Payang Results and Discussion

6.3.2 Payang

Payang seine boats primarily target small pelagics during daylight. They typically consist of up to 10 crew members with a variety of roles, including the fish spotter, the mechanic and an individual who will jump into the water in a rubber ring to help encircle the fish. Different crew members receive different shares of the catch value according to their responsibilities but in general the catch is divided 5050 between the owner and the crew. Larger species are sold directly, but in many cases, the smaller ikan teri are boiled, salted and dried before sale to achieve a higher price. Most fishers reported a significant decline in the abundance of ikan teri, with the season sometimes lasting a few weeks when in previous years it had been months. This was alarming for fishers because payang boats use powerful outboard motors 40 HP to reach the fish quickly, which consume high quantities of fuel. The payang method has not been used in Sungai Pinang for the last ten years because the cost of searching for the fish was not matched by the catch value. For this reason the 16 payang interviewees were from Ampang Pulai, twelve of these crew and four were owners. Four payang crew members from twelve interviewees depended solely on the income they received from payang. Of the remainder, four payang crew worked also as labourers on beach seines, three worked in rice fields or rubber plantations owned by someone else, and one owned a small cafe on the beach. As with the bagan sector, the physical field showed the greatest divide between payang owners and crew Figure 6.3, bottom right panel. Besides their boat, outboard and net which costs approximately 8-9,000US new, all payang owners had at least one motorbike and one of them had a shop at his home. In contrast, only three crew members owned motorbikes and one of these had only been taken on credit the previous month before the interview. Figure 6.3: Payang scores from MDS projected on a bad 0 to good 100 x-axis for all six fields of the analysis. The y-axis shows the similaritydissimilarity scores. Circle = crew members, triangle = owner. For the human and financial fields, owners score more highly than crew but with two exceptions. Three of the four payang owners process their catch and reported that this is a highly lucrative activity. One owner of two payang said “my sons manage the boats and I manage the processing. You get twice the profit from processing than you do from catching the fish” As with bagan owners, processing and trading fish has an important role in accumulating financial capital. Two of the four payang owners had previously worked as bagan crew members for more than 5 years and according to the 2011 census were poor households. During their time as bagan crew they had been able to save, but not enough to purchase a payang. At this point their stories diverge as one them used -40 -20 20 40 20 40 60 80 100 Natural -40 -20 20 40 20 40 60 80 100 Financial -40 -20 20 40 20 40 60 80 100 Human -40 -20 20 40 20 40 60 80 100 Institutional -40 -20 20 40 20 40 60 80 100 Social -40 -20 20 40 20 40 60 80 100 Physical his savings to purchase simple processing equipment and became a fish trader. He estimated that the change from being a crew member to drying and selling fish doubled his income. This enabled him to save more and meant that he recently was able to buy his own payang. He estimated that owning a payang tripled his income compared to being a crew member of a bagan and he seems to be moved away from poverty towards a resilient livelihood. The other former bagan crew member appears to be moving in the opposite direction back into poverty. Fifteen years ago he was able to combine his savings from being a bagan crew member with financial support from his family and he bought a payang. Unusually, he does not normally process his own fish which has limited his potential to save. With four children to look after, an aging boat and machine, fish stocks that are “rarely close to the shore” and nothing to use as collateral for a loan, he is running his physical assets down with little hope of being able to replace them. He is the anomaly that scores poorly for human and financial capital. The anomaly in the opposite direction is the high scoring 80 crew member in both the financial and human capital fields. He has a very different livelihood portfolio to the other crew members. Most payang crew members have been crew members since they were teenagers and live from day to day, with no savings and are frequently in debt. None of their wives work to supplement income. The crew member who scored above 80 has returned to his village and started fishing 3 years ago. Prior to that he worked on building projects and was able to accumulate enough capital to buy a café on the beach. His wife runs the café, freeing him up to go fishing. Between both sources of income, and coupled with the fact that they have no children, they are able to save regularly. They plan to use these savings to increase their supplies and diversify their café. This attitude towards planning for the future is in stark contrast to the payang crew member who said “we do not think too much about the future here because if we do it makes us feel hopeless”. In the natural field, because all payang respondents came