1.1 The World Food System and Southern Hunger

How is it possible that the world’s food producers and rural households suffer the highest levels of malnutrition? The answer to this question does not lie in over-simplified, Eurocentric Malthusian claims about population growth. Indeed, the explanations for such inequalities lie in the structural mechanisms of world capitalism that have fostered “a system of global profiteering” from transnational food marketing (McMichael 1998: 104). Industrialized food production is justified as the quickest path to food security for Southern countries (Watkins 1996) when, in reality, its aim is to generate market control for multinational corporations (Baviera and Bello 2009). By the early 1980s, the value of food imports of Southern countries outstripped the value of their food exports (Constantino 1988). Consequently, Asian representatives to the 1988 World Food Congress voiced alarm about “the flooding into Third World countries of foods their farmers could produce” (Philippine Star, 11 April 1988: 2). Despite these concerns, the 1995 World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture further constrained the ability of national governments to strategize food self-sufficiency. “Because a pivotal goal of the global agro-food system is the capture of local food markets of Southern countries, the WTO’s minimum import rules require all the member states to allow imports of food up to at least 5 percent of the volume of domestic consumption” (McMichael 2005: 277).

Throughout the Global South, food imports exacerbate national debt, alter consumption patterns, and threaten the livelihoods of local farmers. As the richer countries unload their surpluses on Southern nations, they destroy any possibility for those countries to become food self-sufficient (New Internationalist 1999b). By 2000, food imports comprised a significant proportion of the external debt of most Southern countries. At the same time, Asian countries received very little income for their fishery exporting. Southeast Asia accounted for 36 percent of the world’s exports but received only 7 percent of total value of world fishery commodities. East Asia did a little better, providing 30 percent of world exports for 10 percent of world value. Even though 21 percent of world exports originated in South Asia, that region acquired only 4 percent of world value.⁴

Production of, access to, and control over food are managed by a global industrialized system that:

1. centralizes control of local ecological resources and food production systems into the hands of export producers and the multinational corporations with which they trade;

2. generates dependency on imported crop and fishery inputs, fossil fuels and technology;

3. degrades and depletes ecosystems, agricultural lands and fisheries;

4. depeasantizes local agricultural and fishery production;

5. globalizes access to basic necessities of survival while putting producing populations at risk of nutritional shortfalls;

6. causes widening class, gender, age and ethnic inequalities in access to food;

7. grounds food security in imports that require additional national indebtedness;

8. and entrenches poverty and hunger by exploiting millions of bonded and forced laborers (Kara 2012; Barclay 2013; Monthly Review special issue 50 (3); McMichael 1998, 2005, 2008; SAPRIN 2002; Shiva 2002; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2009; Baviera and Bello 2009; Holt-Gimenez 2018).

Technically, the global food system has succeeded because production has more than doubled over the last forty years. During the same time period, however, the numbers of malnourished people have either risen or stayed near the same proportions in both poor and rich countries, demonstrating the failure of the system to end world hunger (Wilkinson 2010). The Food and Agriculture Organization (2012b: 1) concedes that economic growth and globalized trade are not enough to insure that a majority of the world’s people can acquire adequate nutrients. Because the world economy “determines whether or not production gets distributed to meet the needs of all” (Burback and Flynn 1980: 122), only about one-quarter of the world population benefits from globalized food production. Moreover, food prices have steadily inflated since the 1990s, and malnutrition has worsened in much of the Global South (United Nations 2002).

In the Global South, the neoliberal shift to export production has had the greatest impacts in agriculture and fishing. While a majority of Southern nations produce more crop and fishery exports than ever before, fewer of them are food self-sufficient today than in 1985 (Baviera and Bello 2009). In 1996, heads of state endorsed the World Food Summit Plan of Action which established the precedent that “trade is a key element in food security” (Watkins 1996: 248). Less than a decade later, the Food and Agriculture Organization (2003a: 22) warned that the track record of the global food trade in reducing undernourished populations “has been dismal.” There is little evidence that such export priorities have helped Global South countries to rise out of poverty or to end hunger (Galbraith 2002; Stiglitz 2002). On the one hand, these nations accumulate high trade imbalances from the exchange of cheaper exports for expensive imports. On the other hand, more than 90 percent of the profits from export agribusinesses accrue to external corporations, leaving little wealth in the producing countries (Weisbrot and Baker 2002). Since 1980, these trends have worsened, as the Global South has been more deeply integrated into the global agro-industrial food system (McMichael 2005). Indeed, most of the countries that export high levels of agricultural and seafood commodities exhibit high malnutrition rates (Baviera and Bello 2009). Export strategies drain food from Southern countries in which half or more of the households struggle to meet minimal caloric requirements for their families (Shiva 2002).

