Turning The Tide - Women's Lives in The Fisheries and The Assault of Capital - Nilanjana Biswas

Biswas, Nilanjana. 2011. Turning the tide: Womens lives in the fisheries and the assault of capital.
Occasional Paper. Chennai, ICSF. 41p.

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FINAL VERSION/ 30 July 2011
Turning the Tide: Women's Lives in the Fisheries and the Assault of Capital
-by Nilanjana Biswas (nilanjanabiswas@yahoo.com)
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Introduction
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates the number of people directly employed in
fishing and aquaculture to be 43.5 million (FAO 2008). Ninety percent of them are small-scale fishers
dependent for a livelihood on coastal and inland fishery resources (FAO 2005). Fishing and fish
farming activities, which make up the primary sector, critically depend on activities in the secondary
sector, which include post-harvesting activities such as processing, transportation, marketing and
distribution, and pre-harvesting activities, such as net and gear making, boat building, fuel supply,
engine repair and so on. The FAO estimates that for each person employed in the primary sector, there
could be four employed in the secondary sector, which would put the total employment in the fisheries
at about 170 million. When families are factored in, it is estimated that about 520 million people are
dependent on the sector, or nearly 8 percent of the world population (FAO 2008).
Most fishers and fish farmers (86 percent) live in Asia, mainly in China, India, Indonesia, the
Philippines and Viet Nam (FAO 2008). The majority are poor, small-scale fishers, and their poverty
encompasses more than just income; it includes lack of land ownership, high degrees of indebtedness,
poor access to health, education, and financial capital, and political and geographical marginalization
(Bn and Friend, 2009).
Women have a significant role in the small-scale fisheries. They perform many of the pre-harvesting,
and most of the post-harvesting tasks. However, since these tasks fall in the secondary sector from
which data is not usually gathered, womens labour remains largely invisible in the statistics. Over the
years, however, research on women in the fisheries has revealed the astounding amount of work that
women do in the sector and the various forces that shape the conditions under which this work is done.
This stands in direct contrast to the widespread invisibility of women.

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The fishing sector has undergone substantial changes in the past few decades, chiefly, the impact of
industrial fishing first in the North and then its movement to the global South (but catering to a global
market in the North and South); the over-exploitation of marine resources; the shift from capture to
culture fisheries. These changes have been accompanied by documentation and research which have
influenced policy, practice and the flow of resources to the fishing sector. Different epochs produced
their changing assumptions and analyses, which, while broadly influenced by global ideological shifts
in the economic and human rights sphere, had their particular impact on the fishing sector. The
analysis of these shifts, and the understanding of their ideological underpinnings, is extremely
important for the broad alliance in the fisheries sector of different movements struggling for the rights
of fishers. The analysis is in particular important for women in the fisheries to engage in struggles with
a clear and historically-defined understanding of the forces arraigned against them.
Note on Terminology
Before turning to explore and analyse the implications of these shifts, a few preliminary words to
qualify what might otherwise seem to be generalizations.
This paper uses the terms North or global North and South or global South, to denote blocs of
high and low economic development respectively, with countries like Japan included in the North and
countries in transition like India, China, Brazil and South Africa included in the South. Although these
terms are not free of controversy, they have been adopted here because they serve a useful function as
economic and political markers. However, it is possible that a country like Japan, for instance, may be
closer to countries in the global South in terms of culture and occupational practices in the informal
sector, and also that elites within the South may have consumer habits that mirror those of the North.
That is, there would be a South within the North and a North within the South. Further, although these
terms suggest rigid national boundaries, global capital of course transcends the borders of nation
states.
Another qualifier is with respect to the terms traditional and small-scale fisheries used throughout the
paper. The definitions of artisanal, traditional and small-scale fisheries, and the nature of the fisheries
across different regions differ greatly, and there is enormous variability in concepts and the meanings
attached to certain terms commonly used in the literature. The FAO Working Group on Small-Scale
Fisheries characterized small-scale fisheries as a dynamic and evolving sector employing labour
intensive harvesting, processing and distribution technologies to exploit marine and inland water
fishery resources (FAO 2004a). However, observing in todays context of technological advancements
in the fisheries that the terms traditional, artisanal and small-scale defy elegant definition, Mathew
(2001: 7) advocates a relative approach in a definition that this paper uses: It can be assumed that
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artisanal and small-scale fisheries, in general, refer to the smallest viable fishing units in a country or a
province, with downward or lateral compatibility in fishing gear operation.
Outline of the Main Shifts and Context
This paper argues that the following developments, elaborated in subsequent sections, can be identified
in the discourse on women in the fisheries in the past three decades:
1. First, the framework of political economy seems to have been largely replaced by a framework
of political ecology
2. Second, the idea of women's empowerment has gained ascendancy over the idea of women's
exploitation and oppression
3. Third, a rights-based approach is being embraced, within which fishery rights are being
articulated, on the one hand, as privatised rights, and, on the other, as human rights
4. Fourth, there is a growing articulation of the idea of community as well as of models of
community-based management of natural resources in the fisheries
5. Finally, both for fishery activities as well as for research and mobilization in the fishing sector,
there is a growing dependence on multi-donor aid, bringing with it the ideology of
liberalization and free market as a single prescription for all
The period of the last three decades in which these shifts occurred was marked by two significant
milestones in the history of development aid. Its start, in the late 1980s, coincided with the formulation
of what is known as the Washington Consensus; towards its end there was, in 2005, the drafting of the
Paris Declaration. Development was the main thrust of the Washington Consensus, to be achieved
through neoliberal economic reforms. In the Paris Declaration, good governance upped the agenda in
terms of priority with consequent implications for aid budgets. As international financial institutions
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) worked the policy prescriptions of
the Washington Consensus into core-loan conditionalities for country after borrowing country, the
financial and policy impacts of economic restructuring were felt across every sector. In the case of the
fisheries, this led, among other developments, to an emphasis on export-led growth and the
deregulation of international trade and cross-border investment. Its impact was equally felt on
resistance movements and the strategies of resistance that were adopted in this period. By the end of
the last three decades and the start of the new millennium, as the economic restructuring of the global
South accelerated by the Washington Consensus was more or less achieved, capitals priorities (and
hence the priorities of donor aid) underwent major changes. With economic reforms largely in place, it
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became critical for capital to push for the privatization of regulation, and the specific targeting of aid
became the strategy for ameliorating the devastating effects of privatization and ensuring the survival
of those being pushed to the brink of starvation. For these reasons, it is argued, the agenda now shifted
from development to good governance, and, accordingly, the alignment and harmonization of aid with
national priorities became the priority of the Paris Declaration of 2005. Some of the key developments
to emerge from capitals trajectory in this period are outlined here and elaborated in subsequent
sections:
Firstly, it led, in this period, to a significant movement in fish production from the North to the South
and significant growth in fish trade from the South to the North. This restructuring of production and
trade was substantially influenced by global institutions, such as the international financial institutions,
through the mechanism of donor aid.
Second, the relocation of production and trade created new economic opportunities for those employed
in the fishing sector in the South. However, the bulk of this opportunity, in terms of both self-employed
work and wage labour, appeared to be concentrated in poorly paid and sweated labour conditions.
Third, under the influence of conditional aid, this period witnessed a withdrawal of the State, with an
increasing use of local forms, including community forms, of regulation and self-governance taking on
many of the roles that the State would have been expected to perform. The State began to move
increasingly towards deregulation. Where it continued to play a monitoring and regulatory role, it did
so increasingly on behalf of capital, moving significantly away from a welfare/developmental model,
which implied a movement away from community-based benefits and entitlements towards
individual-based benefits and entitlements.
Fourth, in the context of individualization, programmes for empowerment and entrepreneurship
development became pervasive during this period. While these certainly brought benefits to some, for
example, some women gained from gender empowerment and entrepreneurial training programmes in
the fisheries, however, by their very logic, these programmes left the vast majority in the sector
untouched.
Fifth, again in the context of individualization, a rights discourse gained currency in this period. The
idea of rights had grown out of the conditions of modern capitalism, in opposition to pre-capitalist,
feudal structures of oppression, and to that extent, rights were associated with individual personhood,
perhaps the most sacrosanct being the right to property. Within the current regime of global capitalism,
the notion of rights represents a vehicle for the accelerated spread of the ideology of free market and
private property. As the individualising impetus of capital erodes community forms of life,
communities are beginning to counter this trend with an assertion of community rights as human
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rights. This paper discusses some of the possible implications of the wide interpretation of human
rights that is being strategically mobilised today, from the point of view of womens rights.
Finally, the idea of community rights is predicated of course on the idea of community as the unit of
collective negotiation. In the last few decades, the community has emerged as a unit of strength,
deriving its impetus partly from a weakening state (which forces the community to take on more self-
regulatory functions) and partly from policy enactments which, given the neoliberal imperative for
either less State or a State subordinated to the needs of capital (and interested therefore in the
privatization of regulation), encourage such a movement. In this period, as mentioned above, resistance
has also strategically attempted to win back rapidly-disappearing ground by pushing for community
rights. While the pragmatic imperative of asserting community rights may thus seem necessary, the
danger of differences within communities, such as those of gender, caste, religion, class, and so on,
getting subsumed under this pragmatic imperative is equally real. The strengthening, thus, of forms of
oppression and exploitation that are historically and traditionally woven into the very structure of the
family, the community and into labour in the domestic sphere (as is the case of work performed in the
small-scale fisheries), is of particular concern for women in the sector, as is equally the muting of the
discourse around the structural basis of these forms of oppression and exploitation.
In this paper, the shifts outlined above are discussed in a linear manner, one after the other. This may
lead to the mistaken view that each is a standalone development, unrelated to the others. Should such a
view be taken it would reflect a structural limitation of the paper since the argument is in fact just the
opposite: these shifts have evolved not in isolation, but concurrently and in deeply related ways and
must therefore be read and analysed together. Donor aid, as the handmaiden of capital, assisting its
global penetration and spread, has played a central role in manufacturing a global, consensual and
uniform discourse on development. The changes in the analytical concepts and trends in the literature
on women in the fisheries are reflective of this evolving discourse.
