interviews led to further potential interviewees through snowballing Cook and Crang, 1995. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with office based staff
and extension officers of the DKP, village heads and fishersfishers wives in sixteen sub-districts including all of the fishery dependent sub-districts. These
interviews were aimed to; 1 verify that observations from secondary data concurred with the reality in the field ground-truthing, 2 answer specific
question that the analysis had raised, 3 identify the main types of poor fishers in an area and 4 explore the broader implications of the analysis with stakeholders.
Interviews were recorded, translated and typed up. Iterative analyses were used to display the data and draw conclusions Miles and Huberman, 1994. Key points
and recurring themes were highlighted through data display and these were triangulated, compared and contrasted with other interviewees.
4.3 Results and Discussion
5
4.3.1 Fisheries in West Sumatra overview
The six coastal districts of mainland West Sumatra contained thirty one sub-districts. Agriculture is the largest employer 37 of the workforce in these
sub-districts, which includes marine capture fisheries 5 of the workforce. Of these 23,029 fishers, 85 live and fish in three districts, Pesisir Selatan, Pasaman
Barat and Padang. However, production from each district is not proportionately related to the numbers of fishers. For example, the fishers of Pesisir Selatan,
Padang and Agam land on average 3-4 tons of fish per year per fisher compared with Pariaman 8 tyrfisher, Padang Pariaman 14 tyrfisher and Pasaman Barat
17 tyrfisher. These differences are caused by fleet structure with Pasaman Barat containing twice as many large boats 10 gross tons as Pesisir Selatan,
including a fleet of 29 purse seines that in 2010 landed 29,578 tons, the equivalent of the entire production of the whole of Pesisir Selatan.
5
The Results and Discussion section is largely taken from Stanford et al. 2013 with minor modifications.
When landings data were analysed in conjunction with poverty the results of several districts were counter-intuitive. In Figure 4.1 positive values mean that
the district is performing better than the provincial average; it is earning more value or has less poor fishers than the province. In Pesisir Selatan, Padang and
Agam the value of the catch per fisher is worse than the provincial average of 0.11 billion Indonesian Rupiah per fisher, yet the proportion of poor fishers is,
surprisingly, better than the provincial average 39 . The reverse is true in Pasaman Barat and Padang Pariaman. Of all the districts Pasaman Barat lands the
most fish and the value of the catch per fisher is higher than average but Pasaman Barat performs the worst of the districts in terms of the proportion of poor
households. The distribution of the wealth generated from fishing in Pasaman Barat is an issue in this district where one in every two fishers is classified as
poor. The poverty data does not reveal which fishing sector the poor fishers are in but existing studies of Pasaman Barat Elfindri and Zein, 2001; Zein et al., 2007
coupled with the field interviews of this present study identify two main groups of poor fishers. Firstly, there are the crew members who do not own their own boat
or fishing gear and who work as labourers and receive a small share of the catch value. According to Elfindri and Zein 2001 these crew are trapped in poverty,
rarely able to accumulate the financial capital to become independent. There were mixed re
sponses about the nature and extent of this ‘poverty trap’ Barrett and Swallow, 2006. The majority of crew interviewees protested that their share of
the catch was only enough for daily needs and that they were in a constant debt cycle gali lobang, tutup lobang making upward social mobility impossible.
Long hours at sea left them with little time to develop other alternative livelihood sources. However skippers disagreed, maintaining that the two issues holding
crew back from a more prosperous future were wastefulness and a lack of initiative. They recounted several examples of crew members who had saved and
worked hard to become a captain of the vessel. Being a captain guarantees a larger share of the profits which provided the financial capital to purchase their own
vessel. Some skippers conceded that when they made the step up from captain to vessel ownership the natural resource was in a healthier state than it is presently.
These aspects of being trapped in, or escaping from poverty, are discussed more fully in subsequent sections.
Secondly, there are traditional fishers using small boats that they own themselves powered by long-tail machines or paddles and fishing with gillnets or
hand-lines. A third and much smaller group of the poor who are dependent on fishing are the small-scale fish processors who dry fish on the beach. What is
striking in this analysis is that the modernisation of the fleet on its own may not lead to improvement in the livelihoods of the poor if profits are concentrated in a
few hands through an inequitable system of catch sharing. Pariaman performs more predictably with both a higher than average catch value per fisher and a
lower than average incidence of poverty. This is what would be expected in an equitable system.
Figure 4.1:
Catch value and poverty for each district compared to the provincial average. Value refers to the total catch value of a district divided by the total
fishers in that district compared to the provincial average grey bars. Poverty
-100 -50
50 100
150
Pesisir Selatan
Padang Padang
Pariaman Pariaman
Agam Pasaman
Barat d
if fer
en ce
fr o
m p
ro v
in ci
al av
er ag
e
indicates the percentage of fishers in a district that are poor compared to the provincial average black bars.
4.3.2 Where are the fishing dependent areas in West Sumatra?