In reality, the global food system impoverishes the diets of those who can least afford to experience further nutritional deterioration. Food security is not just about total available caloric intake because Southern communities exchange their highest protein resources for less healthy, but more expensive, grains and processed foods. Worldwide, fish comprises 17 percent of the animal protein in the human diet, but fish and shellfish are the most important sources of animal protein in Asian diets. However, Southern countries that export seafoods consume less fish than richer countries. In fact, the richest fifth of the world consumes nearly half of all fish and meat, the poorest fifth only 5 percent. While Asian countries supply the vast majority of internationally-traded seafood products, a handful of rich countries consume 40 percent of the world total supply of fish.⁵ To complicate matters, nonfood uses of fish in rich countries (e.g., livestock and pet feeds, aquariums and industrial oils) are greater than the combined human consumption of fish in India, Latin America and Africa. Nearly 30 percent of fishery exports are intended for nonfood uses (FAO 2012b: 16). For example, almost one-fifth of captured wild fish are dried, pressed and ground into fishmeal and oils to feed livestock and aquaculture species (Changing Markets Foundation 2021).

1.2 The Global Significance of the Asian Fisheries

Paradoxically, developing countries exhibit the world’s highest levels of hunger and malnutrition while they export so much of the food that circulates in the world economy. Fish is the most traded agricultural commodity in the world, with over 50 percent of production marketed internationally. Even though their populations exhibit nutritional deficiencies that could be alleviated through seafood consumption, Asian countries account for 67 percent of exported food fish and 74 percent of nonfood fishery commodities (FAO 2012b). In 2008, twenty Asian countries– twelve of them classified as low-income food-deficient nations– accounted for more than half of the total quantity of fishery exports, the vast majority imported by developed countries.⁶ While these exports occurred, Asians suffered from protein shortfalls, iron deficiency anemia, child and maternal nutritional deficiencies to a greater degree than citizens of any other part of the world (FAO 2012b). Despite those food security problems, Asian fisheries and aquaculture facilities prioritized high-value export species over production for local consumption (APFC 2012: 67–130). By 2010, exporting had transformed traditional Asian seafood consumption patterns significantly. As Figure 2 shows, high consumption of fishery products has been displaced by an average daily diet that consists primarily of carbohydrates and fats, with only 10 to 12 percent protein.⁷

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Composition of average daily dietary consumption, 2019

SOURCE: ANALYSIS OF FOOD SECURITY STATISTICS, FAOSTAT

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We examine the process through which Asian fisheries have been transformed from production for local consumption to follow aggressive export-led agendas, with a particular focus on one country. At the regional level, we provide an overview of the Asian fishery crisis and the linkages between fishery exporting and food insecurity. Through a case study of the Philippines, we pinpoint public fishery policies that exacerbate hunger, nutritional deficiencies and ecological degradation at national and local levels.

1.3 Hunger and Depeasantization

We are also interested in a second paradox of world food security. Hunger and malnutrition are concentrated in rural areas of developing countries, most especially Asia, where households and workers produce a majority of the world’s food (FAO 2012b). In most Asian countries, half to three-quarters of the population are peasants, but their traditional spaces and their livelihoods are increasingly dispossessed by national agendas to target resources for export. Asian commercial capture fishing and aquaculture have been publicly and economically privileged to such an extent that peasant fishers are marginalized and have become the region’s poorest, most malnourished food producers (Baviera and Bello 2009). The agro-industrial food regime displaces self-provisioning peasant cultures, converts land and fisheries from production for local consumption to export commodification, and entrenches marketing mechanisms that entangle peasants in debt bondage within export commodity chains (Bailey 1988a, 1988b; Barraclough and Finger-Stick 1996).