This paper adopts a critical perspective in order to generate discussion around the foregoing issues.
However, at the outset it should be pointed out that the objective is not to reject the main ideas that
have been subjected to critical scrutiny here. Nor is the engagement with the past intended to be a
nostalgic one as if hearkening a bygone era of unsullied politics, for that would be a chimerical
exercise. Rather, the effort is to understand the context in which a dominant discourse involving these
principles evolved as well as the limitations imposed by this context. The paper seeks not to negate, for
example, the principles of gender, forms of community organizing or the idea of human rights but to
explore possibilities beyond these to develop a clearer understanding as well as stronger and more
sustainable forms of opposition.

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Section 1 - From political economy to political ecology
Over the years, research on women in the fisheries moved from a framework of political economy to a
framework of political ecology. As will be discussed in this section, this meant that analyses shifted
away from labour, production relations and surplus value extraction typically grounded in Marxian
modes of analysis, in favour of analyses focused on environmental sustainability, livelihood
sustainability and a discourse on poverty.
The early studies on women in the fisheries came out of a context of organised struggle by fishers all
over the world; in the North, against the rapid breakdown of fishing communities and declining access
to fish resources; and in parts of the South, livelihood struggles that demanded, for instance, regulation
of trawling activities, public transport for women fish vendors and reduction of market taxes for
women vendors. Marxian class analysis was often central to this framework. However, the early
literature did not simply reproduce the Marxian class analysis but actively questioned it for its failure
to account for the work that women did in the household and outside. A body of research evolved,
which often reflected the vibrant political culture of the times and opened up new vistas in the
literature (Connelly and MacDonald 1983; MacDonald and Connelly 1989; Nayak 1986; Thompson
1985; Porter 1983, 1985, 1987; Davis and Nadel-Klein 1988). As a result, the spotlight was turned on till-
now hidden aspects of life and livelihood, highlighting:
- The notion of the sexual division of labour
- The split between the private and public spheres of human life, and
- The ways in which, production and reproduction were structured in societies, interacting
historically with other structures of power in ways that specifically subordinated women.
The sexual division of labour was found to structure all societies, traditional and modern, making
women primarily responsible for certain types of productive work as well as the daily and generational
reproduction of the family. In the traditional fisheries, where fish production was organised around the
household and community, there was little or no separation of the tasks of production and
reproduction; that is to say, fishery-related work such as preparing bait, mending nets, the cleaning
and drying of fish and so on, and housework-related tasks such as taking care of the children, cooking
and preparing food, and so on, take place in conjoint spaces. The logic of familial patriarchy determines
that all work performed in the household sphere, particularly when done by women, will come to be
regarded as an extension of housework. Thus, womens labour within and around the household, be it
fish processing or vending, fish and shellfish harvesting or petty trade, comes to assume the
characteristics of domestic labour in general unregulated, never done, and paid poorly, if paid at all.
Thus, although the fishing economy would collapse if the fish that is caught were not processed and
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sold, or if fishermen were not fed, nurtured and released from the myriad pressures of the household
to venture out to sea, only one type of labour (the act of fishing) was valorised while the other
(everything else) left unvalued or under-valued.
The early literature demonstrated that this state of affairs prevailed, not because women were habitual
martyrs or naturally caring, but because certain material benefits were being creamed off this sexual
division of labour through different economic arrangements down the ages. An enormous amount of
labour that supported the core fisheries, which patriarchy assigned typically to women -- labour that
was shadowy in nature, unquantifiable in terms of wages and income, and elastic in terms of volume
and hours -- heavily subsidised the small-scale fisheries. In fact, today, when the small-scale fisheries
are being steadily eroded by industrial fisheries in many parts of the world, if it still survives in Asia
with increasing numbers drawing their livelihood from it (FAO 2008), this is largely because it is
subsidized enormously by womens unpaid and unrecognised labour labour that maintains the
resilience of small-scale fishing communities (Bangkok Statement on Small-Scale Fisheries 2008).
In many parts of the industrial North, historically, a post-war, developmental State
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was forced to
provide some measure of protection and social security to the traditional fishing sector, and, to some
extent, welfare evolved to address the cost of the reproduction of the labour force
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. However, in the
South, the situation has been vastly different. Here, the back-breaking labour of the poor, and of poor
women, in particular, heavily subsidizes both capital and the State. As Connelly and MacDonald (1983)
have demonstrated in the case of the North, womens labour subsidised capital in the South too, by
keeping wage levels depressed, allowing capital to get away without paying even a minimum wage. In
the South, however, womens labour subsidised also the State by absorbing the costs of the
reproduction of the labour force into the private sphere of the family and the community, allowing the
State to get away without responsibility towards social security.
The fishing economy was split into a public and a private sphere. In the private sphere which coincided
with the domestic or the household domain, poor women, who formed the bulk of the small-scale
fisheries, put in unimaginable number of hours, working until they were ready to collapse. This work

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Although the term 'developmental state' is commonly used to refer to late 20th century state-led macro-
economic planning, the term is used here in preference to the term welfare state to indicate that the post-war
State too went beyond providing welfare alone, and in fact actively intervened to ensure the development of the
small-scale fisheries; in post-war Norway, for example, through legal reforms privileging the sector (Jacobsen &
Aarset 2005).
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It must be added that these measures are today being dismantled by a retreating State, and, moreover,
even in the North, migrant workers have often remained outside welfare cover.
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was unwaged and unvalued. Waged work took place in the public sphere, a sphere that was being
increasingly structured by capitalism. The relations between the public and the private had far-
reaching consequences.
The hidden and devalued nature of work performed in the private, domestic sphere, served to devalue
women in the marketplace when they sought employment. Capital was quick to perpetuate the sexual
division of labour in the public sphere because it served as an effective tool to drive a hard bargain for
cheap labour. A growing demand for labour market flexibility, which has come to mean poor wages
and working conditions, casual work and absence of organization, triggered a trend towards
feminisation of employment in the global South (Neis et al 2005). Women act as a reserve army of
labour for capital, to be hired or fired at will as economic conditions demand (Connelly and
MacDonald 1983). This important insight explains why women in many industrialised countries were
drawn into the labour force when capital needed cheap labour and fired when capital relocated itself to
the South, for instance when canning factories moved out of countries in the North to Thailand and
Seychelles. This analysis of womens work continues to be important in the context of the global South
where capital is consolidating itself through exploiting highly vulnerable forms of feminised labour.
The increasing use of sex as a form of economic exchange by poor women, as we see in fish-for-sex
transactions (Geheb and Benns, 1997 cf Allison, 2004) requires an understanding of the political
economy of our times and is just one example of how women in poverty are drawn into highly
exploitative forms of production and exchange relations.
The political economy framework however had its blind spots and shortcomings. The analysis was
focused too narrowly on labour, ignoring the finite nature of fisheries resources. It lacked an ecological
dimension at a time when fish resources were clearly dwindling. Further, it did not see the problems of
technology, often regarding technology as a liberating force. Moreover, the site of debates quickly
moved away from the arenas of struggle of working women to universities and conference halls and
boardrooms of aid agencies, where hair-splitting debates on terminology stripped the discussion of its
political and mobilizing potential. Another factor was the rise of globalization and post-modern
critiques which together unleashed an assault on labour and womens rights.
The roots of the feminist political ecological framework which gained currency were to be found in the
livelihood struggles of poor women in the South who fought against deforestation, the commercial
takeover of coasts, industrial agriculture and commercial seeds (Mies 1986; Mies and Shiva 1993; Shiva
1989). These struggles shaped the development of the eco-feminist approach which emphasised the
interconnectedness of all forms of life. It rightly focused attention on the dwindling natural resource
base and questioned the relations of production and consumption from the point of view of
sustainability. It demonstrated how science had been used to justify the plunder of natural resources so
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that the death of nature coincided with the rise of science (Merchant 1990). The approach was however
marked by essentialism that equated women with nature (and nurture and sustenance) and men with
culture (and the domination and destruction of nature) (Agarwal 1992).
There are efforts today to articulate a more non-essentialist version of feminist political ecology which
take into account womens role in community coastal and marine resource management and
frameworks of indigenous knowledge systems (Bavington et al 2004). These point out the futility of
narrowly-conceived regimes of fisheries management and urge for holistic approaches that locates the
fisheries in the entire web of life. Thus, they focus attention on the need to question not just
unsustainable fishery practices but all forms of ecologically unsustainable development.
This is a step in the right direction because it allows for a more dialectical process more open to
questioning, but there are several unanswered questions and gaps with respect to women. One is that
the non-essentialist nature of the newer frameworks is never made clear. The arguments tend to be
articulated at a moral and spiritual level without very clear notions of how the specific nature of
womens oppression in the private and public sphere is to be addressed, for example, issues of waged
work in the context of more and more women from fishing communities seeking part-time and full-
time livelihoods outside the fisheries to make ends meet; the sexual division of labour; patriarchal
domination within families and communities, and so on. If political economy frameworks failed to
address the ecological dimension adequately, political ecology frameworks in turn fail to address the
question of labour, particularly womens labour, within the household and local markets and in the
factories and fish processing plants, adequately.
There are other questions too. How would community-based ecological arguments deal with the rural
poor in a context where the poor are increasingly turning to occasional and part-time fishing, in what
has been described in rather commercial terms, as a bank in the water, to pull themselves out of
poverty (Bn, C. et al, 2009)? In the case of South Africa, where individual-centric, quota-based fishing
is destroying fishing communities, the State is sealing the damage by going one step further and
granting fishing quotas to non-fishers too (Sunde pers. comm). This seems to be a deliberate strategy to
turn the poor against the poor and fragment communities altogether. In what ways would community-
management of fisheries be articulated that addressed the issue of non-fishing poor? Or would the
community management of coastal resources mean restricted access for the non-fishing poor? This
raises the central question of whether ecological frameworks might not run the risk of losing the class
focus, pitting the poor against the poor, in a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Section 2 - From Exploitation and Oppression to Empowerment
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Over the last few decades, the idea of womens oppression and exploitation has given way to the
notions of gender and gender empowerment.
