receiving a copy of any publication that uses this publication as a source. The opinions and positions expressed in this publication are those of the authors concerned and do not necessarily represent the official views of ICSF. ii Contents Preface ............................................................................ v 1. Women’s rights and fisheries development .................... 1 2. Not just home-makers..................................................... 5 3. Dragging women through suffering ................................ 8 4. Life is the goal, not fishing ............................................. 13 5. Women must recover their spaces .................................. 17 6. The jury’s verdict ............................................................ 23 7. Up against several barriers.............................................. 26 8. Different voices, similar concerns .................................. 33 9. The tattered net of statistics ............................................ 36 10. Cut adrift ......................................................................... 41 11. Innocent victims ............................................................. 46 12. Tussle in Tranquebar....................................................... 50 13. Women can fish too ........................................................ 55 14. Feeling insecure .............................................................. 58 15. Beyond the veil ............................................................... 61 16. Fighting for space ........................................................... 65 17. Island notes ..................................................................... 67 18. A new space .................................................................... 72 19. Gender agenda ................................................................ 75 20. Changing the locks ......................................................... 78 21. Partners in mutual trust ................................................... 84 iii iv Preface From Kochi to Fiji, from Senegal to El Salvador, from Norway to Newfoundland, women of fishing communities play a central role in the fisheries and in maintaining the social fabric of their households and communities. However, they remain largely invisible, and the roles they play, largely undocumented. Official surveys not only often fail to capture the gender diversity of the fishing economy around the world, but they also sometimes systematically introduce biases that underestimate and underplay the role of women in the entire gamut of fisheries-related activities—from net weaving, fishing, processing and marketing of marine products to trading, arranging financial credit and engaging in aquaculture activities. As a result, women’s contributions remain largely unrecognized. Policy interventions directed at supporting women’s roles in the fisheries have consequently been few and far between, contributing to their systematic marginalization within the fisheries. Policymakers have consistently failed to take account of women’s potential roles in environmental and development planning. As the world’s fisheries undergo fundamental changes that spring from overfishing, use of highly efficient technologies, privatization of fisheries resources and poor fisheries management, on the one hand, and the growing thrust towards fish farming, aquaculture and ecolabels, on the other, women in both the North and the South face a battery of similar problems. In the North, the artisanal sector and way of life are in danger, as more and more artisanal fishers are pushed out of the sector by State-sponsored policies to reduce fishing capacity and limit resource exploitation. State policies tend to be geared towards protecting the interests of large industry, often at great cost to the women in the fisheries and their communities. As coastal communities in the North lose traditional access rights to fishery resources, their cultures and future are under threat. In Norway, for instance, the associations of wives of fishermen have demanded that coastal communities be given back their rights to fish freely in coastal waters, and that the State recognize the value of coastal communities and artisanal fisheries. In Southern countries, on the other hand, women fishworkers are struggling to retain their spaces within the fisheries sector, in the face of the larger forces of globalization and liberalization. Even as they demand better access to improved facilities for marketing, transport, storage and processing of fish, they are joining forces with men in the artisanal sector to fight against the proliferation of socially and ecologically destructive v technologies such as trawling. In Senegal, for instance, women have played a prominent role in challenging inequitable fisheries agreements between their country and the European Union, and in securing a better deal for artisanal fishworkers under such agreements. As another dimension, in Peru, a combination of machismo and bureaucracy tends to obscure the role of women in the artisanal fishing sector. Women’s contributions and concerns tend to be neglected because community and household are not part of the official fisheries management paradigm. Typically, fisheries management is a relationship between a government and a rights holder, who, in most cases, is not a community or a household but an individual. Not surprisingly, the fishers targeted by management policies are predominantly men. There is little recognition of the fact that cohesive and strong community institutions, fostered and sustained by women the world over, are the foundations for effective and equitable systems for sustainable management of fisheries resources. Women in fisheries communities are generally not as well organized and have been less effective than men as an outside political force. Where women are organized, they have brought in a perspective that puts improving quality of life and fisheries-based livelihoods as the bottom line. For them, life is the goal, not fishing—they are concerned with sustaining not only the fisheries but also the communities that depend on them. They have brought a community perspective into the fisheries debate. These issues relating to women in fisheries have concerned the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) ever since it was formed as a collective of supporters of the artisanal and small-scale fisheries sector in 1986. A particular emphasis has been given to the gender dimension through the ICSF’s Women in Fisheries programme. All these issues have often been debated in the pages of SAMUDRA Report, the triannual publication of ICSF, through contributions from a range of writers, researchers and activists. Some of those articles are now collected here in this dossier. We hope they will go towards reasserting and valorizing the roles of women in fisheries, helping them occupy the spaces they rightfully deserve. vi Women’s rights and ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ fisheries development Nalini Nayak In the small-scale fisheries sector, it is women who have a predominant role reparations go on all around the globe of the fisherfolk. Nevertheless, there are Our country, like for the long-awaited Earth Summit. anthropological studies that document the many others, is PKnowing that official positions may way of life and the struggles of these now undergoing a not strike any creative dimensions, the non- communities, which highlight the survival process of radical governmental organizations (NGOs) have strategies these people have worked out for structural done their best to lobby and influence themselves against all odds. While this has adjustment to policymakers. Some of these efforts are sure been the case globally, in Asia and the Third comply with to pay dividends, but we from India, and I World at large, the situation of these am sure, many other Asians, are more communities is far more in jeopardy than at demands of the sceptical than ever. Our country, like many present. International others, is now undergoing a process of Monetary Fund in radical structural adjustment to comply with As it stands today, the development in order