The season has finally come to an end here in Goa. The last of the 'package tourists' have arrived, risking the monsoon, and the backpackers are here looking for cheap off-season accommodation. All that is left on the once-packed beaches are sleeping dogs, day-trippers sleeping off the excess of a whisky-fuelled night, a few sun worshippers in ill-fitting bikinis, and the fishermen.
The local fishing communities have begun to fish again and the beach is starting to return to the way it looked 10 years ago or so. Nets and ropes line the beach. Men, neck deep in lagoon waters, drag their nets through the tides, catching enough fish for their families’ dinners. For hundreds of years, fishing communities around the world have lived this way — a dynamic and sustainable existence along the coastal belts. Generations have grown up with a profound understanding and respect for their environment — everything it gives and everything it takes.
In certain areas of India’s western coastline, fishermen from different castes could identify each other by the way they threw their nets. Each caste group had their own system of fishing as well as fish species to catch. Higher caste members were permitted to catch the larger fish while lower castes would catch the smaller ones. This system, while seen as unjust to many, was sustainable in many ways. Communities would take what their families required to sustain a reasonable standard of living. They knew that their resources were finite and they respected that. They also knew of the seasons during which the fish laid their eggs, the time they needed to mature and continue the life cycle, and of their migration patterns.
They knew that their resources were finite and they respected that.
For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, this natural flow has existed between people and their environment — an understanding of how to manage these life-giving resources in a way that mutually benefited the society and our essential bio-diversity.
I talk to Guru, a young fisherman here in Palolem. He’s 30-years-old, married, and has one child. He and his father run tourist trips via boat to look at the dolphins further out to sea. All day long during the season, you can smell kerosene, hear the drone of the fishing boat engines and the piercing screams of over-excited tourists trying to catch a glimpse of a dolphin’s fin or tail as it hunts for small fish.
They make good money, says Guru. Every trip costs a minimum of ₹1000 for a 45-minute round trip on the boat. He tells me that local fishing has dramatically diminished over the past 10 years, making it difficult to provide his growing family with the sustainable income it needs. The dolphin trips are now his only real source of income; and like so many communities around the world, as their income base shifts and they begin to earn hard currency, they become economic consumers, slowly distancing themselves from hundreds of years of tradition and resource-based self-sustainability.
As a community’s environment and lifestyle change, so do its priorities; in this case causing the disappearance of traditionally hand-made wooden fishing boats. At the far end of the beach, beautifully-crafted wooden boats lie rotting and vandalised, unloved and uncared for, and once-valuable and cherished nets are now buried in the sand.
It’s not just the changing social dynamic that is responsible. The fishermen tell me that they want to fish, but what can they do, when the beach is full of money-toting tourists and there are so few fish to catch? Over the last few years, fishermen’s catches have steadily dropped and the biggest responsible culprits lie just a little out to sea — the trawlers.
At night, the horizon is often lit up with tiny bobbing lights; during the day they crisscross the local waters, engines pumping black smoke as they strain to drag heavy nets through the water.
Over the last few years, fishermen have experienced huge changes as businessmen have begun to exploit the shallow waters of the west coast. Big diesel-driven trawlers prowl the waters with purse nets, scraping the bottom of the sea and lifting all the life. Fish eggs, tiny crustaceans — everything is taken, then dumped onto the deck of the boat. Fishermen busy themselves with plastic boards, flicking anything that is saleable into a basket; the rest of the dead are thrown back into the sea. Day in, day out, throughout the season, the trawlers take anything and everything.
Big diesel-driven trawlers prowl the waters with purse nets, scraping the bottom of the sea and lifting all the life. Somewhere inland, a man sits at a desk and taps figures into a calculator to work out how much profit he has made.
This, according to the local fishermen, is the real cause of the problem. Fishing is now seen just as a profit-based activity. Businessmen, mainly local politicians, own these boats and easily flout seasonal and quota laws. No one seems to be able to change anything. For the last few years, fishermen have come together to lobby for changes and law-enforcement, but local government officials are also boat-owning businessmen and have no desire to reduce their own annual profits. They know that time is running out and that soon fish stocks will begin to collapse, but that’s “not their problem”. Their only concern is to make money and to make it before anyone else gets the chance.
It’s all “big business”, and as global demand increases, so does the value of our resources. As long as you have the hardware to collect, the resources are free — and that’s a profitable business.
We go to one of the ports, a place called Betul on the estuary, where some of the bigger trawlers come in. Here we meet one of the boat owners, dressed in slacks and a clean shirt, mobile phone clipped to his designer belt. He tells us that it is the sardine season. Billions of sardines migrating along India’s west coast are scooped up by giant nets, loaded into the trawlers' holds and then taken to port. He explains that these sardines are headed to Karnataka, the neighbouring state, to be processed into feed for huge chicken farms, a source of valuable protein for another growing food business. He is a happy man, content with his business interests of fishing and mining.
So as the giant trawlers take the lion’s share of the sardine, mackerel and kingfish bounty out of the sea, the smaller trawlers sweep up everything else. Local fishermen worry about what the future will hold for them.
If there are no more fish in their sea there will no longer be dolphins; and without dolphins there will be no tourists to let them earn an income.
Music by Gary Reuben Morris - hoorayface.bandcamp.com/