The idea of womens oppression derived from the notion of patriarchy and of womens exploitation
from the specific ways in which womens labour was appropriated by capital. Patriarchy, as used by
womens movements in the developing world, referred to a system of power relations in society that
controlled womens labour, fertility and sexuality in different ways in service of institutions in the
private and the public domain the family, the caste or ethnic group, the community, religion, the
State, the workplace, the market, the school, the mass media, and so on. These institutions were not
static. They were highly dynamic, in flux, being modernised, resisting modernization, and so on. The
forms of patriarchy were therefore always changing as well, adapting to new requirements as objective
conditions changed, yielding concessions when forced, and consolidating stranglehold over societal
arrangements when able. Some fascinating research in the early literature on the fisheries shows how
familial forms of patriarchy gave way to social forms of patriarchy as the fisheries shifted from the
household to the industrial mode of production in countries of the North (Neis 1997).
The focus on womens labour, and its analysis grounded in the framework of political economy, kept
the idea of the exploitation of this labour alive in the early literature. The research implied that
patriarchal relations which oppressed and subordinated women could hardly be addressed
individually. It became clear that the industrial fisheries profits from the cheap labour of poor women
as a whole. Keeping women out of decision-making was one way that the cofrada or the caste panchayat
or the modern trade union could retain powers unto themselves and perpetuate the status quo. Indeed,
if all the work, unpaid and under-paid, that is performed in the household sphere childcare, finding
food, cooking, cleaning and other housework, bait preparation, boat mending, processing and selling
fish in the market is assigned to women as part of their naturally ordained responsibilities, then it is
the prevailing structures of power within the traditional fisheries, the community and the household
that profit from this assignment. The early literature demonstrated how the entrenched connections
between the private and the public spheres collaborated to keep women out of power and privilege.
Globally, however the idea of womens exploitation and oppression soon began to be discredited. A
possible reason was that it too strongly implicated capital, together with patriarchy and other
structures of power responsible of the subordination of women, and had therefore to be co-opted. The
sex-gender differentiation had been signalled (Oakley 1972) and, though questioned (Mies 1986) the
notion of gender gained currency and soon dominated the development discourse. As capitalist
opportunities inherent in integrating women into development began to be recognised, a variety of
conjugations ensued between the notions first of Women and Development, then Gender and
Development (See Kabeer 1994) and Gender, Environment and Development.
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By 1979, the United Nations had adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Article 3 of the convention stated that States Parties shall
take in all fields, in particular in the political, social, economic and cultural fields, all appropriate
measures, including legislation, to ensure the full development and advancement of women, for the
purpose of guaranteeing them the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms
on a basis of equality with men. This promise of equality could be seen as a starting point for allowing
certain classes of women opportunities within the framework of capitalism. However, the illusion of
equal opportunities obscured the forms of oppression of women that were inherent to capitalism. It
ignored the structural difference between classes; the subsidization of the formal, public economy by
the informal, private economy; the subsidization of the private economy by womens labour; as well as
the differences between men and women in the private sphere. As Brooks (2002) observes, CEDAW
suggests that nothing need be changed except stereotypes and formal barriers to access: just let the
women in, and that's that.
The idea of gender was institutionalised through a process of collaboration involving an emerging class
of professional gender experts from an array of state, non-state and global bodies - the World Bank,
the United Nations and its affiliates, national development agencies, governments, business firms,
multinational companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This was the period of the
Washington Consensus (discussed later), which meant that international and state institutions were
highly inclined to let women in. And, they were also being lobbied to do so by civil society
advocates. In the circumstances, the idea of gender empowerment rapidly took root. This meant
identifying needs and gaps that handicapped women from full participation in the mainstream, and
overcoming these through capacity-building which included gender training, skills and vocational
training, and small-scale monetary support, including micro-credit.
There began a dilution in the ways that the term gender began to be used from the late 1980s onwards
in the fisheries literature. Although the term was everywhere, it was rarely explained. When it was
explained, there was little consistency or rigour regarding its use. In the fisheries literature, gender was
variously defined as a social role (Williams et al 2005); as the relations between men and women (FAO
2004b); as a structuring principle in society (Bavington et al. 2005); and sometimes even tautologically,
as the basis of certain behavioural standards, values and patterns regarding both genders (Aguilar and
Casteneda 2001). In different contexts, thus, the term referred to different constructions; in one instance,
material, in another, ideological. The implications were of course significant and very different. Despite
notable attempts to define gender in political ways that located it in a matrix of power relationships,
the definition that gained currency was the one that viewed gender in terms of the relations between
men and women. Defining gender simply in terms of the relationship between men and women,
without referring to the power differential institutionally structured into roles and relations that
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marginalise women, particularly poor, black/lower-caste, single, elderly women, utterly depoliticises
the term. As Nayak (2002) has pointed out, ambiguities inherent in the term establish a misleading
relationship between female embodiment and the representation of womens interests, giving rise to
the assumption that more women in decision making will result in pro-women decisions.
Soon after the 1995 Beijing Conference, along with gender and gender empowerment, gender
mainstreaming as a policy recommendation also made its appearance in the fisheries literature. This
particular concept was typically offered as a blanket policy recommendation, unmindful of the larger
politico-economic system into which gender was being sought to be mainstreamed. The political
implications were clear: capitalism, caste, religion and other structures of power were not the problem
and did not need to be challenged so long as gender could somehow be mainstreamed into them.
When 'environment' was added to the 'women and development' cocktail, and celebrated, as it was
during 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the empowerment
discourse was further bolstered. "Earth mother myths" about womens natural, cultural or ideological
closeness to nature implied that women were the "natural caretakers" of the environment (Leach 2007).
Empowerment training was all that was required to draw out this potential. In development practice,
the womenenvironment link meant that womens labour, skills and knowledge were used to subsidize
forestry and coastal conservation programmes and women were drawn in to unpaid labour
surveillance tasks (Nayak 2008).
Gender empowerment today is arguably little else besides an ideological permit for the assimilation of
women into capitalism. It has come to be associated, as Petras (1997) observes, with non-
confrontational politics, never going beyond influencing small areas of social life, with limited
resources, and within the conditions permitted by the neoliberal state and macro-economy. The term
gender has been so thoroughly co-opted that it can be effortlessly slipped into the clauses of bilateral
aid agreements and poverty reduction strategic papers. The dilution of gender politics is visible in the
decline in analytical research pertaining to the labor of women, particularly the labor women put into
household production and reproduction. For the fisheries sector, these are central issues. This seems to
indicate a loss of both political focus, and acceptance of the inevitability of patriarchy in the family
sphere. Post-modern analyses, which dominated the decade of the 1980s and 1990s, located power
politics in the subaltern arena. This might have benefited a new form of enquiry into the oppression of
women but failed to contribute to the ability to organize women. Why, even after so many years of
political organization and analysis, have the demands for the socialization of household reproductive
tasks and valuation of womens labor not become global campaign issues joining women of the North
and the South in common cause, is a question that remains largely answered.
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The gender discourse was articulated in ways that suggested that the problem was not with traditional
patriarchal hierarchies within the household and community and their collusion with capital, but
rather, with the inability to provide opportunities and an enabling environment wherein women could
adapt to and accommodate the mythical idea of empowerment. Gender politics was cast in terms of an
essentialist argument of difference (tradition, lack of training, and so on) and the solution cast not in
terms of challenging the structural and political reasons responsible for the difference but rather in
terms of providing opportunities. The spread of this particular interpretation of gender politics,
institutionalised by policy and propped up by aid, was critical, it is argued, to the global expansion of
capital in the last three decades. Gradually, as gender was delinked from institutionalized power and
popularized instead as a function of the skills and capacities that women lacked, the discourse on the
rights of women underwent a similar metamorphosis. The specificity of womens rights, as will be
elaborated later, was increasingly diluted to the extent that womens rights today run the risk of being
subsumed under the more general framework of human rights.

Section 3 - The Rise of Rights-based Arguments
Two main types of rights-based arguments have gained ground in the last few decades - one as put
forward by fisheries managers, which promotes private property rights in the fisheries to counter the
problem of open access, and the other, the assertion by small-scale fishing communities of their
human rights. This section discusses and analyses first the rights-based argument propagated by
fisheries management regimes and then the human rights approach used by civil society fisheries
advocacy to counter the privatization agenda it represents.
In many countries, new fisheries management models have selectively restructured the fisheries, by
curbing, on the one hand, the access rights of small players using a regime of licenses and quotas, and
by facilitating, on the other, access rights of big players often through the same license and quota
regime. The ideological justification for such restructuring derives from the tragedy of the commons
thesis the belief that open access to common property resources inevitably results in over-exploitation
(Hardin 1968). Because this rights-based model of development is being transferred from the North to
the South, including, for example, under World Bank-led wealth-based fisheries management
frameworks which based themselves on the argument of economic efficiency and generation of wealth,
it is instructive to briefly consider its impact on the Northern fisheries, particularly on women in the
sector.
The State, in many parts of the industrial North, deployed the logic of tragedy of the commons to
privilege individual rights over community rights in the fisheries. The crisis brought on by industrial
14
over-fishing was sought to be addressed through privatisation. Aiding privatisation was the quota
regime. The experience of Iceland demonstrates how the Individual Quota (IQ) system, introduced in
1984, first helped to consolidate fishing access in the hands of proprietors of large boats; thereafter, the
individual transferable quota (ITQ) system, introduced in 1991, concentrated access even more in the
hands of big corporations and absentee owners. Ocean fish, by law, common, national property, was
transformed into a marketable, private commodity. While there were differences in the implementation
of quota management systems across the North, increasingly the fishing license became a product that
could be bought, sold, rented out or transferred at will (Munk-Madsen 1998; Skaptadttir and Propp
2005).
The continuing collapse of fish stocks in the Northern seas prompted further market-led regulatory
mechanisms such as the professionalization of the sector which restricted commercial fisheries to core
fishers in Canada, defined as heads of fishing enterprises who had seven years or more of full-time
fishing experience and earned at least 75 percent of their income from fishing. Women, not
surprisingly, came to constitute less than 2 percent of the core fishers population while the rising cost
of vessels and license fees led to further quota concentration in the hands of fishing companies
(Williams 1996).
