Community Based Fisheries Management in Bangladesh
Shashikor Beel
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Shashikor beel is located in the district of Madaripur. It is divided into two parts: Bagmara and Kalaitola. An embankment chipped off the Bagmara part from the rest of the beel. The total area of the beel is 1,000 ha of which the Bagmara part accounts for about 20%. The project intervened here through stocking in 2001 and 2002. While there are many escaping routes in the Kalaitola part of the beel, there is only one in Bagmara. It was well taken care of by the FMC before stocking. This stocking was done mainly in Bagmara because fishes cannot go out of Bagmara once they are in. In 2003 stocking was postponed and a sanctuary was installed in 2003. This report deals with the livelihoods impact of stocking in Bagmara beel in 2002.
The Shashikor beel is a water body on private lands. The livelihoods of the project households are shaped by the agro-ecological environment. Fishing is the main activity in the wet season while farming is the major activity in the dry season. During the peak of the flood the entire beel area is submerged and a village-based rights system controls access. This is akin to a de facto common property rights regime. In the dry season fishes take shelter in kua. Kua are deeper parts of the beel privately owned. The kua owners establish their private rights over fishing in the kua during receding waters. Thus with the level of water property rights regime changes from common property to private property. It is a mono crop area and alternative fishing grounds are very limited. Livelihoods opportunities are therefore scarce and heavily dependent on fishing. In a nutshell, livelihoods in Shashikor straddle between fishing and agriculture for most households. Thus a fishing ban has a very strong impact on the well being of those who are affected.
A five month fishing ban was imposed following stocking. This restricted fishers at the time of year when they previously earned most from fishing. For the entire period of the ban the affected households adopted a mix of coping strategies to make up for the income lost. Some sold assets such as land. But this was open only to those who owned some land. Others took recourse to informal borrowing at a very high rate of interest. They were caught in a vicious circle of debt - borrowing from one source to repay loans taken from another. Livelihoods diversification was common and distress-driven. A household had to take occupations they never took before or not to the extent they had to undertake after the ban. These include working as a wage labourers at a lower return than fishing. Driving rickshaws and breaking snail shells. The women participated in these activities too but for a lower return. Above all, many households had to drop one meal or two a day frequently. These households who could not fish derived no benefits from the fishing ban. They lost a years opportunity of fishing.
There was a considerable discrepancy between the official reports of amount stocked (10 tons) and the opinions of local fishers as to what had actually happened. No precise adjudication between these claims is possible; however we conducted a survey of kua fishers who harvested in Bagmara in 2002 as a rough check. The length and severity of the ban meant that the only fish caught were taken from the kua. However, the responses of kua owners suggested an impact on fishing that would imply stocking of one ton (at most). Even allowing for the natural tendency of beneficiaries to understate their gains, it is difficult to believe that they would understate them so much as to jeopardise an intervention from which they were genuinely benefitting.
This raises the issue of sustainability of FFP project in Shashikor. Sustainability of the project here suffered from leakage, not by the capacity of the households to cope. For two consecutive years, the affected households of Shashikor managed to cope but virtually for nothing.