IIFET 2008 Vietnam Proceedings
14 th Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade Conference ( IIFET 2008), Achieving a Sustainable Future: Managing Aquaculture, Fishing, Trade and Development, Nha Trang, Vietnam 22-25 July 2008 Volume 1 of 2, ISBN: 978-1-61839-609-9 , Printed from e-media with permission by: Curran Associates, Inc. 57 Morehouse Lane ,Red Hook, NY 12571
Believe Your Hands Have Power: Strength of Farmer Organizations for the Development of Culture-based Fisheries in Sri Lanka...............................................................................1536 Mohottala G. Kularatne, Clevo Wilson, Sean Pasco
RURAL AQUACULTURE AS A MEANS OF POVERTY REDUCTION: CULTURE-BASED FISHERIES IN SRI LANKA Mohottala G. Kularatne, Queensland University of Technology and University of Kelaniya,
[email protected]. Clevo Wilson, Queensland University of Technology,
[email protected] Sean Pasco, CSIRO, Australia.
[email protected] U.S. Amarasinghe, University of Kelaniya,
[email protected]. Sena De Silva, NACA Thailand.
[email protected]. ABSTRACT The main objective of this paper is to analyse to what extent culture-based fisheries (CBF) can increase rural incomes and reduce the poverty gap among the agricultural farming communities where reservoirs exist. The paper undertakes an economic analysis of CBF in 23 successfully harvested village reservoirs during the 2003-2004-culture cycle in five administrative districts in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka relies on the fisheries sector to reduce poverty. Since existing village reservoirs are used for CBF development, construction cost are zero. Hence, average total cost per ha in a culture cycle is 22% of the market value of the yield. As will be discussed CBF reduced the poverty gap by 20% in the Monaragala District where poverty levels are highest in the country. CBF is a potential source of animal protein for rural communities that are available at low prices. Therefore, we demonstrate that CBF in village reservoirs can play a major role in reducing poverty among agricultural communities in Sri Lanka. Keywords: Culture-based fishery, Poverty Gap index, Poverty reduction, Village reservoirs. INTRODUCTION One-fifth of the world’s population lives in poverty. Poverty in developing countries is extremely acute in rural areas where 63 % of people are poor (Khan 2000) and are involved in agricultural activities. Due to the heavy reliance on various inputs such as agrochemicals in rural agriculture, there is little provision for improving living standards of rural people in developing countries unless radical adjustments are made in the mode of rural agriculture. There are various methods applied for measuring poverty. Poverty is measured as the minimum amount of nutrition required for person per month (Biological and nutritional approach: Sen 1988). In Sri Lanka, measuring income poverty is based on the use of households’ consumption expenditure to derive a poverty line. The estimated Poverty Line for the year 2002 in Sri
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IIFET 2008 Vietnam Proceedings
Lanka is Rs.1423.The Poverty Line (PL) is deflated with the Colombo Consumer Price Index to update PL annually (See www.statistics.gov.lk). One drawback of defining poverty using income poverty line is misleading because of multi-dimensional nature of the poverty (Lister 2004). Nevertheless, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka defines absolute poverty as not having enough income to buy the minimum required intake of food calories. Poverty Level in rural Sri Lanka. The national average of Headcount Index (HI or percentage of poor population below the Poverty Line) in Sri Lanka is 23 percent in 2002. The lowest HI (6 %) is recorded in Colombo district while one of the highest HI is reported in Monaragala (37%). The HI for Hambantota, and Ratnapura districts were 32 and 34 respectively. Reported HI in Anuradhapura district is below the national average in the same year. Nevertheless, PL in Anuradhapura district is comparatively lower than that of Ratnapura district (Census and Statistics, 2002).