The effects of stock collapse and concentration of ownership reverberated throughout the sector. Not
only were women further marginalised in the traditional economy, in the formal economy they faced
massive job loss due to the closure of fish processing plants. The reserve army of women that had been
drawn into the formal economy a few decades earlier into fish-processing plants and canneries in
certain Northern countries to boost industrial growth was now laid off as the economy was
restructured (Neis et al, 2001; Nayak 2002). A key point is that womens labour in this period acted as a
shock absorber to mitigate the adverse effects of restructuring through an intensification of both
housework and unpaid work in the fisheries (Binkley 2005, Grzetic 2005).
Thus, the very crisis caused by industrial over-fishing was used to drive away small fish producers,
and consolidate the hold of large players on the sector. Since the late 1980s, this model of privatisation
of the fisheries and the shift of regulation from State to the market is being globalized. Transition
economies such as South Africa which have adopted the ITQ regime report a high incidence of
livelihood alienation of traditional fishers and the growing entrenchment of the drug cartel in the
fishing sector, with disastrous consequences particularly on women, youth and children (Sunde 2002).
Today, the privatization model is being cast anew in the form of the wealth-based fisheries
management approach promoted by the World Bank and international aid agencies.
The wealth-based fisheries management approach argues that the dissipation of resource rent from
the fisheries is a phenomenon that can be reversed to realise the inherent potential of the fisheries and
15
to prevent the sector from representing a net drain on the national income (Cunningham et al 2009).
Although this approach has evolved mainly from the experience with single-species, temperate
fisheries with smaller numbers and concentrated holdings, its applicability is generalised to the tropical
fisheries where the majority of fishworkers are located, in situations, moreover, of widespread
community involvement in the sector, with catch diversity supporting diverse forms of livelihood
(Bn et al 2010). A stated purpose of the advocates of wealth-based fisheries management is global
policy reform to draft a general policy framework within which other approaches, such as rights-
based, incentive-based, and ecosystem-based, may be nested (Cunningham et al 2009:271).
While fisheries management regimes thus continue to prop up privatization, there is also a case being
made for adopting a different kind of rights-based framework - a human rights approach to fisheries
development (Sharma nd-a) to an extent, in opposition to privatization. This approach, outlined in a
FAO Secretariat document in 2007 (FAO 2009), has developed over the last two decades with the
proliferation of global consultations around the Right to Development and the emergence of the
Millennium Development Goals and Targets. The human rights-based approach to development in
fisheries argues that fishing communities are entitled to the full realization of their human rights.
Human rights, according to this view, encompass economic, social, cultural and political rights and are
the entitlements of not just individuals but of communities as well. It is further argued that since the
human-rights approach is backed by an international apparatus of universally-held norms, it provides
a stronger basis for citizens to make claims on their States, and for holding States to account for their
duties.(Sharma nd-b) In practice, the human rights approach to development in the fisheries has
translated primarily to asserting the right of access. For example, the Bangkok Statement issued by civil
society groups in the fisheries, which endorsed the human rights approach, highlighted the right of
access of traditional fishing communities to customarily-used lands and waters as well as of
preferential access to fisheries resources and basic social services (see ICSF 2008). The right to
participate in fisheries and coastal management and the right to fisheries services and assistance were
also asserted as part of the human rights entitlements of fishing communities.
How effective is the human rights argument in countering the alienation of small-scale fishing
communities, and even more significantly for the scope of the present discussion, how effectively does
it address the issue of womens rights within the traditional fisheries?
Historically, a key point of note is that access, ownership rights, and the dissipation of rent through
illegal leakages, overproduction, and so on, were not issues of contention for fishing communities in
situations where the State was weak and its institutions remote. The collective possession of resources
ensured that resource rent was absorbed into the community, typically enriching its powerful strata.
However, it was in the era of market liberalization, when capital penetration, aided by the State,
16
gathered momentum, that access became a highly contentious issue requiring regulation, which, in the
political economy of the times meant privatised forms of regulation. This contention, whether
expressed in terms of ownership rights or of preferential access rights, gives rise to multiple questions.
These questions remain even when the issue of human rights is invoked as a mitigating dimension.
Community rights are based on the idea of customary possession not ownership. The idea of human
rights on the other hand is a modern concept most commonly associated with individual citizens of
democratic nation states. Central to the human rights discourse is the sanctity of private property. As
Baxi (2002) observes, the modern nation state has frequently been able to marshal the right to property
as a right to imperial domination, and the right to property and the right to progress have been
inseparable in the modern discourse of human rights.
In this context, when advocacy groups in the fisheries argue that a human-rights approach backed by
an international apparatus of universally-held norms provides a stronger basis for citizens to make
claims on their States, it is not immediately clear what is being signalled. Any arrangement of
community rights and any form of positive discrimination mobilised on the basis of community rights
would necessarily run into conflict with prevailing regimes of individual rights, including, most
importantly, property rights, based on citizenship. This is even more so given that communities are not
homogeneous but rather, are deeply divided along lines of gender, caste, race and class and so on.
If by human rights is meant the preferential access of fishing communities to lands and resources, then
it is likely that the privileged and powerful within communities are ones who will benefit from such
rights. That is to say, it is not the community that will develop but rather individuals within the
community who will do so, leading to further imbalances within the community structure. This is
likely to be welcomed by capital since usufruct rights can be easily alienated and decisions about how
much access is to be granted now, or in what measure restricted in future, would be left in the hands of
the market. In this case, does the human rights argument not represent an argument for accelerating
class formation within traditional communities? Given that class formation can transform womens
relationship to the fishing economy in ways that may be socially constricting (Hapke 2001), what does
the human rights approach portend in terms of the interests of women, and by this is meant the
interests of the bulk of women in the traditional fisheries of the global South?
On the other hand, if by human rights we mean rights that accrue to the community as a whole,
whether of ownership or of exclusive use, then too there are questions that are as yet unanswered in
the literature. The earlier question is applicable here as well, which is that the hierarchy-ridden
structure of traditional communities would render such rights accessible primarily to the communitys
most powerful, thus perpetuating systemic inequalities to the detriment of those already at the bottom
of the hierarchy. Further, because fishing communities are already fairly integrated with capital, such
17
rights would in effect support the establishment of a conduit for speedier penetration by capital into
community resources. There is also the related question of the human rights of the non-fishing poor. In
the absence of viable social security, fishing is drawing increasing numbers of the traditionally non-
fishing poor as a way out of poverty and starvation. If the human rights discourse is posited around the
traditional fishing community as the rights-bearer, how would the human rights of the non-fishing
poor (non- members of the traditional fishing community) be addressed, particularly in the context of a
retreating, privatising state?
An associated and major problem with the human rights discourse is that human rights are usually
articulated in relation to the public domain and rarely linked to the domestic or private sphere. Thus,
household labour, childcare, sexual rights and so on, are usually not articulated as human rights.
Where rights in the private sphere do find mention, they are usually enshrined, as Petchesky observes,
in an almost-feminist vision of reproductive rights and gender equality but very much within a
mainstream model of development under which, as she points out, that vision cannot possibly be
realised. A dangerous gap is thus created between the politics of the body, sexuality and reproduction
and the politics of social development and global economic transformation (Petchesky 1995:151).
Human rights are formulated in ways that typically ignore the crucial fact that the public sphere exists
precisely because womens labour in the private sphere subsidises it, as do other forms of often
overlapping, cheap labour such as migrant and child labour. Moreover, significant aspects of public
policy in the countries of the South, for example, the structuring the minimum wage or family wage,
are based on the patriarchal assumption of female dependency. The assumption of female dependency
and the assignment of the major part of the realm of household production and the entire realm of
household reproduction to women, leads to real and crippling constraints on a womans ability to cross
the boundary of the private sphere into the public, and play any sort of empowered role therein (for
example, see Kusakabe 2003).
The public sphere becomes the sphere of human activity and rights, while the private sphere is the
sexually differentiated one. As the State retreats from the social sector, as capitals stranglehold
increases, and as community structures that might have earlier provided a modicum of social support
are fragmented, the enormous intensification of work is left to women to handle. Reinforced by
patriarchal community hierarchies and capitalist wage labour patterns, this iniquitous assignment,
through a process of silencing and invisibilizing, is made to appear natural and inevitable not every
womans lot in life, for women are divided by the material realities of class, caste and so on, but
certainly the poor womans lot in life. The reality of women in the small-scale fisheries, since the vast
majority is extremely poor, is thus a life full of the crushing burden of labour and high levels of
indebtedness even as the means of production are steadily concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
18
To conclude this section, the human rights approach seeks to counter the regime of privatised rights
touted in the name of fisheries management and to attach a set of rights to the community as a
corporeal entity. However, in order for this opposition to be serious and effective, it must also engage
with and address several questions which arise in this context:
1. How would a human rights approach to fisheries negotiate the issue of private property which
is central to the conception of modern human rights, and do so moreover, in ways that are
fundamentally any different from privatised rights regimes?
2. Related to this, does the human rights approach, particularly in the context of rapid
liberalization and privatization, not accelerate class formation within traditional communities?
For example, would this paradigm not facilitate community elites to gain for themselves
ownership over what were earlier common/shared property resources?
3. Within the human rights paradigm, if the community as a group is viewed as the rights-bearer,
what mechanisms would protect against in-group maltreatment and exploitation of women, the
poor and other vulnerable sections? Further, how would the human rights of the poor outside
the traditional fishing community, such as occasional fishers, be addressed?
4. And finally, how can the human rights framework address the specific nature of gender-based
oppression and exploitation when its very formulation is based upon the denial of the private
sphere, the primary site of this oppression and exploitation?
Section 4 - The Emergence of Community
The idea of fishing communities rights is hinged upon the notion of an identity derived from fishing as
a way of life. The fishing household and community, including its cultural practices, customs and
mores, are the primary agents of socialization of men and women, informing the nomos of the
community, shaping the identity of its members. This notion of identity thus cannot be separated from
the idea of community; further, the notion of identity is less an individual one in the modern sense and
more a collective one in the traditional and customary sense.
