KARACHI, March 25 Hundreds of local fishing communities are being pushed into poverty in the country due to overfishing by foreign trawlers and local mechanised boats which use illegal fishing nets in a bid to catch more and more fish.

Interviewed by Dawn, these fishermen complained that Pakistan's sea resources are being devastated by moves to open fishing markets for international trawlers.

These fishermen are opposed to deep-sea fishing by huge foreign trawlers which use giant fishing nets to scoop up and deplete fish stocks in their national waters.

Coastal communities say their right to fish is being violated and as a result of deep-sea trawling as there has been a dramatic reduction in the catch of local species pushing the former into starvation.

“People are starving,” says Soomar, an elderly fisherman who lives in Abdullah Goth, a remote village of Hawkesbay.

“We do not have bread to eat and we came to our home without fish at night,” he added.

The elderly fisherman accuses rogue trawlers of using damaging nets and indiscriminately catching and dumping huge quantities of juvenile fish thereby depriving the locals of a livelihood.

He said that overfishing continued to threaten the marine resources and the livelihood of thousands of fishermen in the country.

According to him, fishermen are worried over diminishing catches and extinction of several valued fish species over the years.

The fish catch has dropped by 70 per cent due to deep-sea fishing and use of prohibited nets, he claims.

A survey shows that more than 18,000 small fishing boats are registered with the marine fisheries department in Karachi, at least 12,000 of them are operational along the 999-km coastal line of Pakistan.

The adverse effect of prohibited nets is not the only danger to sustainable fishery in the country and at the same time, a greater threat is posed by deep-sea trawling.

These trawlers have been combing the territorial waters of Pakistan for a long time, indulging in poaching and under-reporting along with polluting the sea by throwing bycatch (unwanted species) into the sea.

Initially deep-sea trawling was banned by the military government of Gen Pervez Musharraf for a while but later the ban was lifted.

Although deep-sea trawlers are supposed to operate beyond 35-mile of the coastal belt, a weak surveillance network and a corrupt bureaucracy tacitly allow the owners of these trawlers to violate the law.

“As overfishing has become a looming problem, the livelihood of the fishing community is considered to be at risk. About 34 trawlers were fishing around the international waters boundary and they were creating immense problems for small- and medium-sized fishing boats. If these practices are to continue, the entire fishing communities' livelihood would shortly be at stake. Even at present many boats going out in the sea were coming back with only small catches.”

The survey also shows that the catching power of these huge factory-size fleets has grown enormously. The depletion of fish stocks at “home” stimulated a migration of fishing efforts in search of more “productive water”.

Coastal communities have been demanding a complete ban on deep-sea trawling since a long time along with an effective check on use of prohibited nets by implementing provincial laws.