The hullabaloo of the Male’ fish market and the sounds of the busy street filled with people of all works and ages continue to be the real face of the capital Male’. The scene also gives a glimpse of the human and environmental dimension of dwindling fish stocks. Most people enter rushing in to the fish market, often worried and unhappy about high prices. With increased heart beats, over active sweat pores and a tightened nose to shut out the stench of the different types and qualities of fish, people keep moving in and out of the market.
As a child growing in Male’, it was one of my routines to visit the market every evening, often twice or thrice a day. Fortunately there was more than enough of fish, most days and the basic economic principle of more supply reducing the price works perfectly. As the evening fades, price goes low enough for my landlord to buy 4 or five skip jacks of about 1-3 kg. In those years of the mid 90s only very rarely does the price of a tuna goes above Rf 50.
However a complete turnover has taken recently toppling the price of a tuna to Rf 100-150 on a daily average. This may not be shocking to a youngster who visits market these days, but it is something alarming for a person like me who has seen the old fish market in the vibrant years shifted to a new two story market and beyond. Throughout all these years what I have seen is a constant reduction of fish landings and a hike in price of our most preferred and accessible protein source, tuna. In the early 2000, for a University assignment I collected information from fishermen and found that they were able to catch 30 metric tons of tuna per day and this was the time a new fleet of modern fiberglass boats of larger capacity ventured in. They also claimed that they can often catch double this amount especially during high seasons, but had to sell under the price. This was also the period when yellow fin fishery for Japanese sashimi markets started booming. Sadly the average catch kept on dwindling down steeply. To make things worse our fishermen kept on practicing the traditional pole and line bringing super quality tuna, while lagging behind their purse seiner rivals who were scooping out the entire Indian Ocean.
With no doubt over fishing has led to depletion of stocks bringing us to the dilemma we have today. To make matters worse we are in no way near recovery for stocks and we may either loose stocks of certain species or may have to force ourselves more restrictions. This will then lead to a revolution which will not only affect our nutrition but also will torment our culture and traditions and way of life. We have lived as seafarers and our forefathers got stranded on these islands with nothing except the bounties of the seas. We have lived as fisher folks for centuries and sometimes we refer us as having blood of fish. It is hard to make a living from traditional tuna fishing these days, while also making it impossible to enrich our diet with the goodness of protein and omega-3 much sought after from the tuna. It has now become a collective struggle of the entire nation to harvest and live on the bounties of our seas. It is hard to even imagine the devastating consequences of dwindling fish stocks on the human and environmental dimension.