Since fishing communities have occupied the coastlines for generations, the idea of community, as a
subjective construct, is a very old one. However, as an objective notion, the idea of community
emerged from two different locations at two different points in time. The first the community as a
political construct - emerged from the struggles of fishing communities, threatened by development, and
fighting to retain their rights in the face of imminent dispossession and displacement. The second - the
community as an institutional construct, an artefact of global policy - was the outcome of the
institutionalized response to these struggles. This is a very important distinction but one that is
19
increasingly blurred in real life and also observed less and less frequently in the literature. The role of
aid, it is argued, has been central to the dissolution of this critical difference.
The political role of the fishing community is nothing new. Fishing communities have always resisted
dispossession. The early literature documents the struggles of traditional communities, which, with the
spread of industrial fishing and the growing collusion of governance regimes with large capital,
continuously struggled to protect their right to life and livelihood. Women were often at the forefront
of rallies and picket-lines, protesting, in the North, the fragmentation of fishing communities and the
declining access to fish resources, and, in parts of the South, demanding the regulation of trawling
activities, public transport for women fish vendors and reduction of market taxes for women vendors,
and so on. The idea of community rights thus emerged out of a political context of resistance and
continues to be expressed as such by fishing communities resisting the assault of capitalist forms of
fisheries and coastal development. This is not to claim that such community struggles were always
democratic or even that they articulated the demands of all sections of the community.
However, since the late 1980s onwards there has been also a second articulation, emerging from the
institutionalization of the community into an artefact of global policy. Development, viewed and
resisted until now as a top-down and illegitimate project by communities, was recast in terms that
seemed to be more polite and inclusive. The term stakeholder, drafted from management science,
gained currency. It was during this period that communities found that far from being the primary, if
not sole, stakeholder of the natural resource base that had sustained them for generations, they were
intended to be only one of many stakeholders in a contentious battle. The institutionalization of the
concept of community also signalled a larger transformation in the role of the State, from providing
some sort of regulation towards providing little or no regulation. Where the State continued to control
regulation, as in the case of South Africa, it was increasingly to protect and mediate private property
interests. What factors lay behind these developments?
The period from the late 1980s onwards marked an unprecedented growth of market penetration in the
fisheries in the South which set off various forms of contestation between traditional forms of
livelihood and new forms of capitalist industrial development. The contestation took the form of
prolonged struggles in several parts of the world which questioned the ecological destruction, the
social displacement and the widespread impoverishment being forced upon traditional communities in
the name of development. In the North, industrialization of the fisheries had already taken place. The
resultant depletion of Northern fish stocks spurred the need to find newer production sites and to
move production away from the capture fisheries towards aquaculture and fish farming. Capitalist
forms of fisheries production had to be expanded to new regions where the fishing sector was not yet
capitalised. The fisheries of the South thus became the targets for accelerated modernisation and
20
industrialisation. At the same time, the growing international discourse of human rights pushing for
greater democracy, together with the emergence of networks of international NGOs whose reach
spread to consumer bodies and influenced public opinion within developed nations, made it necessary
to take into account the rights of people directly affected by the spread of Northern industrial
development into regions of the South. Thus it became important to bring on board the development
project, some form of community representation. The growth of certification and eco-labelling schemes
in the fisheries bear witness to this trend (Neis 2004; Sharma 2009). These might primarily be North-
North concerns at present, but, given the manner in which regulatory frameworks move from Northern
spheres of activity to Southern spheres, it can be expected that forms of certification like ecolabelling
would also have a growing role in Southern markets. This is not to say that private regulatory
frameworks do not play a part in bringing about fair and equitable relations of production and trade
but the issue is that the prevalence of such frameworks may tend to push out or weaken broader State
regulation.
A further reason for the institutionalization of the concept of community may be found in the model of
modernization promoted in the years following what is now known as the Washington Consensus of
the early 1980s a prescription for the South that mandated state fiscal austerity, market liberalization
and public sector privatization. From growth with distribution the policy mantra changed to market-
only growth. As a result of this global policy prescription, which was tied, as we shall discuss in the
next section, to aid, the State in countries of the global South began withdrawing from regulation, and
the discourse began to revolve increasingly around the privatisation of all regulation, including that of
natural resource management. Since the decade of the 1990s, first, models of co-management of natural
resources were mooted and, later, the idea of community-based coastal resource management began to
spread in the fisheries. While co-management initiatives have been resisted in some regions by fishing
communities, the response to community-based coastal resource management initiatives has been more
favourable. It is significant however that the few positive reports of such experiments in community-
based coastal resource management remain largely in the realm of pilot projects supported extensively
by donor aid (Quist et al, 2008).
The context of a retreating State in the global South made it necessary for capital to deal with the new
reality of increased private participation in the social sector, taking on roles earlier performed by
government. Increasingly, this included the NGO sector. Market-driven policy received national
legitimacy as well as the rubber stamp of civil-society representation through the incorporation of
NGOs into the process of manufacturing policy consent. This meant that NGOs were under pressure to
surrender what little oppositional role they might have once possessed in order to align with the
dominant ideology. Wittingly or unwittingly, NGOs became instrumental in embedding the tenets of
neo-liberalism into local administrative institutions. Tracing the role of NGOs in undermining the
21
welfare state in Latin America, James Petras writes: [As] the neoliberal regimes at the top devastated
communities by inundating the country with cheap imports, extracting external debt payment,
abolishing labor legislation, and creating a growing mass of low-paid and unemployed workers, the
NGOs were funded to provide self-help projects, popular education, and job training, to temporarily
absorb small groups of poor, to co-opt local leaders, and to undermine anti-system struggles... Anti-
Statism was the ideological transit ticket from class politics to community development (Petras 1997;
emphasis in original). The movement towards community-based politics does not mean that demands
for state intervention disappear overnight. On the contrary, such demands as the rights of fishing
communities to basic services such as safe drinking water, education, sanitation, health and HIV/AIDS
prevention and treatment services (Bangkok Statement on Small-Scale Fisheries 2008), may continue
to be placed before the State. However, as argued more fully in the next section, what is important is to
understand the ways in which the demand for community empowerment, even as it emerges from
communities themselves, is co-opted and melded into the blueprint of the reforms agenda driven by
the imperatives of capital.
Another important factor in augmenting the role of community during the period of the 1990s was the
growth of identity politics. As long as fishing communities, organised around the traditional mode of
production in the fisheries, remained outside the pale of capitalist development, there was no need for
such communities to engage in any significant manner with the mainstream. The mainstream, in turn,
had no real material interest in them. This does not mean however that the traditional and the capitalist
forms of fisheries had no interaction whatsoever. For a long period of time before the era of market-
only economic growth, communities had been subsistence-oriented but they were certainly not
exclusively so. Rather they had interacted with capitalist forms of fisheries in diverse ways as providers
of goods and services. Under apartheid, for instance, capital in South Africa used the traditional
fisheries sector by contracting individual small-scale fishers who used their own boats and gear (Sunde
pers comm). Thus, the expansion of the capitalist mode of production along the coastline overlapped
with the traditional mode
4
.
However, once the aggressive penetration of capital, aided by the State, began, the fishing community
of the global South began to be pulled into the mainstream in a manner that alienated it from its
traditional means of survival. It was now forced to engage with capital to shore up its livelihood
sources, that is to say, forced to begin fighting for a piece of the development pie. For members of the

4
Historically, it may be noted, dominant modes of production have supported and maintained
subordinate modes in order to expand and articulate their base, as in the case of slavery in the days of early
capitalism in the Americas, or more currently, in the case of outsourcing labour-intensive work, for instance in the
garment sector, from the global North to the little-regulated global South.
22
community, the very struggle for survival now depended on the assertion and articulation of their
rights. In the contested political arena, representational politics became paramount and a hardening of
community boundaries along lines of identity began to take place, as in the case, for example, of Kerala,
India, where being born in a fishing caste, irrespective of whether one was an actual fisher or not, was
sought to be made the primary criterion for access to fishery resources, the renewal of the caste card
thus ensuring the rise of absentee ownership (Kurien 2005: 87). In the absence of secular forms of
organising, and further, in an era where labour organizations were on the back-foot, the community
became the main form of organising its members.
Identity, as discussed, is an inseparable part of the fishing communitys life; however, the political
assertion of community identity was a newer phenomenon, a reaction to the growing capitalist, and
hence, state, intervention in the fishing sector. The assertion of traditional identity was mediated by
modern compulsions, leading, in many cases, to the democratization of old community forms. Thus, in
Galicia, Spain, the centuries-old and traditionally male-run cofrada was resurrected as a political entity
in the 1980s but the changing historical context forced it to accommodate, to a certain extent, women
shellfish-collectors (Meltzoff 1995). In Kanyakumari, India, the fishing communitys claim to local
identity and rights was tied to citizenship and the exercise of state power to protect their mode of
fishing (Subramanian, 2003).
The community identity thus was often a vibrant mobilizing force. It however impacted upon the ways
in which the womens question began to be articulated in this period. The womens movement had
never been a uniformly articulated and widespread movement. Despite this, the gains of the womens
movement emanating from the North found their small beginnings of articulation, though very
unevenly, in the South, in new democracies, through new enfranchisement laws, policy changes and so
on. Today, there appears to be a backlash to womens rights. It is argued that the backlash is due to the
manner in which capital is expanding and the manner in which opposition to capital is being shaped.
Often, this opposition has involved the progressive de-politicization of the idea of gender.
In fishery-related advocacy, womens rights are increasingly articulated as community rights:
Womens rights must be placed in a wider context of the roles that women have in communities, and
of community needs (Le Sauze 2008). In a working document, the World Forum of Fish Harvesters
and Fish Workers (WFF) asserted that gaining recognition for the important role that [women] play
would contribute to putting less aggressive and sustainable fisheries policies in place. Further, the
document pointed out, it fell upon the WFF to ensure that our sector is not weakened by dividing it,
putting men on one side and women on the other, in a context where increasingly small-scale fishers
from the North and South are having to abandon their way of life due to the impact of government
policies which favour industrial fisheries interests.(Le Sauze 2000).
