March 22, 2007	Thursday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 2, 1428

ISLAMABAD, March 21: Hundreds of local fishing families are being pushed into poverty due to over-fishing by international trawlers in Pakistani waters, especially those from the Far East.

This case from Pakistan serves as an example of unfair trade practices at a time when new moves to further liberalise the global fish trade are advancing in the current round of WTO trade talks in Geneva.

The warning comes in a research report -- Taking the Fish -- fishing communities lose out to big trawlers in Pakistan -- released here on Wednesday claiming that the poor fishing communities in developing countries worldwide could be devastated by moves to open up fishing markets as part of the latest WTO trade talk.

The research was conduced by Pakistan-based Actionaid International — a non-governmental organisation.

Poor coastal communities say their rights to fish and earn a living are being violated and that thousands of people are being forced out of their traditional livelihoods. As a result of industrial fishing and giant trawler nets, local communities report lower catches and are facing hunger and struggling to survive.

The researcher interviewed a large number of people involved in the business for the last many decades. "Now all the fish are caught by trawlers and I am in such state of poverty that I have to pull my 15-year-old son out of school," a local fisherman Siddique Malah said.

Pakistani fishermen groups say trawlers from China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan encroach on their local waters and use giant fishing nets to scoop up fish and deplete fish stocks under Pakistan's policy of opening up its waters to international fleets.

Another fisherman Hassan Dablo said "I cannot give good food to my family or meet other basic needs of life." Coastal communities say their right to fish is being violated. They report dramatically reduced catches of local species and now face widespread debt, hunger and deprivation.

"The people are starving," says Tahira Ali, deputy general secretary of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum in Karachi. "They don't have bread to eat and they weep when they come home without fish at night."

Rogue trawlers are accused of using damaging nets and of indiscriminate catching and dumping huge quantities of young, unwanted, or dead fish at sea leaving less for locals to catch.

"The trawlers have long nets of one to three km length, and the mouth of the net is equal to three times of the size of the American Statue of Liberty," says Mohammad Ali Shah, chairman of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum." They catch all types of fish, and when they sort out the catches about 90 per cent is discarded.

Some 90,000 tons of fish caught off the coast of Pakistan were exported to China, Japan, the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Germany, the US and the UK during 2004.

Aftab Alam Khan, head of Actionaid trade campaign, says: "Pakistan's fisher folk go to bed hungry because of predatory trawlers moving in as a result of Pakistan's drive for more trade and exports.

With an estimated 400,000 people dependant on the fisheries sector in Pakistan, marine fishing is a key source of food and livelihood for 184,000 people along the 1,000 km Arabian Sea coast in Sindh and Balochistan provinces.

Pakistan's total marine fleet of 22,000 vessels-- which includes local motor-cum-sail boats, mid-sized locally flagged trawlers and large foreign trawlers took an estimated total catch of 400,500 tons in 2003-04.