We submit some reflections from our experience of over two decades of work with fisherfolk in pakistan, and from experiences shared by social movements specially in south asia.
We find trade as an obstacle to promoting the lives of subsistence and small fishers. Yes, export prices have steadily increased and so has volume of exports. But there is growing inequity within the community and between fishers and traders, processors and exporters.
This inequity has resulted in an unacceptable situation where fishers cannot afford to eat their own catch of highly nutritious varieties. An absurd result is that e.g. Vietnam exports tens of millions of dollars of cheaper, tastless fish and then buys premium marine species.
Fisherfolk are now increasingly dependent upon industrial, chemically laden poultry to stave off hunger. Such poultry is 'cheap' because of various subsidies. These subsidies include fishmeal prepared with 'trash fish' caught largely by large, commercial trawlers. The implications for ecology as overfishing are ominous.
Trade is supposed to make life cheaper. We dont see that happening at all.
State policy encourages food exports such as wheat, rice and sugarcane. It also encourages imports to stabilise prices between harvests. Both sorts of trade make lots of money for exporters, but domestic prices do not fall by imports and obviously do increase by exports that are subsidised from public funds.
Some allude to fuel imports as the necessity to export whatever can be exported. But who do increasing fuel imports benefit? Fisherfolk are forever complaining about fuel prices and prices of commodities produced via fuel-dependent processes.
Our issues may be generalised to small farmers, specially the landless.
We believe that a genuine food security policy will be one of food sovereignty. Until all have adequate assets to allow them to choose trade as beneficial, the policy must ban food exports and discourage other exports that endanger the ecology of water and land such as textile products. Enormous acreage is devoted to growing cotton, which displaces the production of nutritious food items.
In a country that has mass poverty and resulting mass hunger and malnutrition, any trade in food products is lethal for universal social protection.
External websites carry articles that elaborate our position. These include http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/blogs/southasiamasala?s=ercelan&searchbutt...!
Aly Ercelan