This time – lets do it right

Nature’s Terror, which struck at 9 on the Richter and the consequent tsunamis that ripped into beaches and raped coastal areas from Sumatra to East Africa have made it impossible for me to write about any other topic. It was also less than a month since the words “Tropical storms bring some of the world’s worst disasters” were printed here in the December issue of World Fishing, describing America’s recent hurricane series. The enormity of the calamity is hard to grasp. Our fishermen colleagues and their families have had to face its reality.

The mega-waves swamped thousands of kilometres of coast line in Sumatra, Thailand, Sri Lanka’s the Indian states and low-lying islands in the Maldives and Andaman and Nicobar archipelagoes. They submerged villages, towns, ports and vast swathes of countryside, spreading death, misery and despair from Indonesia all the way to East Africa’s coasts and islands.

Just as is the case for tropical storms, so here the burden in total loss of life and property was by far larger for fisherfolk than for other groups in their national populations.

Massive numbers of dead, destruction of their homes, loss of boats, engines and fishing gear — their only means of making a living. The fisherfolk of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, India and Thailand were the hardest hit.

Calls for help

The first urgent calls for help came from those who were on the spot and had already started to help the survivors. Herman Kumara, the Convener of the National Fisheries Solidarity of Sri Lanka (NAFSO), e-mailed his correspondents worldwide, while his team was working its way through the desolation: “Please help us urgently”. Pretty soon governments and NGOs from all over the world started collecting contributions and sending out assistance missions, while some people started thinking of things that must be done so that the survivors could keep going on in a world, which for them would never be the same. “These communities have lost all their productive assets,” said Fernanda Guerrieri, Chief of FAO’s Emergency Operations Service. “Obviously the most pressing needs are for medical supplies, clean water, food, shelter and sanitation, but the affected communities need to restart productive activities as soon as possible so that they can feed themselves and to avoid mass migration of the displaced to already overpopulated cities.” Prof. John Kurien of India, is a life-long fisherfolk’s activist. He wrote in the SAMUDRA News Alert that, apart from bringing the fishing communities back into a functioning condition, future programmes should provide them with safer housing farther off the beaches the natural disaster prone Bay of Bengal. That means modern warning and rescue systems and rehabilitation of the coastal vegetation for natural protection of the beaches.

India’s Tamil Nadu state government wants to keep 85,000 survivors close to their respective fishing villages and to help them with fishing equipment and housing. The government wants to accommodate them within a month in long houses, with toilets and community kitchens near by. This would enable them to stay at their home sites and keep fishing. Houses will be repaired and new houses constructed. The budget, about US$4,350,000, or US$51 per survivor, doesn’t seem over-ambitious. The terror is now over, most of the dead have been buried or cremated, and what remains is the misery and destitution of the survivors, many of them fishing people without homes, boats and gear. Whole technical and commercial superstructures have been destroyed. In some areas, along with fisherfolk, the catastrophe killed also their clients and consumers.

Let’s do it right

Massive international aid is being promised but the promises must materialise and reach those who need that aid. High priority should be given to the recovery of the production capacity of the coastal fishing. That means those who lost the bulk of Indian kattumarams (the tens of thousands of sailing or outboard-powered log-rafts used from Puri in the north of the Bay of Bengal to Kanyakumari in the south), regular and outrigger-canoes, other traditional small wooden craft and small, motorised fibre-glass fishing boats and launches. This equipment best serves the surviving coastal fishing people and it can be inexpensively locally produced or repaired according to earlier work of the Bay of Bengal Programme (www.fao.org/docrep/007/ad942e/ad942e00.htm). It shouldn’t be replaced with expensive fishing boats of foreign construction not tested for local conditions and with which local fishermen are not familiar.

Local is best

It is essential that we avoid the old malady which had plagued international and bilateral technical assistance for decades. This is when donor countries convert a share of their aid obligations into equipment made in their own countries to help their own manufacturers. In this way, all sorts of expensive “western” technology, inappropriate for local peoples and conditions, have been sent to developing countries. This has been very convenient for the donors, not many of whom have followed the example of Denmark.

The Danes have made it a matter of principle not to use their own products in their foreign assistance schemes. As a rule, such technical assistance was often coming at the expense of money which could have been spent more productively directly at the aid’s destination. To avoid “white elephant” projects and be truly useful, the financial assistance should be aimed at local production infrastructure, local raw material, local boat and equipment makers and nationally produced machinery for which technical support and ample spare parts supply are locally available. Where larger fishing vessels have been damaged, sunk, or otherwise destroyed these could probably be replaced by vessels of similar size and technology level originating from capacity-reduction schemes in northern fishing countries. I’m aware of the rules and the lobbies which stand in the way of such a procedure. Nonetheless, the enormity of the damage and the urgency of the needs should take precedence over routine thinking. Fast and highly professional assessment of the needs should be performed. FAO Fisheries, the FAO Bay of Bengal Programme, together with the fishery departments of the concerned countries and such regional international institutions as The Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC). These are bodies best equipped to produce results that would be recognised and accepted by the various donors.