The Indian Ocean (60 page)

All this can be seen as the painful, but arguably necessary, process of modernisation, a drive towards greater efficiency based on the use of new technology, which certainly has some winners and some losers. However, over the last two decades Indian Ocean fishers have been confronted by a situation where their fates are largely determined by forces far away and outside their control. This reflects an increased integration of the global market, a process summed up by the term globalisation. To be sure, this was not new. We have shown how one has always been able to write a history
of
the ocean, looking at connections and processes within its boundaries, yet there also has been, to an increasing degree, a history
in
the ocean which goes beyond its bounds (hence the title of this chapter). What has happened recently is really an intensification of this process, based on vastly faster communications, and the triumph of open economy and free market notions.

What did this mean for Indian Ocean fishing? We have noted that the Indian Ocean has been relatively underfished. Two processes turned world attention to it. First was the way in which other fishing grounds were being rapidly depleted: as one example, in the mid 1950s around 150,000 bluefish tuna were caught each year in the Atlantic, but by the early 1970s only about 1,800. So also with tuna and other species in the Pacific. In the 1990s the world fishing industry was in trouble. Only two of the world's fifteen major fishing regions have still-increasing catches: the western and eastern Indian Ocean zones, This is what has been called the tragedy of the commons. Humans deplete natural resources which no one 'owns'; the sea and fish are prime examples. In a situation of unrestricted access to resources, the result must be depletion. The world situation is deteriorating all the time. As shallow water fisheries collapse, very deep-sea trawling, going as deep as 1.5 km, increases. About 40 per cent of the world's trawling grounds are now in water deeper than the continental shelf. What makes this even more threatening is that while fish species found in shallow waters can recover quite quickly, deep water species take much longer to replenish themselves. One example is the orange roughy, which only begins to reproduce when it is twenty years old, and can live to be 150 years old. Now it is close to extinction. Similarly, deep sea coral which took 5,000 years to grow can be destroyed by one trawler passing its net over it.
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It was not only depletion in traditional western fishing grounds which caused the
swing to the Indian Ocean. The move was also helped by its cheap skilled labour. First world manufacturing tends to move to third world areas where wages are low, and working conditions often unregulated. The fishing industry, and especially prawn cultivation, is merely one example.

The prawn industry is at the cutting edge of globalisation. Once used as fertiliser in India, from the 1960s their price has increased dramatically due to freezing techniques which enable them to be exported to markets in Japan, Europe and North America. The beach price of 'pink gold' in 1961–62 was Rs. 240 per tonne, but by 1971–72 it was Rs. 1,180 per tonne.

The result was a huge increase in the value of this new industry, especially in the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal: in the Indian state of West Bengal, in Bangladesh, and in Thailand. In 1984 total production in South Asia was worth $US 512 million, in 1995 $US 2.79 billion. This was achieved by the introduction of intensive industrial methods of production. Traditional fish farms produced 1,000 kg per hectare, but the new intensive 'industrial' farms 10 tonnes per hectare. In Bangladesh production was pushed by the World Bank and IMF, who insisted that the country develop export industries. There was however a marked down side to this achievement. Much of the capital came from overseas, and government laws to control the industry were often ignored. Pollution has increased, and as the process becomes more mechanised, less local labour was needed.