Throughout the Global South, small farmers and fishers are displaced through a process of depeasantization, i.e., small producers are threatened by national and international pressures to produce for export rather than local markets (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2009).⁸ Through their development priorities, Southern governments reshape local agriculture and fishing into production units that are re-oriented to supply the global supermarket. Under these circumstances, agriculture and fishing are no longer foundational institutions of societies and states because they have been integrated into corporate global supply chains (McMichael 1998: 104). By the early 1980s, nearly one-quarter of all arable lands and about one-third of the fisheries of developing countries were being used to produce food and industrial commodities for the world’s richest countries (Magdoff 2013). By 2010, a much greater proportion of Southern lands and fisheries had been “grabbed” by external investors to control those areas for production of export foods, fish and biofuels, displacing or threatening hundreds of thousands of peasant households (OXFAM 2012).

There is another significant way in which depeasantization occurs. National food security is conditioned upon structural incorporation into the global food system, so local households will secure more of their survival necessities from imports, displacing domestic producers (Shiva 2002). “The preference given to the price form disempowers farmers and empowers agribusinesses across the world. In the North, traders and processors purchase commodities through farm contracts at low prices unrelated to production costs. … For traders, low commodity prices enable commodity dumping in the world market … forcing local prices down at the expense of small farmers” (McMichael 2005: 278). The world food regime not only absorbs formal farm and fishery enterprises, but it also captures informal provisioning networks, draining away foods and natural resources that have traditionally been utilized for household consumption (Shiva 2000).

1.4 The Importance of Gendered Analysis

The impoverishment and marginalization of rural Asian households have not been eliminated through export-led strategies, and women have borne the brunt of income shortfalls, diminished access to ecological resources, and expanded workloads. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (2005b: 2, 5), rural Asian women “play a critical role in supporting the three pillars of food security– food production, economic access to available food and nutritional security.” Despite these contributions, “a considerable proportion of women’s contribution to agricultural labour throughout the region is invisible in macro statistics.” To complicate matters, “the development and academic communities have generally paid scant attention to the situation of rural women.” In spite of their importance to food security, hunger and malnutrition are disproportionately concentrated among the world’s rural females. For these reasons, we focus sharply on rural Asian females, especially fisherwomen. We are concerned about the lack of scholarly attention to gender inequalities in Asian fisheries and to the implications of women’s changing work roles in these households. Even though the World Bank (2012) estimates that females account for nearly half the global fishery labor force, “women’s work in fisheries, aquaculture, and shellfish harvesting is rarely found in statistics” (Frangoudes and Gerrard 2018: 118). While there have been 21st century international symposia about women in Asian fisheries, that interest has not altered the failure of international organizations to collect and report gender disaggregated data in their annual surveys of the status of fisheries (Harper et al. 2020).⁹ According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (2012d: 107–108), “gender analysis in fishing communities focuses mainly on the … male catching role,” minimizing the work of females. For that reason, it is crucial that researchers “look beyond the simplified picture of men as fishers and women as processors to examine the more complex picture.”

