Abstract
Small-scale fishers in tropical regions of Asia are known to respond to uncertain resource fluctuations in diverse ways. Less is known of their adaptations to and motivations for fishing in severely overexploited fishing grounds. A common explanation emphasises poverty and a lack of access to alternative skills and sources of livelihood. Based on a study of small-scale fishing among coastal dwellers on Negros Island in the Philippine, I show that fishers’ reasons for continuing to fish in overfished waters are more complicated than this explanation allows. To explain why better-off households remain committed to fishing when fish catch levels are generally very low, and why very poor and marginalized households drop out of fishing under such conditions, I combine a diverse livelihoods approach with literatures that focus on issues of power, politics and social exclusion. I differentiate among different kinds of small-scale fishing and track changes in these over time. I pay close attention to fishermen’s own conception of their work and the status distinctions made among them, and examine the socio-institutional arrangements of coastal livelihoods more broadly.
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Notes
The smallest political administrative unit in the Philippines.
‘Socio-institutional mechanisms’ are the formal and informal rules and regulations governing access to resources and the potential benefits extracted from them (Béné 2003).
‘Informalization of formality’ is rampant even in the government sector. In the Municipality of Sibulan, more than half of all workers – including sea wardens – were in 2006 ‘job order employees.’ Such contracts provided no social security and other benefits and could end on short notice, depending on the outcome of elections and the availability of patronage funds.
Dollar value calculated with an exchange rate of 51,3 pesos per US$ for 2006.
In 2006, the official poverty line for the Central Visayas Region was 13,963 pesos per person (NSCB 2014) and the average household consisted of five persons.
The survey of boats was in the morning of Election Day, May 13, in both 2006 and 2013, at a time when very few fishers were out fishing. The survey was followed up with targeted interviews.
Ethnographies from different regions of the lowland Philippines demonstrate the widespread existence of a subsistence ethic in everyday community life (Blanc-Szanton 1972; Kerkvliet 1990; Cannell 1999; Fabinyi 2012), particularly prevalent among low-income and marginalized sectors of society: “Everyone has a right to survive and provide for his [or her] family” (Blanc-Szanton 1972: 129).
‘Bajau’ is an exonym with negative connotations in many areas of the Philippines and the wider region. The Sama(bajau) comprises what may be “the most widely dispersed ethnolinguistic group indigenous to insular Southeast Asia” (Sather 1997: 2).
There are important differences in histories of settlement, land tenure and livelihood practices within and between the hamlets in this study. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a detailed account of these differences, and how they affect family and settler groups’ ability to broker relationships between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside,’ secure access and strengthen diversified livelihoods in current circumstances.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported with an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and an Australian National University Scholarship. A Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore allowed me to do additional fieldwork. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers and the editors for helpful comments.
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Knudsen, M. Poverty and Beyond: Small-Scale Fishing in Overexploited Marine Environments. Hum Ecol 44, 341–352 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9824-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9824-y