23
The suggestion that the fishing sector would somehow be weakened if women were to organize
around their own issues is reminiscent of the apprehensions of the Left in an earlier era that womens
autonomous organisation would inevitably divide working class struggles. In a sector which in fact has
experienced the autonomous as well as being part of community-based organization of women (Nayak
1990), the current impetus to subsume womens rights under the rubric of community rights could run
two risks: first, that of further depoliticising the issue of gender, and, second, of weakening a
communitys ability to resist external assaults. The pressure of external assaults can only be withstood
by a community that is internally cohesive, equal and united. If a community keeps sections of its
population in a state of denial and subjugation it cannot be said to be internally cohesive, equal and
united. By articulating the rights of all its sections, including those who have historically been denied
their rights, a community would in fact be able to vastly strengthen its militancy, drawing all its
members into the fight to protect its way of life. To deny the specificity of womens rights, it is
argued, is in fact to sacrifice womens rights, a sacrifice that serves little purpose apart from hastening
the destruction of divided communities increasingly being hemmed in by modern development.
The loss of the specificity of womens rights is evident in recent civil society statements, for example,
the Bangkok Statement on Small-Scale Fisheries. Such statements do recognise the indisputable truth
that all rights and freedoms apply equally to all men and women in fishing communities (Bangkok
Statement on Small-Scale Fisheries 2008). However, they fail to acknowledge that, in the absence of
formal and systemic equality, access to rights will remain differentiated by existing structural
disparities, such as those of gender, class, caste, and so on. If the structural disparities that exist within
fishing communities do not find even a mention in the formal pronouncements of civil society groups
today, why would there be any imperative from within the community to address, let alone eradicate,
them? In the absence of any fundamental questioning of oppressive community structures, the call to
Protect the cultural identities, dignity and traditional rights of fishing communities and indigenous
peoples, as contained, for example, in the Bangkok Statement, could in fact have negative and
undesirable repercussions on at-risk groups that have been historically denied their rights as part of the
traditional mores of the community.
The internal restrictions of a community under conditions of multiculturalism (Kymlicka 1995) could
lead to a situation where some of its members, for example, women, are asked to bear a
disproportionate share of the costs of multiculturalism. Shachar et al (2001) have discussed the United
States Supreme Court decision to grant the Santa Clara Pueblo tribe autonomy to fully determine its
membership boundaries a decision which meant that the tribes gender-discriminatory membership
rules (denying membership to the children of females married to non-tribals while the children of
males married to non-tribals enjoyed undisputed membership) were upheld. We see therefore that
24
when entitlements based on community identity are sought, safeguarding the interests of vulnerable
groups within the community becomes vital.
Related to this issue is the duality between the cultural and the economic spheres which is rarely
questioned, although it has a direct bearing on the contemporary discourse on rights. To explain, there
is, at the level of culture, a growing hardening of identity and consequently of boundaries based on
insider-outsider politics. While this is expressed in terms of a fisheries way of life it often precludes
any fundamental questioning of oppressive community structures whether based on patriarchy, caste,
class or religion. However, at the economic level, the communities are rapidly becoming integrated
with capital. This leads to obfuscation at two levels. One is an obfuscation of what goes on within the
community in the name of tradition and culture (the brunt of which typically women have to bear and
ironically are the generational bearers and carriers of), and second, the obfuscation of the growing
penetration of capital into the community and the consequent benefits that accrue thereof to the
communitys powerful strata. In this fraught context, the household within the rights discourse
becomes even more of an opaque structure.
Examples from countries of the South such as India where economic reforms are rapidly altering the
contours of the fisheries show that as women are pulled into new forms of work, theirs is a mixed bag
of experiences with new opportunities allowing an escape from oppressive traditional practices.
Despite the exploitative working conditions that migrant women workers from Kerala working
seasonally in the commercial fish processing industry in far-off Gujarat face, they report earning better
wages and feeling less discriminated as against men than did their counterparts engaged in home-
based fish processing in Kerala (Centre for Social Research n.d.). Women in Indias Sunderbans district
who are earning a decent wage today as a result of commercial prawn seed collection, report
experiencing a sense of liberation from the exploitation of feudal and patriarchal landlords in whose
fields they had laboured for generations (Jalais 2009). In other parts of the South too, such as Ghana,
motorization and technological change have brought empowering opportunities for certain sections of
women (Over 2005). However, even as waged work helps to improve womens status and bargaining
power within the household, it introduces to their lives a punishing double burden since housework
continues to be primarily womens responsibility.
The foregoing, it must be added, is not a uniform comment on all fishing societies. In advanced
capitalist societies, womens movements have wrested some lasting, though by no means complete,
political and economic rights for women. However in the global South, where the community is the
principal social and economic unit, the constraints on womens labour, sexuality and fertility are
determined primarily by the communitys customary practices. Communities are not static but rapidly
changing in response to capitals growth. In the global South, the context includes a retreating State, a
25
bitterly-contested and threatened and rapidly-depleting natural resource base, intensification of labour
and diminishing social support a situation that has grave and specific, gender-determined impacts on
women. For example, the National Fishworkers Forum (NFF) in India has justified its shift to caste-
based identity politics on the grounds that fishworkers as a caste/community must unite to get their
share of mainstream development. However, as Nayak (2005: 42) points out: The minute that caste
identities are called into play, the old social and cultural norms that have subjugated women are also
revived, and any attempt to raise feminist positions or to talk about an alternative development
paradigm is jeopardized. The question that arises in this context therefore is: how would womens
rights that derive from gender and citizenship be reconciled with practices that result from entrenched
power structures within communities such as those of religion, sexuality, race, caste or class?
The context of fishing communities in the South, thus, is one in which women are increasingly moving
into wage labour and finding empowerment within the community as a result of access to independent
economic means. The context also includes the fact that governments are being forced to recognise,
even if only to pay lip service to, the idea of womens rights, which is bolstered further through NGO
interventions. Given that the context is making it increasingly inevitable for communities to respond to
women both as individuals and as part of community structures, what forces will determine the
womens agenda and in what ways?
If an earlier period had actively questioned community hierarchies and challenged the split between
the public and private domains that legitimised the oppression of women and the exploitation of their
labour at every level - within households, within communities, within waged work and also within
structures of political organization, there is a much greater level of silence around these issues today.
What is more common today is descriptive literature, recounting the endless unpaid, underpaid and
undervalued tasks women in the fisheries have to perform, which is rarely analytical in terms of
unpacking the political economy of womens labour. The material and changing linkages between the
private and the public sphere are rarely explored. Why? Is it because subjecting the private sphere to
political scrutiny would mean asking uncomfortable questions about the sexual politics that structure
fishing communities and allow communities to perpetuate themselves in a patriarchal mould?
The next section of this paper discusses the role of aid. It is argued that the shifts covered so far the
loss of focus on labour and the rise of ecological frameworks; the loss of focus on womens oppression
and exploitation and the rise of the discourse on gender empowerment; the loss of focus on the rights
of specific categories of the oppressed and the rise of the idea of human rights; and finally, the
cooptation of community struggles into institutionalised forms of community expression all these
could not have played out in the concerted manner that they did in the last few decades without the
26
key role of aid in manufacturing a global, consensual and uniform discourse on development, that is to
say, in establishing hegemony.
Section 5 - Growing aid dependence
Aid has played a significant role in the spread of the ideology of globalisation and the spread of free
market. If free market is regarded as capitals iron fist, then aid may be seen as the velvet glove that
sheaths it. Through its structure and the conditionalities it involves, aid determines the pattern of
growth and development of different sectors of the economy in different parts of the world. The
paradigm of aid changed through the years, reflecting broadly the dominant geo-political trends of the
period, and the imperatives of expansion of the political and economic interests of capital.
Trends in aid also significantly affected development in the fisheries sector choice of technology, the
structure of production and markets, and patterns of state intervention and regulation. It also had its
impact, directly through government agencies and indirectly through non-government organisations,
on the development and changes in the organisation and management of traditional fishing as a
response to the large changes brought by capital in the sector. While this dynamic had its regional and
temporal variations, the dominant international aid organisations did influence a harmonisation of aid
agendas at various levels regional, nation, and local. It should however at the outset also be said that
for such an important determinant of modern life, there has been very little in the way of a critical
analysis of aid and its impact, including the impact of aid on the fisheries sector.
Among global institutions, the synergies of the Big Three the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO
have created what has been described as a single global institution governing the world economy,
whose three parts specialise in stabilization (IMF), structural adjustment (World Bank) and trade
liberalization (WTO), cooperating closely to forge a coherent, unifying policy position, increasingly
centred on what they take to be their most convincing theme free trade (Peet 2003:201). This policy
has been imposed upon countries as a conditionality for borrowings, as a conditionality for debt relief,
as a trading requirement as well as part of overseas development assistance or aid (Peet 2003; Goldman
2005). Aid critically influences internal policy decisions of governments, including the type of
industrial growth to be supported and incentivised. The agenda of free trade is very much central to
the liberalization agenda pushed directly through aid. Aid and trade are thus deeply and inextricably
linked.
Donor aid was often tied to conditionalities promoting modernization and industrialization, making a
destructive model of development in the marine and culture fisheries ubiquitous in the global South. In
a 1991 study, the FAO revealed that most of the funding in the fisheries has gone to industrial fishery
projects, and increasingly to aquaculture (FAO 1991). There are, however, no recent analyses of aid
27
trends in fisheries (ICSF pers comm.) Worldwide fisheries subsidies are estimated at US $30 to 34
billion annually, the majority of which goes to industrial fisheries. Industrial fishing uses 89 percent of
total fuel of catching fish and the industrial fisher receives an estimated 187 times more fuel subsidies
each year than does the average small-scale fisher. Yet the small-scale fishery nets four times more fish
per litre of fuel. A large part of the subsidies funds market-based sustainable seafood initiatives which
would never benefit the small-scale fisheries (Jacquet and Pauly 2008)
Export-led growth has been followed so aggressively that the fisheries today is one of the most highly
globalized economic sectors (LeSann 1998 cited in Neis et al 2005). According to the FAO, in 2009, 37
percent of fish was exported out of the country of origin. The value of exports for 2008, at $102 billion,
was two thirds more than exports in the year 2000. Fish is thus the fastest-growing cash crop (FAO
2008). In 2008, Japan, USA and the EU received 70 percent of all fish exports from developing countries,
which are now the largest exporters of fish and fish products whose fish exports constitute 60 percent
by weight and 50 percent by value of total exports. The net figures in export showed a sharp rising
trend, from $7.2 billion in 1996 to $27 billion in 2008, a nearly 300 percent increase indicating the huge
transfer of an extremely important source of protein for the common people, from the South to the
North (FAO 2008) Global fish exports transfer fish from the poor consumers plate in the South to the
rich consumers plate in the North (Bn et al 2010).
