Most management measures aimed at habitat improvement or increasing access for fishing, as described in section 2.1, are small scale interventions carried out by local people and/or the fishermen themselves. Few are documented in the published literature. Some examples, e.g. the fertilization of small reservoirs to increase productivity, are described in later sections of this report.
Large-scale habitat improvement programmes occur when government or international donors fund big rehabilitation projects for nationally or internationally important, degraded waters. Good examples of this are the cases of several large swamp areas in northern Thailand, which have been converted into productive shallow lakes by integrated programmes combining engineering and biological management measures.
The Khaw Phayao swamp, in Phayao Province, was rehabilitated under a project co-funded by the government of Japan. The objectives of the work, in order of priority, were:
To create a productive fishery.
To ensure an adequate water supply to the nearby town.
To create a reservoir for irrigation of farmland.
Conservation of wildlife, especially birds.
Before work started, the swamp area of over 2,000ha was choked with water hyacinth and rooted vegetation, and water level fluctuated wildly with the annual flood cycle. A major part of the rehabilitation work was the removal of the weed cover, and regular mechanical weed control is still carried out as part of the routine management of the water. However, useful aquatic plants, such as lotus, are actually cultivated around the margin of the lake.
A constant water level is now maintained, following construction of a small dam on the single outlet from the swamp via the Ing River (a tributary of the Mekong) and building of water-retaining embankments around low lying sections of the swamp margin. The result is a perennial, shallow lake of about 1.5m average depth. In some areas prone to siltation, regular dredging is done to maintain the required depth.
A fish hatchery built adjacent to the lake is operated by the Provincial Fisheries Department, which manages the fishery. About 5 million fingerlings of Nile tilapia, common carp, rohu, Chinese carps, Thai silver barb and Macrobrachium are stocked annually, and contribute towards a fish yield approaching 100kg/ha/year which provides a full or part-time living for around 800 local fishermen. The passage of migratory species through the lake is facilitated by a fish pass constructed adjacent to the outlet dam. It is a legal requirement that all new dams constructed in Thailand must now be equipped with fish ladders, though there is serious doubt about their usefulness for many species of indigenous fishes.
The maintenance of good water quality in the lake was aided by the building of a sewage treatment plant to handle municipal wastes before discharge into the water body. The plant uses a monitored series of oxidation ponds.
Bung Borapet, another swamp 10 times larger than the above, situated in Nakorn Sawan Province, is managed in a similar way except that it is periodically drained for removal of vegetation.
Where water bodies serve a number of functions in addition to fish production, the potential for conflict between different users is often present. One important practical example of this is in the operation of sluice gates in flood control embankments in Bangladesh. There, heavy spring pre-monsoon showers are the trigger for migration and spawning of many species of indigenous fishes. When these rains come, floodplain spawning species attempt to leave their winter refuges in large rivers and other perennial water bodies and move through minor rivers or canals into the floodplain areas. Thus at this time of year, fishing communities would wish to have the sluice gates which regulate these channels left open to allow passage of broodstocks. However, local farmers often have remnants of their winter rice crops still unharvested in low-lying fields at this time of year, and an early ingress of water could “drown” these. Indeed, protection of this crop was the major motivation behind the construction of many of the flood control schemes in Bangladesh. Therefore farmers often wish to have gates kept closed. The operating schedule for each sluice is decided separately by a local “gate committee”, which is officially made up of representatives of all interest groups, including fishermen. In practice, however, fishermen in Bangladesh are of low social status, and they therefore exert little influence over affairs. Instead, the wishes of more powerful groups, especially landowners (i.e. farmers), almost always prevail.
Many other similar conflicts of interest over water use can be seen in all countries. Cases in which other uses of waters have negative impacts on fisheries and aquaculture are common. Examples can be found immediately downstream of virtually every large conurbation in the Asian countries under consideration, where domestic and industrial pollutants discharged into rivers make the water unsuitable or less valuable for both natural and artificial fish production.
Large falls in water levels caused by drawdown for electric power generation and/or irrigation make many reservoirs in Vietnam, china, Thailand and other countries unusable for fish culture in pens, and can occasionally cause mortality of fish in cages by bringing deoxygenated water to the surface.
Cases where fishery activities have negative impacts on other users of water are less common, but can be found. Examples in the countries included in this study are the obstruction to navigation caused by dense concentrations of fish cages in Cirata Reservoir, West Java, Indonesia, and perhaps a few branches of the Mekong delta in Vietnam.
All the countries included in this study have both national laws and local regulations governing inland fisheries. To enforce them, some countries (e.g. China, Thailand) employ special “fisheries police forces”, normally working under the authority of the provincial fisheries department. In other places (e.g. Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh) fisheries officers/inspectors employed at provincial, district or local level must enlist the assistance of the regular police to arrest wrong-doers, confiscate illegal gears etc. Nationally applicable rules common to all countries include the prohibition of destructive fishing methods, i.e. use of explosives, poisons and electric fishing. Regulations concerning use of other gears, net mesh sizes etc., as well as closed seasons and areas, vary both between countries and from water to water within a country according to tradition, type of water body, the species of fish requiring conservation and the management system used.
However, it is not considered valuable to explore the regulations in detail here, especially in view of the following two major practical problems which beset the usefulness of legal restrictions on inland fishing in all countries. These are:
The difficulty of enforcing the law.
Lack of the necessary scientific data on which rational regulations could be based.
