KARACHI: Foreign trawlers termed threat to marine wealth
By Our Reporter
KARACHI, July 10: President of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, Mohammad Ali Shah, has warned that if an immediate ban was not imposed on deep-sea fishing by foreign trawlers, Pakistan would lose its entire marine wealth and it would take decades of minimal fishing to replenish the stocks in these waters.
Mr Shah was delivering a lecture in a weekly lecture series, organised by the Pakistan People’s Party, here on Monday. Babu Ghulam Hussain, a former PPP MNA from Thatta presided over the sitting.
The PFF chief recalled that in 1980, the FAO had conducted a fish stock survey and declared that Pakistan’s territorial waters were unsuitable for deep-sea fishing by trawlers. No survey has been conducted since then but the rapid depletion of the average catch by local fishermen paints a very grim picture of the marginal fish stocks the waters have been left with now. These too would be destroyed very soon by these trawlers, he apprehended.
Deep sea trawlers are throwing more than 400, 000 tons of dead fish in the sea every year. This figure equals the entire tonnage of the fish caught by the local fishing communities collectively each year. Besides, polluting the ocean heavily, destroying the fertile seabed and sweeping the wanted and unwanted fish stocks with their three-km-long nets, the foreign trawlers have driven countless species to near extinction.
These trawlers are not permitted to fish in the 35 nautical mile zone, but very frequently they operate even within the 12 nautical mile zone, which has been designated as provincial waters.
Mr Shah demanded that the entire 200 nautical mile zone be declared as provincial waters open to local fishermen.
He pointed out that besides the damage being caused by the foreign trawlers, all kinds of filth, industrial waste and agricultural waste, including hazardous chemicals, were being dumped into the sea. The pollution thus created is rapidly destroying the marine life in our coastal areas.
Karachi alone discharges more than 300 million gallons of filthy sewage into the sea every day. This sewage water should be treated and recycled before being flushed into the sea. This will not only help overcome the severe water shortage in the city, but also keep the seawater sparklingly clean as it was until a few decades ago.
Speaking on the existing situation of inland sweet water fishing, Mr Shah blamed the contract system, the declining input of fresh water into the sea and the discharge of industrial and agricultural waste in ponds and lakes as the major reasons for the miserable poverty existing in the fishing community. The local fishermen, who have been fishing for centuries in the waters of Sindh have been forced to migrate upstream to Punjab to earn their livelihood, according to him. Some of them had been going as far as Afghanistan to find a living, he claimed.
The PFF chief was of the view that unless Sindh was given its right of 10 million acre feet flow downstream Kotri of fresh water, as envisaged under the water accord, the situation would continue to deteriorate. Future democratic governments must protect not only the rights of the three million-strong fishing community, but should also provide social security, heath, education and housing facilities to it.
Babu Ghulam Hussain, while supporting the recommendations made by Mr Shah, pointed out that fish stocks could not nurture and were being destroyed also because fish of very small size were being continuously caught with illegal fishing nets. These small fish are dried and used as chicken feed in poultry farms. “Besides implementing the ban on the use of illegal nets, there is an urgent need to ban the use of fishmeal in poultry farms,” he added.
