Fate and the fisherman

“We earn whatever is in our fate” – a phrase I heard from the many fisher folk I met in Karachi. They were referring to the fact that the sea is uncontrollable and catch from the sea is unpredictable.

Despite the unpredictability, except for the year that brought a Covid-induced halt to all economic activity including fishing, the economic surveys of Pakistan show continuous growth in the metric tonnes of fish caught as well as the revenue generated from the fishery sector each year. The logic of fate runs deep in creating and sustaining a discourse that allows predictable growth of the fishing sector from the unpredictable sea.

The idea of fate is quite commonly used in our cultural narratives. At the core of it is the notion that the outcomes of our actions are beyond our control. The external locus of control takes human responsibility out of the equation. Once responsibility is out of the equation, the dominated class has no reason to raise questions and the dominant class does not have to answer.

In theory, fisherpersons’ lack of control applies only to the sea, but in practice, it spreads across the organizational structure in a way that the fisherman is completely alienated from the means, forms, and outcomes of production processes. When the fisherman leaves his family behind and risks his life against the unpredictable sea weather to earn a livelihood but fails to bring enough fish to make profits, he returns home with borrowed money to feed his family. It affects his future earnings not only because he must pay back the borrowed money, but also because the boat owner deducts the losses from the fisherman’s future income.

Conversely, when the boat consistently makes decent profits to the point that the boat owner finds himself investing in a second or a third boat in just a matter of a few years, it remains business as usual for the fisherman – he does not get a share in the ownership of the boat. The trap of loans inevitably strengthens and deepens for the fisherman, resulting in the expansion of alienation to his labour, and invariably his self, too.

The credit structure has been crucial in contributing to the growth of the sector. Historically, smaller-sized boats used to be owned by nuclear or joint families, who did not have to travel deep into the sea to catch the fish, yet they were able to self-sustain. However, the capitalist economic structures first made it impossible to catch fish closer to the land because of the ever-increasing dumping of factory pollutants into the sea. Going deep into the sea had risks that smaller and weaker boats could not manage and, therefore, increasingly fishermen needed large and strong boats to survive sea storms and spend multiple weeks in the sea to catch fish weighing hundreds of tonnes in just one round.

However, individual fishermen never had the capacity to build or buy such large boats, resulting in the rise of corporations that lent money and in return bought the fish for cheap and sold it at competitive prices in the local or international market while remaining almost invisible in the everyday talk about the fishery sector.

The free-market dynamics added fuel to the fire. Unlike wheat, the prices of which were regulated by the state to ensure food security, the price of fish was left completely up to the market. Thus, in the high seasons when the catch of certain sea products increased significantly, market prices dropped significantly because of the surplus. As a result, the life-threatening hard work that fishermen put themselves through to catch more fish did not benefit them even though it contributed to the sector’s annual growth.

Corporations today have been accepted as common sense for the fishing sector’s survival, resulting in structural inertia in the sector which benefits a few while the majority continues to be exploited until they breathe their very last and pass the suffering onto their future generations. That is how fate tests the majority fishermen while favours a small minority of dominant players of the fishery sector.

In a nutshell, fisher folk are trapped under the exploitative economic structure where the mostly invisible corporations, or their owners precisely speaking, avail the greatest benefits while the folk who risk their lives to catch fish remain at the bottom of the economic, social, and cultural hierarchies. From the case of the fisher folk community, it is strongly evident that the sociopolitical manifestation of fate, a notion which may have roots in religion, is deeply rooted in class dynamics. Challenging the discourse of fate could be critical to exposing the sociopolitical structures that it embodies and gives acceptance to, and therefore, could help turn a new page in history.

The writer is a researcher. He can be reached at:

aqeelmalick@gmail.com