Bagan Results and Discussion

6.3 Results and Discussion

The 151 households were grouped according to one of four fishing sectors Table 6.1. A fifth group ‘other’ was included because there were several former fishers who had retired or changed profession and had a unique contribution that added breadth to the analysis. The analysis demonstrated a high degree of overlap between fishers from Sungai Pinang and Ampang Pulai so the results below are described firstly on the basis of fishing sector, with a comparison between locations being given in section 6.3.7. Table 6.1: Breakdown of the 151 interviewees according to sector of the fishing industry they operated in and whether they were boat owners or crew. PH = Poor household, SP = Sungai Pinang, AP = Ampang Pulai. Bagan Payang Sampan Pukat Other Sample 52 16 39 25 19 Crew 42 incl 3 captains 12 8 15 3 x Retired fishers 3 PH 3 x Fish traders 2 PH 1 x Diver 1 PH 3 x Fish labourers 3 PH 1 x Fish processor 0 PH 1 x Ship builder 1 PH 2 x Fisher wives 2 PH 2 x Motorbikers 2 PH 2 x Farmers 1 PH 1 x Shop owner 1 PH Crew from SP 14 6 PH 7 3 PH 13 8 PH Crew from AP 28 28 PH 12 11 PH 1 1 PH 2 2 PH Owners 10 4 31 10 Owners SP Netting Handlining 2 25 14 8 PH 11 5 PH 10 6 PH Owners AP Netting Handlining 8 1 PH 4 6 4 4 PH 2 2 PH