This unequal transfer will only intensify in the years to come. Projections indicate that by 2020, Chinas
net fish exports would tend to zero while India would become a large importer of fish (Ahmed 2006).
This will generate increased pressures for fish exports from other poorer developing countries, leading
to declining per capita availability of fish in those countries, with consequent implications for food
security. The growth in global fish trade is mostly fuelled by increases in industrial aquaculture
production promoted vigorously in the South by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and
other financial institutions (Goss 2005). Here, industrial aquaculture has thrived on weak labour laws
and poor environmental regulation, and is rapidly eroding both the environment as well as traditional
forms of smallholder aquaculture through forced tie-ins with corporate value chain involving crippling
capital investments (Gura 2009). Environmentally destructive industrial technologies, which have led
to the monetization of traditional economies and their unprotected integration with the global capitalist
economy, have been further pushed through global trade in an increasingly liberalised environment.
Aid by promoting liberalisation has therefore also promoted the growth of destructive technology.
The origins of aid in the post-World War II period following the New Deal and the creation of the
Bretton Woods institutions the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), or the
World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to build back currencies destroyed by the
war are well documented. Also well documented, in a large body of post-development critique, is the
28
trajectory of this aid, which, from being reconstruction money poured into reviving Europes ailing
economies following the Marshall Plan, later took the shape of development loans poured into states,
particularly Europes remaining and former colonies, for the purchase of capital-intensive goods from
Northern firms (Goldman 2005; McGillivray et al, 2006; Peet, 2003; Escobar 1995). In the post-war, post-
depression context, this aid was tied to welfare, which meant that although capital-intensive
modernization was the goal, a developmental state was expected to intervene to stimulate economic
growth, spending in areas unlikely to attract private capital. In the fisheries sector, the 1950s thus saw
massive infusions of capital to induct offshore bottom trawlers and distant water fleets in the North,
and, in the South, inter-governmental aid initiated the modernization of craft and gear.
After decades of industrial over-fishing and economic restructuring, fish stocks in the North began to
collapse. The introduction of internationally agreed quotas in the early 1970s and of the 200-mile EEZs
and national quotas did not curb, but in fact only continued over-exploitation (Neis et at 2005). Massive
job losses were reported in certain parts of the North as fish processing plants closed down, signalling
an unprecedented crisis in the fisheries. With economic demand in the North reaching a plateau,
capital required both new markets and new production sites for investment of surplus. In a post-
colonial era, the most politically acceptable way of making this investment was through aid routed via
multinational organizations such as the World Bank.
By the early 1980s, a Southern debt crisis triggered by overspending became capitals opportunity to
expand to new sites. The plan, now known as the Washington Consensus, crafted by the World Bank,
the IMF and the US Treasury, made mandatory state financial austerity, market liberalization and
public sector privatization as the three conditionalities for core loans for borrowing countries,
indicating the shift from growth with distribution to market-only growth (Goldman 2005). The role
of aid was critical in making this Structural Adjustment Programme the blueprint of future economic
growth for heavily indebted countries. Southern markets had to be speedily opened up but inter-
governmental aid, as the preceding decades had demonstrated, contained inherent drag factors. It
impeded the direct flow of capital in terms of regulations that had to be bypassed; it involved a
bureaucratic apparatus that had to be humoured, and so on. The Washington Consensus therefore
sought to remove governmental controls on capital flows, for which aid was the most expedient route.
In the first stage, it is argued, aid agencies provided a politically acceptable route for capital
investments, and in the second stage, as the ensuing decades would demonstrate, they became the
vehicle for comprehensive privatization.
The period from the late 1980s through the decade of the 1990s was the period of market
fundamentalism in countries of the South massive cuts in government spending, the dilution and
dismantling of regulation and the sale of public goods and utilities, matched only by growing
29
joblessness, landlessness and livelihood alienation in these countries. This period witnessed massive
worldwide protests against what was being called globalization. In the preceding decade, the
womens movement had already politicized the issue of womens labour, demanding its recognition
and valorisation. Now, as a result of unregulated economic growth unleashed in emerging market
economies, unprecedented numbers of women in developing world were being pulled into the labour
market and placed in highly vulnerable and insecure forms of employment. At the same time, even as
the imperative for capital in this period was to move rapidly into areas of resource extraction,
indigenous people were fiercely resisting displacement and dispossession. Further, the ecological
devastation that was a necessary adjunct to capital accumulation on a world scale was attracting
mounting criticism and opposition. Finally, political elites in the South, interested in consolidating their
national stakes even as they profited from the sale of public sector goods and utilities, joined forces in
opposing foreign investments. For capital, it became absolutely necessary to co-opt the growing
resistance from women, from environmental activists, from indigenous people resisting livelihood
alienation, as well as to ally with the political elites of the global South. Investments had to be made
politically acceptable while, at the same time, the process of deregulation had to be kept up in order to
remove any existing barriers to capital penetration.
In the context of the fisheries, Martha MacDonald (2005) has described the role of the international
financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO in influencing national
governments to promote supply-side policies for the liberalisation of trade and capital flows,
deregulation, privatisation and export specialization. Writers have invoked Gramscis notion of
hegemony to unpack the extraordinary consensus that emerged around neoliberal economic growth in
the last few decades, a consensus built and sustained mainly by civil society institutions, rather than by
institutions of the State, which appeared to naturalise and universalise beliefs and values congenial to
the interests of the dominant social bloc (Peet 2003; Goldman 2005). The belief, for example, that the
private sector is more efficient than the government in all spheres of economic and social activity; or
the belief that the ills of globalization can be attenuated by poverty reduction programmes, which
again can be made more efficient through targeting, and so on.
The notion of hegemony helps to explain why this period became a period of exceptional double-speak.
Gender empowerment and mainstreaming, the project, that is, of integrating women individually or in
small collectives into capitalism, became a necessary component of every proposal and project plan
okayed in Washington and Brussels and implemented by growing numbers of civil society bodies.
The greening of investments became paramount. Policy elites in Southern countries therefore drafted
national environmental plans in consultation with the World Bank, and environmental NGOs drafted
the project documentation for aquaculture, coastal management, forestry, mining, and agriculture
projects. At the same time, the privatisation of all regulation, including that of natural resource
30
management, was vigorously pursued. In the fisheries, the notions of co-management and later
community-based coastal resource management gained currency. Aid flowed into capacity-building
and professional skills training for existing, or newly set up, community-based organizations and
networks that worked directly with indigenous groups and natural resource-based communities.
Not surprisingly, income disparities between and within nations rose sharply during this period of
market fundamentalism. As Tandon (2008) notes, the top 50 financial institutions were reported to
control a third of the worlds assets and the richest 1,100 individuals owned almost twice the assets of
the poorest 2.5 billion. The ravages of the global economy were revealed most disturbingly during the
food shortages, oil and food price hikes in recent times. To manage the growing livelihood alienation
and growing political unrest, these years also witnessed the growth of the poverty and livelihood
discourse throughout the global South.
Poverty reduction programmes were initiated, entailing poverty reduction targets (the implicit
assumption being that poverty could not be eradicated) for indebted countries. These were spelled out
in country-owned Poverty Reduction Strategic Papers (PRSP) and harmonised with the UN
Millennium Project. As opposed to the earlier Structural Adjustment Programme, where the World
Bank told a borrowing country what to do, the PRSP required a borrowing country to tell the World
Bank and IMF what it would do in order to meet the eligibility criteria for a Bank-Fund loan (Easterly
2006). In the fisheries, the point was not so much that the traditional fisheries were often left out of the
scope of the PRSP of country after country, as reported in a FAO/DFID/SFLP study (FAO/DFID/SFLP
2002), as it was to challenge the legitimacy of the PRSP itself, which was rarely done. The key issue was
that poverty reduction was no more than a vehicle for privatization, the chief agenda of the PRSP
process (as it is also of the Millennium Development Goals), indicating capitals hegemonic control
over the processes and discourses made widely acceptable by the development project.
Until the late 1990s, a macro-micro paradox of aid had prevailed, that is, most micro or project-related
studies were quite clear about a positive impact of aid but macro-level studies could provide no such
clarity (McGillivray 2006). However, in 1998, the World Banks Assessing Aid report asserted that
aid did help to increase growth, but only in countries with sound economic management, or good
governance (Dollar and Prtichett 1998). A few years later, saw the adoption of the Paris Declaration on
Aid Effectiveness. This declaration
5
, signed in 2005 by 102 countries, aimed to align and harmonise aid
with governmental priorities. These two developments, it is argued, ensured that aid to the global
South would continue to be firmly strapped to the needs and requirements of capitalist growth. How?

5
See http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/11/41/34428351.pdf
31
Over the period 1996 to 2004, while all other forms of development aid tended to plateau out, aid for
governance and the rule of law increased steadily from 10 percent in 1996 to 45 percent in 2004.
Following Tandon (2008), it seems that from the donor perspective, the project of economically
restructuring the global South in terms of stabilization, fiscal cutbacks, privatization and liberalization,
appears to be more or less over, with only minor hurdles remaining in the path of complete
deregulation and free trade.
If economic restructuring is largely achieved, then it is critical for capital at this stage to push for the
transfer of regulation away from the State to so-called civil society stakeholders. This is indeed what is
happening. In this brave new world, giant corporations and political elites together with the daily wage
worker, the aborigine, the peasant woman and the artisanal fisher are all expected, as civil society
stakeholders, to take decisions based on consensus. This new form of regulation is called
management. The management of land, forests, fisheries, coastal and other natural resources by such
civil society stakeholders, aided by a pliant State, is called good governance.