In practice the enforcement of fishery regulations in the countries under consideration ranges from poor to nonexistent, with the mean falling towards the latter end of the scale. This observation is not intended as any criticism of the authorities concerned. The plain fact is that deployment of sufficient “police” to ensure that fishing regulations were adhered to would cost more than most inland fisheries are worth. Further, a high percentage of the illegal fishing is done by small-scale subsistence fisherman who really need the little extra income or additional source of food to support their families. From both sociological and economic points of view, therefore, it would not be appropriate to commit the large amounts of government resources which would be necessary to effectively regulate the activities of such needy people.
What can be criticized, however, is that cases are known where the fisheries police forces employed to protect the resource in fact operate as the best organized poaching gangs. Sometimes they employ illicit gears (often those previously confiscated from “private sector” poachers) to catch large quantities of fish from reserved areas during closed seasons, e.g. taking broodstock from the spawning grounds. Official transport is then used to convey the catch to market in the cities.
Whether due to practical impossibility or official wrong-doing, therefore, fisheries regulations are rarely, perhaps never enforced as planned. The value of laws which cannot be enforced must be highly questionable.
Regulations on use of particular gears, e.g. types of nets allowed, net mesh sizes, lengths and numbers permitted etc., are difficult to formulate in any rational way. This is partly because of the complex, multi-species catch composition in tropical and sub-tropical fisheries. Thus, for example, a gillnet mesh size big enough to avoid capturing the juveniles of a species which matures at, say, 10 cm length will still kill young fish of a species maturing at 50 cm. Nevertheless, in some fisheries the regulations state that gillnet mesh size of × cm may be used for species A, whilst nothing less than 3x can be deployed in the same water to take species B. Clearly in practice the smaller net will take the young of the larger species, unless these frequent different, legally defined areas of the water body over which different rules apply. Trying to legislate for such factors in multi-species fisheries would make the regulations too complicated to be implemented in the real world, even if the full cooperation of fishermen was forthcoming.
Further problems in formulating scientifically-based regulations are presented by the prevailing paucity of knowledge about the population dynamics of the species making up the catch. Much of the legal framework governing fishing is therefore arbitrary or at best based on informed guesswork. The research needed to provide hard data on which management decisions could be taken is difficult, time-consuming and expensive, and its results are subject to large margins of error and annual variation. Consequently it is rarely done even in the wealthiest countries of the world. In most of the relatively small-scale Asian inland fisheries under consideration here, the research costs would outweigh the value of the catch. Even more fundamentally, expensive research towards rationalizing regulations hardly seems justified when it is known in advance that the regulations will not, even cannot, be enforced.
Ownership of discrete water bodies is generally vested in the government department responsible for the primary water use, e.g. in the case of reservoirs this is usually the Department of Irrigation or Energy. Responsibility for fisheries is sometimes delegated to the Department of Fisheries (e.g. Myanmar and Indonesia), or to an autonomous state-owned Water Management Company (e.g. large lakes in China and Vietnam).
The fisheries may then be leased by government to private companies or individuals, fishermen's cooperatives etc. Leases may be awarded annually, at periods of several years, or in perpetuity, giving varying degrees of incentive for the leaseholder to invest in long-term conservation and improvement of the fishery.
Many Asian societies are fairly rigidly stratified, and local elites exercise substantial influence over all remunerative activities in their area. Under these circumstances fishing is often more effectively controlled by powerful leaseholders than by the government. A good example of this is Bangladesh, where most discrete waters are leased in whole or in parts as jalmahals (water estates) . Most are leased by the Ministry of Lands to wealthy individuals, many of whom sub-lease to larger numbers of subsidiary lessees. Under the New Fisheries Management Policy a small minority (about 150 out of a total of 10,000) are supposed to be leased through the Department of Fisheries to groups of “genuine” fishermen, but in practice local elites normally manage to retain control of these also by using the fishermens' organizations as a “front”.
Inland fisheries in Bangladesh are dominated by the annual flood cycle. During the wet season, up to 40% of the total land area in the country is covered with water. At this time few discrete water bodies are discernible, and access to capture fisheries on the floodplain is traditionally open to all. However, once the flood recedes to such an extent that discrete residual water bodies begin to appear, the leaseholders rigidly enforce their monopoly. Should respect for the individual's property prove insufficient to deter poaching, rights are ruthlessly protected by the leaseholders' agents using any method necessary, including physical violence. Fatalities are not uncommon. Thus leaseholders have good control over the gears used, timing and extent of fishing etc., and can impose conservation or improvement measures if they wish, in a way which would be totally impossible (and unacceptable) for government.
More rarely, in some countries apparently successful instances of community management of fisheries can be found. For example, Bailey and Zerner (1992) described the implementation of gear restrictions, fish size limits and spawning habitat protection in the upper Kapuas River of West Kalimantan Province, Indonesia. The regulations were based on tradition and the experience of local “senior fishers”, who were empowered by their communities to impose penalties on wrong-doers. Mechanisms for community management of small village reservoirs in Thailand and oxbow lakes in Bangladesh are discussed below in section 3.3.2. In Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, ownership of small irrigation reservoirs is generally vested in the surrounding community, which leases fishing rights to an individual or group of local fishermen/farmers on very long tenure terms of over 15 years. Community management is now seen both by international donors and governments as a possible way to make controls on fishing activity workable in practice, as well as to distribute the benefits accruing from exploitation of the fishery more equitably. However, it must be said that to date fully successful examples are relatively rare and apply only to fairly small areas of water controlled by a few families or villages. On major water bodies, the degree of consensus building and inter-community cooperation needed to make such management systems work would be unprecedented in most countries.
