Community Based Fisheries Management in Bangladesh
Boro Beel
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Boro Beel is the name used by the project to refer to a massive floodplain containing 44 jalkars (one of which carries this same name) located in the Faridpur and Bhangura Upazillas of the District of Pabna. Of these 44 jalkars, only 14 have been successfully handed over to FFP project.
The FFP intervened here through stocking in the second year of the project and creation of a sanctuary in the third.. By official estimate, the floodplain covers an area of 3,000 hectare of low floodplain, of which only 300 hectare of land is Khas or the property of the state. Our guess about the size of the floodplain is 25 times than that this figure. According to the baseline survey, there are 35 project villages with 8,659 households and a population of 44,774. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee or BRAC is the implementing NGO.
The project jalkars merge into the wider floodplain for two or three months during the wet season but are otherwise distinct. The entire floodplain can be divided into four zones based on its hydrological characteristics: Zone I - permanent beels, Zone II - seasonal beels, Zone III - Rivers Ruknai and Chiknai, and Zone IV - seasonal beels and some channels of the Chiknai River. We looked at changes in fishing practices and fishing rights in these zones first to identify the impact of the project on the livelihoods of the fishing households.
There are a number of fishing practices and institutional arrangements that are common at the floodplain level to all the jalkars which influences on the management of the fishery and the impact of FFP. First, bhashan rights refer to the wet season when all the jalkars go under water and the floodplain becomes a single resource system. At this time the leaseholder of the jalkars co-operate to collect tolls from the fishers. Second, there is a distinction amongst the fishers. The bhagi fishers are those who share the ultimate de facto leasing costs of a jalkar. They could be called the fisher lessees. Joma fishers, on the other hand, make no direct contribution to the leasing costs but obtain fishing rights in exchange of payment of toll to the bhagi fishers. This heterogeneity amongst the fishers points to the fact that the fishers had control in many parts of the floodplain. The bhagi fishers are generally the owners of major fishing gears. Third, excluding the rivers (i.e. the Zone III), there are also some common fishing rights and customary practices. For example, the leaseholders would allow fishing in the beginning of the dry season for a week for half of the share of the catch from the participant fishers. This is known as beel baich. When the catch declines, the fishers and the leaseholders negotiate a fixed toll paid in cash. This system serves two purposes. Revenue collection from toll charges is high and it also helps to determine cash tolls in a competitive way since this is practiced in all the beels of the floodplain and the fishers could move easily from one jalkar to another. Fourth, the leaseholders also have to allow public polo fishing for a day or two in the beels for free which is known as polo (trap) baich. These fishing practices, customs and local norms were more or less shielded from FFP interventions.
Fishing in Zone I is, as before, mainly done by badhai ber, khora and katha and strongly controlled by the bhagi fishers. However, costs of acquiring rights increased because the bhagi fishers had to make various payments to the members of the FMC and others (though such fluctuations in leasing costs are not uncommon). Since, toll is fairly competitively determined, the burden of higher leasing costs was not passed on to the fishers. FFP thus resulted in a transfer of surplus from the bhagi fishers to the project institutions or those who controlled them. Major fishing in Zone II is done by ber jal, though a wide variety of other fishing gears are used in this zone. This was also not affected by the FFP. Before the project, the jalkars in this zone were controlled by non-fisher lessees but after sub-leasing rights went into the hands of a group of bhagi fishers. According to these bhagi fishers, this improved their income position because they now have two sources of income - from fishing and from rights to collect tolls. But note that this benefit accrued to them as an unintended outcome of FFP intervention. They took the advantage of the opportunities from the market for water bodies ushered by the FFP in this region. Major fishing in Zone III was and continues to be done by katha, suti and khora and a wide variety of minor gears operating in a different seasons.. Despite project objectives, water bodies continue to be sub-leased by bhagi fishers. There was no change either in fishing practices or in fishing rights in Zone IV. Our investigations of the local fish market also indicated that there was no noticeable change in the amount of fish coming from the PWBs.
Two key objectives pre-occupied the FFP institutions here; stocking and sub-leasing of the project jalkars. Most villagers thought there was hardly any stocking in the PWB. The FFP Technical committee warned the local managers about various anomalies in stocking.
Though the project documents frequently refer to revenue collection through introduction of licensing system, the FFP institutions were unable to provide any evidence that this had happened. Thus the FFP institutions had no choice but to depend on selling fishing rights over the project water bodies. But they failed to generate adequate revenue for paying lease values to the state. Thus on the one hand FFP resources were wasted because of leakages involved in the stocking and on the other hand the DOF introduced a system of (sub) leasing the water bodies in a way similar to those done formally and legally by the Ministry of Land, though this is explicitly proscribed within the project. The NGO was a tacit accomplice in this. They neither informed fishers of their rights, nor developed the community institutions, nor trained them. The implementing NGO gained from resources received from the FFP but delivered nothing tangible.
In our judgement geographical, hydrological, socio-economic and institutional factors all made the success of FFP highly improbable. The size of the PWB, the number of seasonally distinct water bodies within it, and the number of project villages was too large. The fishing environment was highly complex, fishing practices were highly varied and there were a number of deep rooted norms and customs governing fishing behaviour. As a result, management of FFP activities by the state, NGO and other community institutions with the resources made available was difficult to the least, if not impossible. Most of the jalkars in the floodplain remained outside FFP (some under the control of a banned underground party). Yet stocking was allowed to go ahead at a point in the hydrological cycle when these were still joined to the project jalkars in a single resource system. As a result, there was a very high chance that many stocked fish would be taken by fishers who had not contributed to the project. This is one of the reasons why a licensing system could not work in this site.
This was, in short, a highly inappropriate site for the CBFM model adopted by FFP, raising questions about both project design and site selection. The persistence of all the institutions involved in continuing with this suggests either a lack of understanding of the pre-conditions for effective CBFM or a lack of openness in partnership arrangements.