from Ampang Pulai scores for geographical isolation and the port attributes were identical for all respondents meaning that the variation in scores for this field was determined by the attributes; state of stocks, fishing income, natural disasters and access to land resources. Three respondents from the payang sector had changed profession recently and could not comment on the state of the stocks but eleven from the remaining thirteen stated there had been a drastic reduction in catches. Most crew members did not have access to land but two payang owners also owned rice fields. Two of the owners had experienced loss of boats or gear through storms and one crew member had also lost a payang because of a storm 15 years ago. Since then he has been working as a crew member and has not been able to save enough to buy a boat. One crew member had previously owned a beach seine net which he modified to become a payang seine. He fell ill and had to sell the seine net in order to have two operations. Since then he has been forced to work as a crew. These last two examples highlight the vulnerability of even seemingly prosperous boat owners to disasters. Low scores in the institutional field for both owners and crew were caused because only three from sixteen respondents were aware of a fisheries extension officer, only two respondents had received any livelihood aid in both cases nets, a different two had received training in processing or fixing boat engines and there was no advocate who could be called on to help. Interviewees complained that proposals would be sent away but nothing happened. A few payang crew members argued that suppo rt and assistance worked on a “family system” and any help you received was contingent on who you were related too. From a sample of sixteen it is not possible to confirm if this is true but the data do demonstrate that institutional support is poor for owners and crew alike meaning that poor crew members are not being discriminated against in particular. There was considerable variation in the social field with scores ranging between 4 and 65 on the bad to good scale. Variation in responses was greatest for the attributes leadership, trust and social structure. Half of payang respondents felt that the leadership were doing a good job and the others disagreed. Of those that disagreed, six of them scored all three attributes poorly, arguing that the leaders were not doing a good job, people could not be trusted to cooperate and that in the event of a difficult situation you were essentially on your own. One of these respondents stated in the course of the interview “I have been a fishermen since I was ten and although I come from elsewhere in the province I have lived in this fishing village for 20 years but I still feel like an outsider”. Conversely, one of the local payang crew members who had received government aid in the form of a net and boat machine scored leadership and social structure as the best it could possibly be. As with the institutional field, one significant finding is that there is no difference in the social capital that a wealthier boat owner has compared to a crew member, instead there are suggestions that differences in social capital come from being in certain family networks rather than necessarily certain economic brackets. These results demonstrate broad similarities between the livelihood profiles and resilience of bagan crewowners and payang crewowners. In short, both types of owners generally have physical, financial and human capital exceeding crew members. In both sectors for owners and crew, there was no significant difference in the scoring of institutional, social and natural fields, with the institutional field scoring especially poorly. Because payang boats were only in Ampang Pulai, and the scores for geographical isolation and sheltered mooring were the same, the leverage exerted by these attributes was much lower than in the Bagan sector Figure 6.4. Only two attributes had leverage greater than 10, state of land resources 12.8 in the natural field and leadership 11.1, in the social field. As with the other sectors several iterations of the software were run with the addition of random values to assess the sensitivity of the results. This analysis indicated robust results with the change between x values for the payang sector never more than 0.4 when dummy values were included. Figure 6.4: Leverage exerted on the x-axis scores by each attribute for the payang sector. 5 10 15 Geographical_isolation Sheltered_mooring State_of_coastal_resources State_of_land_resources Natural_disasters Fishing_income Ability_to_save Collateral Origin_of_loan Goods_on_credit Savings Remittances Alternative_income Desire_to_save Market_awareness Hard_working Occupational_multiplicity_skills Wife_working No_of_children Education_aspiration Education_reality Retirement_planning risk Household_expenditure Husband_spend_consumables Extension_officer Village_interventions Personal_interventions Advocacy Training_empowerment Community_spirit Trust Leadership Help_when_crisis Right_to_speak_out Sanctions_rule_of_law Boat_ownership Fishing_gear Other_asset_owned Processing_adding_value Ice_availability Housing Fish_auction Natural Field Instit. Field Social Field Finance Field Human Field Physical Field

6.3.3 Sampan handlining and netting