6.3.1 Bagan

More than a third of all respondents worked in the bagan sector. Smaller bagan vessels employed 12-14 crew members go to sea mid-afternoon and return in the morning. Larger vessels also fish throughout the night but employ 20-24 crew members and can make trips of up to a week, travelling as far as the Mentawai Islands. Bright lights attract fish to the vessel at night and a net is lifted to retrieve the catch. Fishers, particularly on the larger boats, supplement their income by handlining during the day. Larger vessels are increasingly using Fish Aggregating Devices FADs. During the full moon, the crew will not go to sea but may be expected to work on repairing the vessel. In the 1980s and 1990s fishermen report that there were considerably more bagan operating off the coast of West Sumatra but following the financial crisis their numbers declined. In many smaller villages such as Sungai Pinang crew members leave their families for weeks at a time and live in larger fishing ports. The bagan catch is split evenly with 50 going to the owner and 50 being divided amongst the crew. Figure 6.1: Bagan 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, square = captain, triangle = owner. The gulf in physical assets between bagan owners and crew members is much greater than for any of the other fields Figure 6.1, bottom right panel. Modern bagan boats equipped for week long trips cost 80-100,000US new. Several owners had more than one vessel and also owned other substantial assets such as -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 trucks, shops and residential property. Besides their home and possibly a motorbike, crew members and captains lacked physical assets. Because bagan crew spend the majority of their time at sea, only one individual also owned a small paddle powered boat, which he used for squid fishing when he had the opportunity. The reality of this physical capital ‘gap’ between owners and crew may be the driving force behind the over-emphasis on physical capital in livelihood programs Stanford et al. 2014a. In the financial field Figure 6.1, top right panel, crew members were scattered widely across the ‘bad-good’ sustainability scale but mostly congregated below the midpoint. Above the midpoint there were 6 crew members and all but one of the bagan owners scored highly. Although the financial capital ‘gap’ between owners and crew is less pronounced than for physical capital the implications of a difference in financial capacity between owners and crew was a recurring theme in the qualitative aspects of the interviews. The higher scoring bagan owners had access to financial capital either through formal lending institutions, if they had the collateral to secure the loan, or through family, or their own carefully accumulated savings. Frequently owners had also been fish traders too, pointing to this close relationship between human capacity and financial capital. Particularly during the 1980s and 1990s when local catches were high, these individuals traded fish and were able to accumulate financial capital quickly which they invested in vessels. While many owners, or their extended families, continued to process and sell the catch, only one bagan owner had diversified his income sources away from a dependency on fishing, with him and his wife owning a shop. The low scoring bagan owner was the exception because his bagan is much smaller than the others. He employs only 4 crew members on an aging boat and, with 7 children, his household is classified as poor. He worked his way up from being a crew member to owning his own vessel through trading fish and careful saving but with an aging boat, declining stocks and 7 children he is finding it impossible to save. With no collateral, no one is prepared to lend him the money needed to buy a new boat so for the moment at least he trying to keep this boat going for as long as possible. There used to be many of these traditional smaller bagans operating throughout West Sumatra and there were several accounts of crew members being able to save and eventually buy their own small bagan. Steadily they accumulated more capital and were able to invest in larger boats. As local stocks have declined, so have the numbers of these smaller bagans and the emphasis has been on building larger vessels capable of exploiting stocks as far as the Mentawai Islands. The financial capital required for these vessels makes them far out of reach of crew members. As a result, some respondents argue that one traditional pathway out of poverty for crew members to become small bagan owners is now much more difficult than when stocks were healthy. For crew members the most common response to their income was “it’s just enough” pas-pasan and “we get it in the morning and its spent by the afternoon” dapat pagi habis sore. The majority of crew members argued that they could not access credit because they had no collateral and that was a key limiting step for them. While the availability of credit with low interest rates is an important factor, it is not the whole story. When discussing their attitudes to risk, several crew members demonstrated risk aversion with comments such as “if I take a loan I am afraid that I will not be able to pay it”. This again highlights the close relationship between financial and human capital and how human aspects of character, personality and behaviour have implications for an individuals’ ability to access credit and use it productively. Because so few bagan crew members have alternative livelihoods, they are vulnerable to declining stocks and seasonal fluctuations. Some crew members had taken the initiative to open small kiosks in their homes but had found when catches were low the goods in the kiosk had literally been eaten up by the family themselves. This relates to two further issues that the analysis raised; fluctuating expenditure and the readiness to try again. Several crew members or their wives found it difficult to pin down typical daily expenditure because it depended on fluctuating incomes. Fisher wives are highly adept at keeping the family surviving through lean periods through changing the type of food or quantity served up, or through borrowing from friends and neighbours. Conversely, when catches were high some unnecessary expenditure increased with one crew member summarizing it succinctly “I smoke a packet a day if few fish are caught and 2 packets a day if lots of fish”. Comments like these, which were expressed by the minority of crew members, demonstrate a lack of forethought by some crew members to plan and prepare for the lean times by restricting consumption during the good times. Readiness to try again could equally be labeled “bounce-back-ability”. On many occasions crew and owners had been exposed to setbacks, ranging from low fishing returns, illness in the family, loss of fishing vessels or other natural disasters. Their ability to respond to these setbacks often separated crew members from owners. Clearly owners often have the financial capacity to try again when their first boat has been destroyed by rough seas but the difference is not only financial. In one case, a bagan owner was completed bankrupted and reduced to becoming a farmer. He used family land to grew chillis and the profits from these were sold to buy a boat with an outboard so that he could reinvent himself as a fish trader. Several bagan crew used to own a small boat which they used for handlining or netting. In every case their boat or machine had worn out and they had no financial capital to buy another so resorted to being a crew member again. They argued that it was much better being your own boss as a boat owner and, all but one, reported that the returns from your own small boat were higher than as crew member. There are all sorts of interlinking causative factors in these stories that shape the responses of individuals to shocks. The availability of family land for the bankrupted bagan owner provided him with a safety net that many landless crew members do not possess. Yet repeatedly there was a mindset of acceptance pasrah by older crew members who did not believe that change was possible or likely. They were risk averse and lacking both the financial capital and the human initiative to change their fate. For human capital Figure 6.1, middle left panel the results of crew members were tightly congregated around the midpoint on the sustainability scale with owners scoring more highly. Four crew members had higher human capital scores 70 and these were all households from Sungai Pinang that had alternative livelihoods such as shops at home. Three of these four had a high desire to save for the future, two of them had clear plans for their future and none of them had more than 4 children. All bagan owners shared the characteristics of being committed to saving, prepared to take risks, had experience of trading fish and knew the market price, and were hard working. They differed in their readiness to pursue alternative livelihoods outside of fishing and only two of the bagan owners’ wives worked. For crew members, there were widely varying attitudes towards savings and investing in alternative livelihoods. Even when income was