Women and blue economy in the Bay of Bengal

By Sharon Susan Koshy

Within the ambit of discussing and policy-making on the ocean-linked economy or the blue economy, women are often grossly excluded. They are also critical components of managing ocean-linked resources which are advocated as efficient, equitable, and sustainable means of resource management and allocation. Women, who form at least half of the entire workforce employed in fisheries globally, contribute to the blue economy and hold tremendous power in terms of shaping sustainable futures. The roles women play in various sectors of the blue economy in the emerging and developing world become even more important given the vulnerability of these societies and their economies to climate change-induced complications.

Since the 1980s, South Asia has institutionalised community-based resource governance mechanisms. The origin of such institutions can be attributed to a range of factors including the general distrust of state institutions by equitably and sustainably allocating resources. As a result, decentralised structures of resource management became popular to not just address the concerns of equity in resource allocation, but also to manage resources efficiently and to check resource degradation. However, such seemingly efficient, sustainable, and equitable institutions have several gender implications which are often overlooked.

Eco-feminists have consistently argued for increasing the representation and participation of women in decision-making processes and resource management institutions. Regardless, looking at the current implications of resource management policies in South Asia, gender mainstreaming has taken a back seat in community management of both land- and water-based natural resources.

Gender and community management of resources

South Asia’s waters have tremendous potential regarding livelihood options and socioeconomic upliftment, and women play a significant role in managing ocean-linked resources. However, policies at local and national levels in South Asia, particularly the Bay of Bengal (BOB) remain gender-blind. Further, owing to climate change, the region witnesses rising sea levels, declining fish yield, forced migration, reduced food and water security, and natural disasters, all of which have unforeseen gender implications as well. Outmigration of men, religious and cultural differences, and unequal social structures that determine women’s access to decision-making processes are factors that exacerbate gender vulnerability in many parts of the BOB littoral states.

The case of the Bay of Bengal

The littoral countries in the BOB predominantly fall under the income brackets of upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income groups. Maldives and Thailand form the upper bracket whereas all others come under the lower income bracket. These countries vary in their approach to the blue economy which shapes the national policies on fisheries and aquaculture. For instance, technological innovation varies from Thailand to the Maldives, which also affects the nature of employment available to women in these respective countries. Fish forms the core of food security in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, which is not the same vase in the other BOB countries. In fact, it is found in many countries that small-scale fishing industries are able to support more women to achieve socioeconomic parity outperforming industrial fisheries. Moreover, besides employment generation, the small-scale fisheries sector is more efficient in terms of efficiency of catch, and environmental sustainability.

The littoral countries also contribute to the blue economy via coastal tourism, inland fishing, and servicing of distant vessels. In fact, many countries are also assumed to handle three times the legal amount of fish through IUU fishing. In effect, the region is also reeling under declining food production, environmental degradation, livelihood loss, and climate-induced displacement. To safeguard gender interests, all the six pillars of the blue economy namely, fisheries and aquaculture, seaports and shipping, offshore hydrocarbons and seabed minerals, marine biotechnology, research and development, and tourism must be integrated into gender-sensitive policy making.

Women’s employment in fisheries in BOB region (source: FAO)

A majority of women in the BOB region are self-employed and they suffer from issues such as low wages, high livelihood insecurity, and lack of social protection and social support. Women, more than men, are dependent on the availability of fish for post-harvest economic processes and also to feed their families. Hence, they are directly affected by the declining fish yield in the region. Such consequential trends reiterate the importance of addressing the challenges and protecting the interests of women workers in the fishing sector. Such interventions must also favour the small-scale fishing sector which more often than not is the primary employer of women in the region as opposed to the large-scale industrial fishing sector.

Women’s contribution to the fishing sector

Women’s fish catch is critical to the survival of the family as a primary source of food and nutritional security and also for financial security at the end of the day. Women’s experience in the fishing sector is guided by the quality of their participation and recognition of their roles and contribution to the economy at large. One of the primary reasons why women’s labour and participation in the sector are severely undervalued is due to a narrow definition of what contributes to fishing.

