It\u2019s 9am and Duanpen Jaengpracham sits patiently at the end of the Ko Tor community pier, where the sea breeze keeps her cool as the day heats up. She\u2019s waiting for her husband and daughter, who have been out fishing since 3am. Duanpen, who is called Khun Pen, is hoping they land a decent catch.<\/p>\n
A large, long-tail boat has already come in.\u00a0 The crew, all members of the same family, are working hard to unload. They\u2019re happy, having caught a tonne of\u00a0Lang Keaw,\u00a0or sprat, last night: much more than the average haul of 200 kilograms to 300 kilograms.\u00a0 It will fetch only THB6-7 per kilogram, which such large hauls are a big deal.<\/p>\n
Khun Pen, 50, usually joins her family on the boat but has stayed behind to tell\u00a0Coconuts\u00a0how her story intertwines with that of the sea, an ever-diminishing bounty blamed not only on climate change but also practices closer to home \u2013 industrial pollution, poorly designed nets, harmful abandoned gear \u2013 and innovative attempts to address them.<\/p>\n
A member of the board representing Samut Prakan\u2019s artisanal fishing communities, Khun Pen described how climate change has made coastal waters warmer, causing once-common mackerel to disappear as the water\u2019s now too warm for them to lay their eggs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to go far to catch mackerel,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t bother going for them anymore. Overall, stocks of all species have fallen and fishing families with many mouths to feed are facing problems.\u201d Climate change is just one of many reasons this has happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s partly caused by nearby fabric factories which release chemicals into the sea,\u201d she added, \u201cand there\u2019s illegal fishing.\u00a0 People outside the community use illegal Ai Ngo nets which catch all species indiscriminately.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ai Ngo nets do not have specially designed escape routes for juvenile fish or non-target species to break free. When fish are caught too young, they cannot be sold and are thrown away. This means they don\u2019t get a chance to reproduce, causing fish stocks to plummet.<\/p>\n
Khun Pen has reported the problem to the authorities and sometimes they come to remove the nets, which they find unsupervised and laid out on the seabed. It\u2019s hard to catch the culprits because there is no way of identifying who owns the nets.<\/p>\n
She says there are desperate people who use these unsustainable fishing methods to earn cash to feed drug habits.\u00a0 When officials come to investigate, she has seen them shout and throw stones at them.<\/p>\n
Asked about\u00a0plastic pollution, she does not think it\u2019s a big factor in fishing decline, though, it still creates frustrating problems.<\/p>\n
\u201cI pulled my net in to discover plastic bags and nothing else. Water filled plastic bottles and bags snag and tear our nets when we pull them in,\u201d she said. \u201cDiscarded bags and old clothes can get tangled in the boat\u2019s propellers, costing both time and money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another issue facing fisherfolk and likely contributing to falling yields surrounds so-called ghost gear. This is abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing equipment that ends up in the oceans without any control.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a deadly form of marine plastic pollution,\u201d said Salisa Traipipitsiriwat of the Environmental Justice Foundation. Traipiptsiriwat coordinates the foundation\u2019s Net Free Seas project, which is working to overcome the problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce leaked into the ocean, old fishing equipment continues to do what it was designed for: catching or entangling whatever it comes into contact with,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":2,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[1148,715],"region":[28],"source":[9380],"country":[1987],"state":[],"city":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/96662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/newss"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/96662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96663,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/96662\/revisions\/96663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96662"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=96662"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=96662"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=96662"},{"taxonomy":"state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/state?post=96662"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=96662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}