Critics of export-oriented aquaculture argue that it has largely negative social and environmental consequences and that marine and estuarine fishers and coastal agricultural communities whose livelihoods have traditionally been rooted in local systems of fishing and crop cultivation are being incorporated into global networks of commodity flows which increasingly dictate standard and type of product, price, and other conditions of production, marketing and sale.
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Most revealing of the reality of a global market was an episode between July 1997 and July 1998. The European Union and the United States banned the importation of Bangladesh prawns, claiming that unhygienic production methods rendered them unfit for human consumption. The ban was lifted after quality control had been improved.
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A similar move to intensive industrial production has occurred on parts of India's west coast also. Here and elsewhere traditional agricultural lands have been taken over for prawn farming. It used to be that in coastal areas fish and rice coexisted on the lowlying land, rather as in the Marsh Arab area of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. Sluice gates were used to regulate the supply of water for both. Fish and prawns were a by-product of rice cultivation. Now with the price of fish, especially prawns, up and rice down, the land is flooded more or less full time to enable prawn and pisciculture. To be sure export earnings have risen, yet the profits go to outside, even foreign, capitalists. Local employment in fishing has declined, and a complicated ecologically sound balance has been destroyed. Perhaps most revealing, unusually in
India fish has been a large part of the traditional diet of Goan Christians, but now those species, such as pomfret, which have an export potential are priced out of the reach of local consumers.
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Of all preciosities, pearls are most purely maritime. They are completely aquatic, and entirely natural. Unlike precious stones, their shape is not affected by humans, though in recent years people have helped nature to produce pearls: nevertheless, the shape and colour are beyond human intervention. As such, a brief description is in order. The decline in the traditional pearling industry is hardly a cause for lamentation, for it was brutal and dangerous. This trade had boomed in the Gulf in the nineteenth century. Exports rose from about £100,000 a year at the beginning of the century, to £300,000 in the 1830s, £700,000 in the 1870s, and over £1 million around 1900. At this time the Gulf produced half of the pearls in the world.
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These profits were produced with a very heavy human cost. Off Bahrain all the divers were indebted to the merchants who controlled the trade, and so had no choice but to continue diving. Worse still, their debts were inherited by their sons, who as a result were also forced into the debilitating and dangerous activity. The trade declined catastrophically in the 1930s, partly as demand for this luxury product fell during the depression, partly as the Amir of Bahrain implemented reforms, but mostly thanks to competition from Japanese cultured pearls.
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In the season for pearling, June to October, in 1939 Alan Villiers found only 150 craft venturing out from the other main centre in the Gulf, Kuwait, when forty years before there would have been at least 600. The price of 'real' pearls had fallen to one-tenth of what it had been, but he could not regret this decline, because for the divers the activity 'was accompanied by hardships almost intolerable, by risk to health and life and limb, and its rewards were scanty, often distributed most unfairly, and sometimes withheld from their rightful owners altogether.' Divers, using only a nose peg, were required to dive to a depth of 60 and 70 feet over 100 times a day, staying under for about a minute. By this time many of the former divers had been able to escape and work for the oil companies instead.
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The decline occurred also in the Gulf of Mannar, the other traditional pearling region. Developments around Broome, in Western Australia, over the last century or so are worth a brief description, as they provide a useful case study of change and adaptation. In 1861 the
pinctada maxima
oyster was discovered in Roebuck Bay. These are the largest oysters known, with the shells reaching a diameter of up to 12 inches. Aborigines had been diving for pearls, and the mother of pearl shells, for many years, selling them long before the white invasion to traders, often Chinese from Makassar. From the 1860s Europeans entered this trade, using coerced Aboriginal divers. Women were preferred. In Nickol Bay six or eight of them would go out in a dinghy with a white man in charge. They had no aids at all – no goggles, no stones – and went down only to a depth of about 10 metres. Mortality was very high. In the 1890s copper helmets and canvas suits began to be used, and an influx of divers from Japan and the Malay area produced a boom in the 1880s and through to World War I. Some 400 luggers were based in Roebuck Bay. In the off season 3,000 divers congregated in Broome. This was still a very dangerous trade, as witnessed by 900 Japanese graves in Broome's Japanese cemetery. Great risks were taken, and many divers died when their lugger was caught in a cyclone. In 1936 twenty luggers and 142 men were lost in a huge cyclone. Even more dangerous was the bends, or decompression sickness. The solution, to come up slowly from the depths, was worked out only in 1905, and even after this it took time to educate the mostly illiterate divers: in 1914 alone thirty-three divers operating out of Broome died from the bends. Pearls were found in few of the oyster shells. The valuable product was mother of pearl. Around 1900 Broome produced 80 per cent of the world's supply of this preciosity. The trade declined in the 1920s and 1930s, and was dealt a fatal blow by the development in the 1950s of plastic for buttons, cutlery handles, walking stick grips and a host of other items where mother of pearl had previously been used.