Women’s participation in the fisheries sector is diverse. Women living in the coastal areas engage in a range of fishing activities including the use of hand-operated gear including hooks, lines, traps, and scoop nets, gleaning sea cucumbers, spearfishing crustaceans, seaweed harvesting, lagoon-based fishing, and so on. A significant number of women also take part in subsistence fishing which becomes a food source for families and also another means of livelihood. This may also include low-tide marine harvesting, collecting sea cucumbers from sea beds by hand for exports, and so on.

Within traditional fisheries, a majority of female workers in the BOB undergo several challenges. More often, women fishers are invisible and unrecognised by policy decisions or socio-cultural structures which are predominantly patriarchal in nature. As a highly unregulated sector, women fishers are also severely unremunerated. There is poor regulation of tenure which inhibits the access of women fishers to fish either as individuals or groups. Women also have low access to credit which leads to more production constraints for women than men. Women do not have access to storage technology and cold transport which makes the yield go stale and unprofitable. Compared to men, women have limited market access as most forms of public transport are inaccessible to them, making them walk to marketplaces with heavy loads of fish.

Within the industrial fisheries, employment conditions remain poor and the sector is largely unregulated. This means women are underpaid without employment tenure, or social and job security. Women are often relegated to part-time jobs which pose hurdles to their advancement in the industry. Cheap foreign labour is overexploited and unethical employment practices continue in many littoral countries. In both traditional and industrial fisheries, women’s participation is not formally recognised in the sector, which denies them social security. Occupational safety concerns remain another important, but an unaddressed issue in the sector compounded by issues of job insecurity.

Some of the external challenges for equitable employment participation of women in the sector include the modernisation of capture fisheries and aquaculture, the growth of competitive sectors including seaports and shipping, and the global fish trade which restructured the way the fishing sector worked hitherto making women’s labour almost redundant in the sector. IUU fishing and armed conflicts have also caused disruption of the livelihoods of women in the region. Tourism which is a major income earner for the countries in the region relegates women to underpaid, low-skilled, and unseen labour which affects their productivity and contribution to the economy. As a result, there is an alarming increase in food insecurity among the coastal communities coupled with undernourishment and malnutrition.

Challenges in policymaking

Most often in policies, only fishing that takes place using fishing vessels is understood as fishing. This essentially leaves out shore-based fishing or catching invertebrates and aquatic species in intertidal zones, rivers, and shallow waters where more women are employed. This reinforcement and undervaluation of the gendered division of labour perpetrate policy blindness wherein adequate protection is not made available to female fishers.

Another major challenge in policymaking is the critical lack of data pertaining to the involvement of women in pre- and post-harvest fisheries activities. It is difficult to find sex-disaggregated data, either because they are not collected, or because they are not recorded so, to make informed policy decisions that are gender-sensitive in nature. Reports released by FAO (2018) show that the employment of men and women in the primary and secondary sectors together are almost equal although there is a vast underreporting of women’s participation. In the primary sector including capture and culture fisheries, women constitute almost 14% of total employment and form a majority of those employed in the secondary sector.

Another major challenge is the categorisation of women’s fishing-related work as comparable to care work which is unpaid and unaccounted for. These works are considered complimentary to their housework, helping men in the family for instance with mending nets or maintaining accounts. There is also the misrepresentation of earnings as and when fishers engage in other activities in the rural economies such as agriculture-linked or forest-based work. Earnings from these non-fishing works are calculated as income for fishers which is a gross miscalculation from a policy perspective.

In conclusion, there has to be focused policy-making decisions for sustainable, fair and equitable resource allocation that are mindful of gender experiences. To drive informed and inclusive decision-making processes, it is important to collect gender-disaggregated data. Governments and policymakers must move away from incentive-based regimes to those programs that create enabling ecosystems, as the former is not always beneficial to women in the blue economy.

The author is visiting Fellow, NIICE Kathmandu.

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