A total of 384 thousand people live below the PL in Kurunegala district (North western province) where reservoir density is the highest in Sri Lanka. According to the national level poverty indicators, sampled villages had very high poverty levels in the country. According to information in t he Department of Census and Statistics, of the 38,259 villages in the country, People in most villagers are unable to fulfil their basic need as their income levels are below PL. Monaragala District is one of the poorest districts in Sri Lanka. Similarly, Poverty Gap Index (PGI is the sum of income gap ratio for the population below the poverty line (national and district poverty line) in Monaragala district is 51% (Census and Statistics, 2002). This implies that the people in this district 51% far beyond the PL. It has been shown that traditional farming systems, associated with the multitude of reservoirs, could be considered as conservation farming systems which reduce the poverty level with minimal adverse impacts on the environment (Dharmasena 1994), but recent agricultural modernization and population increases have changed the biophysical, environmental, and socio-economic set-up in the village irrigation-system (Abeyratne & Perera 1984; Aheeyar, 2001). Sri Lanka has more than 15000 village reservoirs (< 50 ha) with the total extend of about 39000 ha, in addition to large perennial reservoirs (Mendis 1977). The reservoirs of Sri Lanka are ancient dating back to 12th century or more. There are scattered over the low rainfall zone of the island, solely due to the reason that these reservoirs were constructed to conserve rainwater for irrigating paddy lands during low rainfall season. It has been reported that there had been subsistence fisheries using traditional catching methods in these reservoirs (Siriweera1986; Ulluwishewa 1994). However, a commercial-scale fishery has been established in Sri Lankan reservoirs only after the introduction of exotic cichlid species, Oreochromis mossamicus in 1952 (De Silva 1988), which resulted in over 250-fold increase in inland fish production within the span of about 12 years (Fernando and De Silva 1984). However, the inland fisheries production in Sri Lanka comes from large perennial reservoirs and small village reservoirs are not utilized for fisheries development. Recent studies revealed that there are a relationship between inland fishperies production and extend of reservoirs with commercial fish production (Amarasinghe, 2006). North central province (Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa Districts) has a highest reservoir area with inland fish production in Sri Lanka. Also, North Central province (Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa districts) recorded the highest per capita fish consumption (Amarasinghe, 2006). Percentages of people below the PL in North central, and Northern provinces are 18.1% and 18.5% respectively (Census and Statistics 2002). Nevertheless these provinces have high potential to develop inland fisheries. The increase of income or consumption in lowest income groups in developing countries will be beneficial in reducing rural poverty ( Dao 2004) The Fisheries
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IIFET 2008 Vietnam Proceedings
sector has been identified as a one of the main streams which could be used for poverty reduction in a country (Thorpe et al. 2006). Culture Based-fisheries The small village reservoirs in Sri Lanka, which range in size from about 2 ha to about 250 ha, where there are no commercial-scale fisheries, represent a cumulative extent of about 39,000 ha and about 15, 000 in number (Mendis 1977). These reservoirs support livelihoods of people though agricultural economy so that each reservoir is linked with each village community. Mendis (1965), based on limnological studies, suggested that the small village reservoir are highly productive biologically so that they can be used for extensive aquaculture, which involves stocking of hatchery-reared fish fingerlings and subsequent harvesting after attaining to the marketable size, a strategy which has recently been termed as culture-based fisheries (CBF). The government of Sri Lanka has incorporated CBF in the fisheries development plan (Thayaparan 1982) and in 1980s successful experimental results were obtained (Chakrabarty and Samaranayake, 1983; Chandrasoma and Kumarasiri 1986). However, this strategy did not sustain as De Silva (1988) correctly predicted, due to the reason that the action plan did not consider an effective mechanism to select village reservoirs based on biological productivity and did not treat the importance of social component to implement CBF development in village reservoirs. Recently, comprehensive studies have been carried out to define suitable strategies to selecting village reservoirs suitable for CBF development based on biological criteria (Jayasinghe et al. 2005a, 2005b; Wijenayake et al. 2005). In this paper, an attempt is made to analysis in what extent CBF facilitates increase of rural income to reduce the poverty gap among the agricultural farming communities associated with village reservoirs in Sri Lanka. METHODS This study was carried out in five administrative districts where a high number of seasonal reservoirs are found (i.e., Anuradhapura, Kurunegala, Hambantota, Monaragala, and Ratnapura; Fig. 1) and are with different social and economic setups. Detailed description on site selection procedure was given elasewhere (Jayasinghe et al. 2005; Wijenayake et al. 2005; Kularatne et al. 2008). Depending on reservoir size (