However, the hard reality is that large sections of society in the global South are being sharply
marginalised by market liberalization and a retreating State. Therefore, for the neoliberal economic
project to go on, good governance is today critically hinged on the targeting of aid, for example,
through identifying below poverty line families, the pregnant and lactating among poor women,
ethnic minorities, and so on, for targeted livelihood support. This rationale informs a range of global
policy instruments, for example, the Millenium Development Goals, and goes by the name of inclusive
growth. However, such marketization of governance is expected only to sharpen existing divisions
between the poor, who would be left clamouring to somehow fit inclusionary criteria, leading to the
further hardening of identity politics across all sections of the poor, including fishing communities. The
dominant ideology is based on the flawed assumption that, in the words of Samir Amin, the miseries
associated with [globalization], for which there is no alternative, will only be transitory and can be
attenuated by programs that fight against poverty (Amin 2006). As Amin points out, this option will
require, moreover, democratic political management called good governance.
To summarise, the agenda of free trade has been central to the liberalization agenda pushed directly
through aid. Donor aid in the fisheries has been tied to conditionalities promoting modernization and
industrialization, making a destructive model of development in the marine and culture fisheries
widespread in the global South. Early aid in the fisheries was routed through national governments.
Following the collapse of fish stocks, Southern markets had to be speedily opened up but inter-
governmental aid, the chief modus operandi until this period, had been known to impede the direct
flow of capital. The Washington Consensus of the early 1980s therefore sought to remove governmental
controls on capital flows, for which aid was the most expedient route. Structural adjustment policies
32
and the systematic manipulation of trade barriers forced countries of the global South to adopt
neoliberal, export-led models of capitalist growth in the fisheries. International financial and trade
institutions used aid in carrot-and-stick arrangements to coerce governments to liberalize trade and
capital flows, to deregulate, to privatise and to specialize in exports. Global fish trade has been fuelled
mainly by increases in ecologically unsustainable forms of industrial aquaculture. Export-led fish trade
is also likely to compromise the food security of populations in the South, driving larger numbers into
poverty. To attenuate the miseries associated with neoliberal growth, aid is being linked to Bank/Fund-
led poverty reduction strategy initiatives and managed by systems of good governance, a euphemism
for the privatization of regulation. As a result, models of co-management and community-based
management of natural resources are being viewed favourably by donors.
If the intention of policy reform were to genuinely empower communities (and within a community, its
vulnerable sections) it would at a minimum have to begin by recommending the regulation of capital in
a world where unfettered capital flows are creating irreversible human and ecological damage. The
agenda of good governance however appears to be only trying to win, in the face of growing
inequalities, some legitimacy back for the agenda of privatization. It is not at all surprising, in the
context, that the latest policy recommendation to emerge from the Bank-Fund echelons for the fisheries
is that of wealth-based fisheries management an argument for the further privatization of the fisheries
in the global South in order to harness the potential worth of the oceans wealth and prevent the
dissipation of resource rent through various mechanisms critically hinged on good governance. In
the words of its proponents: [T]he need emerges... (particularly in developing countries), for reform of
the legal and institutional framework and support to build the necessary human and institutional
capacity to implement the new vision... (Cunningham et al 2009: 285).
Conclusion
This paper discussed five major trends visible in the development of the literature on women in the
fisheries in the past few decades: the shift from a framework of political economy to one of political
ecology; the rise of the notion of gender empowerment; the rise of rights-based arguments; the growing
articulation of community, and, finally, a growing dependence on aid. Ideologically, these shifts hang
together. They have evolved not in isolation but in tandem; not just concurrently but in deeply related
ways; not merely accidentally but cohesively as part of a discourse whose terms have moved away
from sites of struggle and into corporate boardrooms, whose lexicon is now crafted in the offices of
donor agencies.
The unprecedented expansion of capital in the last few decades has fundamentally restructured
economic relations in the fishing sector, moving fish production from the North to the South and fish
trade from the South to the North, and creating new work opportunities, which, while drawing heavily
33
upon the labour of women, are concentrated in poorly paid and exploitative conditions. With the
global rise of the environmental state (Goldman 2005), notions of labour and illegitimate surplus
value have been largely replaced by the idea of environmental destruction. The poor and the
marginalised are seen less as an exploited labour force than as the natural custodians of the
environment. The locus of struggle moving away in this manner from class to ecological sustainability
represents the consolidation of opposition to the present form of development. The most significant
gain from this perspective is in developing a sharp critique of the industrialisation model of economic
development embraced by both capitalism and socialism. However, it has the definite weakness of
blurring class distinctions among those opposed to industrialisation. It very importantly downplays
distinctions between imperatives in the North and the South; it downplays also the connection between
the growing impoverishment of the South and the increased accumulation of wealth in the North. As
Michael Goldman points out, fundamental links between countries within the North-South world
system are made invisible through the discursive practices of development, such that today
development is still interpreted as a gift of the North and any specific failures are attributed to the
shortcomings of leaders or cultures of the South, reductively assumed to be mired in corruption and
irrationality (Goldman 2005: 21).
The relinquishing of the class perspective has heralded a new era of political concord. Positive" rather
than "oppositional" agendas for struggle were urged and instituted since the late 1980s. The womens
question began to be framed in terms of gender empowerment rather than "opposition to patriarchy
and opposition to exploitation by capital even as womens labour was mobilized at an
unprecedented scale and concentrated in the most vulnerable and insecure jobs to fuel economic
growth in the fisheries, and even as violence against women in the sector continued to escalate.
Community-based identity politics proliferated in this period; however rigorous analyses of womens
exploitation and oppression within communities became increasingly hard to come by. To counter the
privatization agenda of neoliberal fisheries management regimes, a conflicting amalgam of human
rights and community rights is being invoked in which the specificity of womens rights is increasingly
hard to detect. Driving this growing consensus has been donor aid. Gramsci had noted years ago that
the moment of hegemony is revealed when the dominant bloc also po[ses] the questions around
which the struggle rages (Michael Goldman 2005). Aid agencies not only provided a politically
acceptable route first for capital investments and later for comprehensive privatization in the global
South but also helped to manufacture hegemonic consent.
NGOs might, for reasons of pragmatism, have to combine a developmental role together with an
oppositional role, but increasingly NGOs are, at best, offering only the weakest opposition, and, at
worst, embracing the development agenda set by capital. As far as labour is concerned, the role of the
NGO is restricted to addressing only the issue of labours survival. Increasingly unaddressed is the need
34
for a politically powerful labour power which is able to negotiate for greater justice and equality. For its
survival, labour no doubt requires the safeguarding of jobs and livelihood support. However, that
alone is not enough. A just and equal society cannot be based on the illegitimate extraction of surplus
value. The pressure for a more just and equal society would come therefore not from ensuring the
survival, alone, of labour but from the growth of a politically conscious labour power. In the context
where global capitalist fisheries economy is built upon the unvalued or under-valued labour of poor
women, a new analytical and political articulation and news forms of organising would be necessary to
fundamentally challenge this exploitation. It would also require that capital is not left unfettered to do
as it pleases but is forced through stringent regulation to heed other considerations apart from
profitability alone. Donor aid is however driving the NGO increasingly towards conciliatory,
mediatory roles, incapable of seeking solutions outside the framework of capital (See World Bank
2001). There is little possibility therefore for the radicalization of the NGO while the pressure to
conform to the dominant ideology is intense.
Padel and Das (2010) have written about the terrifying uniformity in NGO discourse. One of the
perils of hegemony is that the dominant bloc and the opposition to it are not very often
distinguishable. The construction of power and knowledge is identical everywhere. Concepts like
sustainable development, gender empowerment, poverty reduction, human rights, good governance,
and so on, let alone being questioned, are embraced without discussion, as they emerge from the
corridors of power in Washington and Brussels. Being tied to funding sources, they generate a great
deal of research and policy based on assumptions that are never verified but peddled nevertheless,
seemingly on the Bellman's principle in The Hunting of the Snark: What I tell you three times is true!
The assumption, for example, that capitalist economic growth, for which seemingly there is no
alternative, is perfectly compatible with sustainable development, the challenge being only to improve
governance by rooting out corruption, mismanagement and so on.
Community-based forms of mobilization face many challenges. Can communities form their own
market mechanisms that are not modelled after capitalist forms, and evolve non-cash-based
economies? Can communities demand for the regulation of capital and its relations with both people
and the environment? Can they collectivize the ownership of property and the means of production,
ensuring the rights of those who labour while delegitimizing the profits of the profiteers? As the neo-
liberal State introduces privatised quota regimes, as for example in South Africa, extending quota
rights to non-fishers as well in ways that turn the poor against the poor, in what ways would
community-management of fisheries be articulated that addressed the issue of the non-fishing poor?
Can communities collectivize housework, recognise and value the full labour of women and free the
fertility and sexuality of women from the institutions of family and private property? Can
communities make unthinkable the exploitation and oppression of women? Is it enough that newly-
35
evolving perspectives, such as feminist political ecology, focus on economically unsustainable
development or would not the project of Development itself, as we know it, require to be
fundamentally challenged? Given the context of fishing communities becoming progressively more
integrated into the capitalist economy, community leaders often being co-opted into the echelons of the
powerful political elites, would not other forms of organising also need to be explored? With the
spread of globalisation and capital penetration on the one hand, and the increase in unregulated wage
labour on the other, is it not necessary to bring back to centre stage the struggle for regulation of
capital and its relations with both people and the environment? Can the analytical and political clarity
required for this come solely from identity-based politics? Similarly, would identity-based politics
tolerate the struggle against patriarchy? Would it not necessarily require bringing back an emphasis on
class along with other contradictions based on gender, identity, and so on? Is not the radical re-
envisioning of womens politics an urgent necessity of our times?
The literature on women in the fisheries gives us some clear signals both for the future of women in the
fisheries and for our collective future. What shall we pick out, what shall we ignore? It would be fitting
perhaps to turn to the wisdom embedded in this body of work the reminder that rights and
democracy, like charity, always begin at home. But unlike charity, these will never be handed to us by
some gracious benefactor. At every level, be it the family, the community, or the larger world, these
rights must be systematically wrested.
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Occasional Paper. Chennai, ICSF. 41p.

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