contacts

Philosophy

The bottom line is that fishing grounds and coastal zones around the world are in crisis and fishing communities must unite to protect their natural capital and human rights. We want a government acknowledgment that the sea is the source of all life and a promise to protect coastal waters and coastal communities. We seek a ban on destructive fishing gears, particularly factory trawlers. And, of course, we want an end to industrial pollution. This should be a key element of India's national purpose. Like our forests, the seas too can repair themselves, provided we are keep profiteers and destroyers from violating them.

History/struggle
From the time of independence in 1947, India as attempted to modernize its economy rapidly. The government promoted western technologies likes bottom trawling and purse seining for large-scale harvest of fish.

These new mechanized boats often operated close to the shore in competition with the traditional fishworkers for both space and resource. In many part of India this led to a drastic fall in catches of the traditional fishworkers and in this five decades to a worse plight of the inland fish workers.

Only the problem is not that much a result of Government intervention in fishery itself, but more the result of development projects meant for other sectors.

This treat of their very livelihood had forced the fisher people to forge new linkages and organize themselves to face the threats. The growth of the All Goa Fish Workers' Union, the Kerala Independent Fish Workers' federation, the Tamilnadu Fish workers'Union etc. are a result of such trends.

Through a long chain of hunger strikes, and different manifestations the fisher people were able to obtain marine fishing regulations in most of the coastal states in India. Trough ongoing struggles the fisher people forced the government to bring about zonal regulation for the mechanized boats, night trawling ban, purse seine ban etc.

Since Fisheries being a subject handled by State Government, most fish workers' organizations were at local or state level. So there was a need to forge a national alliance to face the many problems with a common origin. The National Fish Workers' Forum today represents the interests of many of these local movements.

Right from the inception of the NFF, women have played an important role in all the fishworkers' struggles. They have participated in the struggle on various issues like trawling; fish depletion and displacement, apart from their personal struggle to safe guard their own livelihood. Based on empirical micro studies in NFF areas, they have presented a report and a memorandum of suggestions to the National Commission for Labour in Delhi.