However, today Broome is again the centre of the pearl industry, this time focusing on cultured pearls. This all began in the 1960s, and is now a multi-million dollar export earner. The luggers, now very modern fibreglass air-conditioned craft, again go out to Eighty Mile Beach, south of Broome. Mother of pearl has regained some market share, so the larger oysters are taken for their shells. Smaller oysters are collected and taken in special ships, where they are in fresh sea water all the time, north to King Sound. Many die of stress on the way. Natural pearls are a result of the oyster building up encrustations, called nacre, around a foreign body such as a grain of sand, or a small parasite. This occurs on the outer mantle inside the shell. Cultured pearls are produced rather differently. Once the oysters have reached the oyster farming area, there comes the technical task of inserting a tiny nucleus into the oyster's gonads. Fragments taken from Mississippi mussel or clam shells have been found to work best. Once the nucleus has been inserted, the oysters are placed in metal frames, and left in suitable locations around King Sound. Over two years the oyster covers the nucleus with nacre, forming layers like an onion. The pearl is then extracted. As the oyster is now bigger, a larger nucleus can be inserted, and a larger pearl produced. This process can be done, on rare occasions, four times using the same oyster. Parts of this technique were learnt from Japanese pearl farmers. However, the
pinctada maxima
is much bigger than any others available elsewhere. Japanese cultured pearls reach a maximum diameter of 11 mm, while Australian ones can be monsters of 18 or even 21 mm. Since the 1970s about 70 per cent of the world's cultured pearls have come from Broome.

Cultured pearls provide a fine example of change and commercialisation. Natural pearls have always been valued by elites, in for example imperial Rome, and the Muslim and Hindu worlds. Many portraits of past potentates show them with necklaces of huge pearls. They were produced in the hazardous and chancy manner that we described earlier. Indeed, some purists, especially in the Arab world, despise cultured pearls and still consider only natural ones are worthy of being bought. Today it is a highly scientific branch of aquaculture, or marine farming. The animals, the oysters, are cosseted to avoid their being stressed. Increasingly they are bred in captivity, rather than being harvested from the wild. Every few weeks the metal frames in
which they are trapped are brought to the surface, and their shells scrubbed clean of encrustations. Once the nucleus has been implanted, the panels containing the oysters have to be turned over every two days for forty days. Oysters are valuable livestock, like cattle or sheep. The divers who do most of the work are really farmers, tending their livestock. Indeed, in recent years pirates have taken to raiding the oyster farms and stealing the shells, the exact equivalent then of cattle rustling.
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The tourism industry around the Indian Ocean today betrays many of the benefits and costs which we have just found to characterise fishing. Again globalisation has had mixed results. Certainly tourism has expanded in geometric fashion in the last few decades. Total numbers worldwide have roughly doubled each decade: from 25 million in 1950 to 69 million in 1960, to 160 million in 1970, to 284 million in 1980, and to 425 million in 1990.

Of course travelling is not new, but it may be that we can differentiate between travellers in past times, people we have quoted extensively like Ibn Battuta and Isabel Burton, and the modern tourist. Before steam, sea travel, even for the elite, was a long and hazardous undertaking. In the nineteenth century travel, both for work and pleasure, increased dramatically, yet the former far outweighed the latter. The Brasseys and their entourage were very exceptional (see pages 233–4). Most of the passengers on a P&O liner were not recreational travellers. If they were men they were almost all going somewhere to take up a job. Women accompanied their husbands, or travelled to seek a husband – the ill-named Fishing Fleet of marriageable young women who came out to India for a season hoping, so we are told, to catch a husband. Even more demeaningly, those who returned home unbetrothed were Returned Empties.