Footprints: the young man and the sea

Published July 7, 2017
GHOST fishing gear stored in Asif Baloch’s home in Rehman Goth. Asif Baloch and Absar Khan of the Olive Ridley Project have recovered nearly 700kg of ghost nets which they will now store in a 10x10 room in the area.—Fahim Siddiqi/ White Star
GHOST fishing gear stored in Asif Baloch’s home in Rehman Goth. Asif Baloch and Absar Khan of the Olive Ridley Project have recovered nearly 700kg of ghost nets which they will now store in a 10x10 room in the area.—Fahim Siddiqi/ White Star

KARACHI: For generations, the men in Asif Baloch’s family have been fishermen. They didn’t know anything else, he said as we sat down in a room in his family’s compound in Rehman Goth — a small village on the way to Karachi’s French Beach.

He said his father, grandfather and great grandfather were friends with the Arabian Sea. “They would leave every day and return with a fish catch we can’t even dream of now,” said the young man.

These days, he explained as the sea roared just outside his house, there aren’t enough fish in the sea for him and other fishermen.

“We are out of work for more than eight months every year as we start fishing in September when the tide is low enough for us to take our boats to the sea,” he said.

But by that time, there is nothing left for them to catch — a direct result of overfishing.

According to Baloch, other fishermen or those outsourced by individuals and businesses use large wire nets which are made of plastic and are so fine that a lot of fish get caught as they can’t see these and “…out of 500 caught in this net only 100 or so are useful or worth selling”.

Despite this slump, Baloch has decided to give something back to the sea that for years provided for his family.

Nearly a year and a half ago, Baloch was introduced to Absar Khan, a co-founder of TacTack and project coordinator for the Olive Ridley Project-Pakistan, through a friend. According to Khan, Baloch has “since proven to be a remarkable addition to the ORP team. He is a field supervisor...our ORP field coordinator who oversees and is in charge of all things ORP related on the field from our workshops to our recovery dive expeditions, general education, monitoring, recording data, cleaning up the lot”.

Talking about ORP, Khan said that it was a collective effort to simply improve the health of the marine environment and coastal communities by cleansing the sea of abandoned fishing gear. “It is focused, refined and has a solid foundation built upon extensive data collected from our marine victims in the Indian Ocean — mainly the Olive Ridley sea turtles, ergo the name,” he said.

According to the UN, nearly 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear is lost or discarded in oceans every year. This ‘ghost’ gear is found in every sea and ocean on the planet. Gear from Karachi can go down all the way to the Maldives, where the ORP is based.

Why is it bad? According to the World Animal Protection, ghost fishing gear has a devastating effect on marine ecosystems and animals, injuring and killing millions. Ghost gear also acts as a source of persistent toxic chemical pollution in the ocean.

For the last several months, Khan and Baloch have been busy collecting plastic bottles, filling them with water from the sea and stacking them on top of each other to make a 10x10 room to store ghost fishing gear such as wire nets.

By May 7 this year, Khan and Baloch had recovered nearly 700kgs of ghost nets — the size of a fully-grown saltwater crocodile. But the problem they faced, according to Baloch, was where to store it.

This is how they came up with the idea to make this shed and store the nets and clean them. Before this, Baloch recalled, they used to keep the nets at home.

“We [Baloch and Khan] go into the sea and clean it. Whenever we spot ghost fishing gear we get that out of the water,” he said.

“The landlord of the area gave us a small piece of land to construct this room to store the ghost gear. Khan and ORP’s founder Martin Stelfox collected funds and came up with a plan on how to go about this. We used almost 4,000 bottles to make this storage unit,” he added.

“There are so many nets at my house, at Khan’s …we hope to sell the nets once we clean them or use them to make other items which can be useful to people and generate an income,” explained Baloch.

“We used to have resham ka jaal, some of us still do. It is more expensive than a wire net — about Rs20,000 and lasts eight to nine years. The wire nets which are made in China cost around Rs3,000 and are sometimes only good for one or two trips to the sea,” said Baloch.

Along with fishing out ghost gear from the sea, Khan and Baloch also survey and monitor what is going on in other villages by the sea.

“Absar [Khan] Bhai and Martin [Stelfox] asked me to go to Mubarak Village, Kaka Pir and similar areas to discuss the problems faced by fishermen in these places and to help create awareness in other fishing villages,” said Baloch.

The most common complaint, according to Baloch, is that there is no work. “Karobar nahi hai, that’s what everyone says. There is nothing for us to do here…all we can do is save the sea.”

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2017

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