highly variable there were still individuals committed to daily saving clubs Julo-Julo. According to bagan owners, it is shortcomings in this human capital that are the crucial issues keeping crew members poor. They argued that crew needed to live frugally and save carefully, but they conceded that more than financial prudence alone was necessary for poor bagan crew to improve. They agreed with crew members that you can live from day-to-day with the income that the bagan provides but that some kind of alternative income source was necessary to improve their status. One current bagan owner, and former community leader stated that “crew need to work hard, live frugally and be honest”. Another said that the three key components of a more prosperous future for bagan crew members are “financial credit, knowledge, or experience, and the most important of all, self-belief; they must have self-confidence to take proactive steps for a better future.” This is a crucial point. Whilst recognizing that there are physical and financial capital limitations that restrict the opportunities of the poor, there are still members of the poor who are demonstrating positive behaviour, for example regular saving or growing their own vegetables, that demonstrate higher human capacity. This human capacity needs to be sought out, praised and rewarded so that they are the first people helped with government aid. It also needs to be cultivated in others so that it becomes a precursor to receiving aid. In the natural asset field Figure 6.1, top left panel the results were scattered in two distinct groups on the similarity y axis according to the place that they lived with the two attributes geographical isolation and sheltered mooring determining this. On the ‘bad-good’ sustainability axis there was no observable difference between owners and crew. The reasons for this are noteworthy. In this field of six attributes, two relate to catch quantity and value and although the majority of respondents argued that catches had declined over the last 20 years, this effect was felt in equal proportion by crew, captains and owners. For the two categories where one would expect there to be a divergence between owners and crew this was also not the case. Because bagan crew members had so few physical assets and tended not to farm rice their susceptibility to the direct effect of natural disasters was lower than owners, some of whom had lost boats and equipment in storms. Bagan owners were not translating their financial capital into natural capital through buying land. Conversely, they tended to stick with what they knew, reinvesting profits into more and larger boats. This strategy of specialization was different to many crew members who would look to invest any surplus in livestock or small kiosks that their wives could run while they were at sea. There were few differences between owners and crew in the social field Figure 6.1, bottom left panel with the majority of respondents scoring these attributes poorly. The attributes from both these fields referred more to the broader context rather than the specific livelihood capacity of individual. For some attributes such as leadership owners tended to score more highly. As wealthy members of the community, sometimes these owners were former leaders themselves or had close families ties with leadership. The majority of respondents argued that it was very difficult for the poor to stand up against leadership if, for example, government assistance was being distributed in a nepotistic way. Similarly, the majority of respondents doubted that sanctions for non-payment of grants could be enforced within the community. Both standing up to leadership to demand your rights or seizing goods from a neighbour would damage social harmony and may have future repercussions for you and your family. Institutionally Figure 6.1, middle right panel , only five from 52 bagan respondents knew an extension officer responsible for their area. Only three from 39 crew members had received any physical help and one of these was a long tail machine which could not be used because the crew member did not have a boat. A third of bagan crew members or their wives had been part of a livelihood improvement training program but none of these reported that the skills that they gained were being used as part of their livelihood portfolio now. There was a difference in the responses of owners and crew in the attribute advocacy. Half of all owners reported that they did not need an advocate because they would liaise directly with government officials from, for example, the fisheries agency. Despite the fact that captain’s receive a higher share of the catch value than ordinary crew there was little evidence of this difference in the results. Only for financial assets were captains at the higher end of the group of crew with one experienced captain acknowledging that he could save 500,000 IDR per month. However, the sample of captains was small and one of them had only been promoted from being an ordinary crew member 3 months before the interview happened. The philosophy of the Sustainable Livelihoods approach is that livelihoods are multi-faceted and there many linkages between different asset categories. This message came out repeatedly from the interviews with bagan owners and crew referring to weaknesses in character and behaviour, a lack of skills, low motivation and weak leadership human and social capital, declining catches and increasing fuel costs natural capital and a lack of support from agencies institutional capital, as elements that were underpinning a lack of access to credit financial capital and therefore physical capital. Sensitivity analyses and leverage A sensitivity analysis was run on the data to assess vertical and horizontal movement of data points. Different combinations of data were run with 20, 39 and all 52 bagan entries, with and without the inclusion of random data points. For five of the fields financial, human, social, physical and institutional the difference in x values between these results was minor typically between 0 and 1 and for the y-axis typically between 0 and 5. However for the natural field there was a large difference in positions when the analysis was run with 20 and 52 entries. The mean difference between 20 and 52 entries was 13 on the x-axis and 10 on the y-axis. Even with the inclusion of 10 random entries, running the natural field with more than 40 entries significantly increased variation in the results. To overcome this variation, different combinations of 39 bagan entries were run. The results of these showed smaller variation, typically 0-2 on the x-axis and 0-5 on the y-axis. The leverage analysis provided some clues as to why there was variation in the results Figure 6.2. Four of the top five attributes exerting the greatest leverage across all fields were in the natural category. As the number of data points was increased from 20 to 39 and then on to 52 the leverage values for certain attributes significantly increased with the natural attributes being dominant among them. One of the main contributory factors for this high leverage in the natural resource category is the lack of variability in scoring for two attributes, ‘geographical isolation’ and ‘sheltered mooring’. Because only two locations, Sungai Pinang and Ampang Pulai, were chosen for this analysis the scores for these two attributes were fixed. If the analysis with 52 entries is run with a third dummy location that replaces the geographical isolation and sheltered mooring attributes for the 13 owner and captain entries with an average score the leverages for this field drop considerably. Similarly, retaining all 52 data entries and including a further 10 random scores reduced leverage. Several of the attributes straddled multiple fields. One such example is the attribute catch value which relates both to the natural status of the stocks, a resource in decline tends to see an increase in sale value, and to the financial field. A great deal of consideration was given to where best to place the catch value attribute. Several runs of the software were conducted with catch value as both a component of the natural field and the financial field. When catch value was included in the financial field it had a minor effect on the results with a small leverage. When catch value was included in the natural field it had a stabilizing effect on the natural field with only minor changes to the financial field. Without catch value in the natural field, the leverage of the attributes geographical isolation and sheltered mooring were between 25 and 30 but were reduced to 9 and 13 respectively by the inclusion of catch value. The reason that catch value could have such a stabilizing effect on the results was because only 2 locations were selected, meaning that geographical isolation and sheltered mooring were dominating the results. As more locations are analysed and the natural attributes further developed the catch value attribute could be moved to the financial field. Figure 6.2: Leverage exerted on the x-axis scores by each attribute for the bagan sector. 5 10 15 20 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

6.3.2 Payang