Sampan handlining and netting

6.3.3 Sampan handlining and netting

Small outrigger boats sampan with a total length of less than 5m are common in West Sumatra. Traditionally these were powered by sail or paddle but most fishers now use a long-tail machine 5-7 HP. Those that continue to use paddle or sail generally fish alone and tend to be older ‘hobby’ fishermen who may also use their boats to paddle up the river to their rice fields. The two main gears used by sampan fishers are gillnetting and handlining, either trolling or stationary reef fishing. Many sampan fishers in West Sumatra set their nets before sunrise and retrieve them shortly afterwards. In some locations the day’s fishing is over when the catch is landed before 9 am. Others gillnetters return in the morning and then fish in the afternoon. A third group of gillnetters fish through the night and return in the morning. Handliners from Sungai Pinang typically go to sea before sunrise and return around 2 pm. The majority of sampan owners have one boat and use it for themselves. They are often accompanied by one or two crew members and the catch is shared equally with each person and ‘the boat’ receiving one share. Thirty nine respondents worked on a sampan, with 31 of these owning their own sampan and the remaining 8 working as labourers. The owners could be further divided into those who predominantly fished using gillnets n=18 and those that used handlines n=13. The differences between owners and crew are much less pronounced in the sampan sector Figure 6.5. Only in the physical field bottom right panel is there a clear distinction between sampan owners and crew and even this is much less prominent than in the bagan and payang sector. There are two reasons for this. Buying a sampan is relatively cheap 500-600US and even equipping it with a long-tail machine and net is only in the order of 1000US. Unlike owners of bagan, and to a lesser extent payang owners, sampan owners are not thought of as wealthy people by the rest of the community. This means that unlike other boat owners they do not normally have other land-based physical capital so, for example, only 5 out of 31 sampan owners has a motorbike. The second reason why there is not the gulf in physical capital between sampan owners and crew is that because sampans are much cheaper than larger boats, there is much greater fluidity between owners and crew. Six of the eight sampan crew had previously owned a sampan but because of a difficult economic situation ekonomi macet they had either had to sell the boat or, more typically, had been unable to replace the boat when it was worn out. For some it had simply come down to a choice between replacing a boat or enabling their children to go to school. Many owners of aging sampans reported that they were in a similar situation and may be forced within the next few months to move back into the crew sector as they had no savings to replace their boat. Figure 6.5: Sampan 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 = sampan owner that gillnets, triangle = sampan owner that handlines. -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 In the financial and human fields Figure 6.7, top right and middle left panels there were no clear differences between sampan owners and crew although the few sampan owners that do score above 60 in both these fields are invariably owners of gillnets, who are committed to saving for the future. One of these individuals worked as crew on larger boats until he was 30 and then bought his own second-hand sampan with 400US that a fish trader had borrowed on his behalf from the bank. Having successfully paid that off he borrowed a further 600 US from the same fish trader and has almost paid this off as well. His boat is powered by two second-hand machines and although he normally sells the fish through that agent at the auction, he does not feel trapped in a patron-client relationship. The willingness to take a risk by borrowing capital and move from a crew member to a sampan owner, coupled with his commitment to paying the loan off as quickly as possible has enabled this individual to move towards resilience. The use of two second-hand machines also helps him to avoid the sudden shock of one failing and instantly needing to find the 150US to replace it. Individuals like this, who have demonstrated underlying human capacity need to be supported with financial and physical capital. These kinds of people are highly motivated and determined to make a better life for themselves and their families. Barring sickness or natural disasters, his lifehood profile is growing more resilient. For others, who lack those financial management skills, they will need considerable supervision both from external change agents like extension officers andor from membership of a group to grow in human capacity. In the natural, institutional and social fields there was no clear difference on the bad-good scale between crew and owners or between fishers using nets and fishers using handlines. However within individual attributes differences were apparent. While the sampan sector in general reported that catches had declined over the last 20 years, this was especially evident in the handlining sector. All 13 respondents reported you could not catch the same volu me of fish as previously with comments such as “you cannot find large groupers now” and “we used to catch a whole basket, now it’s a 5 kilo tin of paint”. For both netters and handliners, the price of fish had increased as the resource got scarcer but fishers from this sector complained that this was not compensating them for the decline in catch value and they were finding it harder to save, “it’s no use having a high price for a fish you can’t catch” Both crew n=6 and sampan owners n=22 tended to own or borrow rice fields and besides rice, 29 of the sampan sector had some other kind of diversification including activities such as collecting firewood, raising goats and cows, small household kiosks, wives making cakes and other crop farming. These activities have different roles depending on the needs of the family at those times. Rice is normally stored and then eaten as needed but could equally be sold if money was needed to repair a boat or machine. This degree of diversification did contrast the sampan sector with both the bagan and payang sectors. In the bagan sector, 36 n=14 of crew members and for payang, 58 n=7 of crew had no alternative livelihood and depended entirely on catches for their household income. In contrast just 8 n=3 of sampan respondents depended on catches and even one of these three had just 2 months previously changed from being a bagan crew member to owning a sampan. His story was significant because he was 38 years old and had just changed after more than ten years fishing as a bagan crew member. He saved up money and also borrowed from his family and since he had owned his own sampan reports that his income has increased and he is enjoying the freedom and flexibility that being a boat owner gives him. Other sampan owners had similar stories of using their time as a bagan or payang crew member to save money so that they could buy their own boat. One family saved for seven years and were finally able to buy their own sampan. During this seven years, their children were still small and their family did not face any disaster which could have cleaned out their savings. Having bought the boat, they are finding their income is higher than previously and are continuing to save to improve their business in the future. They had a window of opportunity to save while their household expenditure was low and they have managed to move towards resilience. Of all the sectors sampan owners were at greatest risk of having boats destroyed by large waves or carried away by the current. Eight of the 39 had experienced this but seven of them had been able to subsequently buy another boat. Mostly they worked as crew to save up the capital to do this. As with the bagan and payang sectors there were high leverage scores for the attributes ‘state of coastal resources’ and ‘natural disasters’ Figure 6.6 in the natural field. The attribute ‘personal interventions’ in the institutional field exerted a greater leverage in the sampan sector than for bagan and payang respondents. The main reason for this was that most sampan respondents 7 out of 39 were from Sungai Pinang and for the other institutional attributes their responses were fairly uniform. Generally, Sungai Pinang has received very little institutional support ov er the last five years so attributes such as ‘advocacy’, ‘extension officer’, and ‘training’ were scored equally poorly by almost all respondents leaving the largest source of variation in responses to come from whether they had received personal interventions from the government or not. Figure 6.6: Leverage exerted on the x-axis scores by each attribute for the sampan 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 Risk Wife_working No_of_children Education_aspiration Education_reality Retirement_planning 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

6.3.4 Beach seine pukat tepi