Women’s marginalization and invisibility in public records is also reflected in the failure of scholars to investigate the roles of women, especially when they research Asian fisheries (Pauly 2006; Siar and Kusakabe 2020: 24). Even though “gender and fisheries” research emerged in the 1990s as a field of scholarly endeavor (Williams et al. 2004: 5), there is no previous investigation of Asian fisheries “that systematically tackles gender issues or women’s participation and integration in fisheries development” (Siason 2001: 76).¹⁰ By reconceptualizing the work roles of fisherwomen, we seek to address this gap in the literature and to overcome the sexist stereotypes that handicap public policy formation about fishing communities. During our ethnographic research, we asked male fishery officials and fishermen to describe women’s work roles in fishing. Only 39 percent of our male interviewees acknowledged female work roles, but we routinely photographed female labors that these males could witness as easily as we did. For example, only 22 percent of these men reported that wives mended nets, an activity that was highly visible to us throughout fishing communities.¹¹ In contrast to male stereotypes, women are visibly involved in work that is credited to male fishers, and many older wives indicate they always have been. Women fish in boats alone, and they manage the harvesting and repairs of large stationary net systems, as our photographs will show. Furthermore, “there has been a research gap about the changing contours and experiencing of gendered lives by men and women in fishing communities in relation to economic restructuring” (Turgo 2015: 372). Daniel Pauly (2006: 16) indicates that the roles of women in small-scale fisheries are understudied because of the narrow range of “traditional” questions that have guided scholars. He advises that what is especially needed is analysis of how women in fishing households “literally subsidize male fishers” and make their continued low-paying fishing economically feasible. We embedded the concerns of Turgo and Pauly in our field research, and we address shifting gender roles in our theoretical formulations.

2.1 Target Study Areas

We have woven six vantage points into our analysis: global, national, regional, small community, household, and women. At the macrostructural level, our first target area consists of those sixteen fisheries of East, South and Southeast Asia that produce more than two-thirds of the world’s seafoods and account for more than one-third of world fishery exports (see Table 1). Except for North Korea, they rank in the world’s top fifty fishery producers and exporters. Because a majority of Asian countries do not export fish at more than trivial levels (FAO 2012b), we focus on the fifteen countries of East, South and Southeast Asia, plus the Taiwan province of China.¹³ Fifteen of these Asian fisheries rank among the top forty producers of captured fish while fifteen rank among the top thirty aquaculture producers (see Table 1). Thirteen of these countries rank among the top fifty fishery exporters. More than two-thirds of their fishery exports go to the United States, Canada, Europe and other developed countries, with only about one-fifth traded to Asian countries.¹⁴ Despite their high fishery exporting and dramatic expansion of agricultural outputs over the last two decades, thirteen of these fisheries exhibited alarming, serious or moderate Global Hunger Indexes between 2010 and 2018 (Concern Worldwide 2010–2018).¹⁵ In 2010, eight of them were classified by the Food and Agriculture Organization (2011a) as low-income food-deficit countries that were relying heavily on food imports and exhibiting food shortfalls.

We report data and analysis separately for mainland China and Taiwan, Province of China, because of the sharp differences in the Human Development Indexes for them and because these two parts of China exhibit very different patterns of food security. If we merged mainland and Taiwan data, the food security trends would be distorted, resulting in a highly inaccurate representation of mainland China. Afghanistan, Bhutan, Brunei, Mongolia, Nepal, and Timor-Leste were excluded because they produce, import, and export very little fish. Lao DRP was excluded because it exports very little of its domestic production. Singapore and China-Hong Kong were excluded because they are fishery re-exporters. That is, they produce little fish domestically, import great quantities, then re-export higher levels of fish than they produce nationally. Even though Maldives exports a high proportion of its fish and is dependent on food imports, we were forced to exclude that tiny island country because the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Health Organization, Asian Development Bank and World Bank report limited or inconsistent data for it.

Our second target study area is a highly-indebted country that exports three-quarters of its fishery products even though it is food-deficient. In an attempt to repay its accumulated external debt, the Philippines opened access to its ecological resources to foreign investors and vastly broadened its food exporting. In 1994, the World Bank congratulated the Philippines for being one of the “most deregulated” economies in Asia, predicting that the country was right on track for full economic recovery by 2000 (Asia Money Magazine, March 1996 Supplement). By the early 21st century, however, the Philippines had declined from the most dynamic economy in Asia during the 1950s to a nation facing fiscal crisis and economic stagnation (Lim and Montes 2002; Escobar 2004). About half the population lives in the thousands of fishing communities that line the coasts, so seafoods traditionally provided two-thirds of all animal protein in household diets, especially among the poor (Goldoftas 2006: 85). Since 1980, Philippine coastal areas and inland rivers have been targeted for expansion of commercial capture fishing to meet national export goals. In addition, the country developed the world’s largest area of river-based fishponds situated in deforested mangroves (World Bank Philippines 2003). By 2010, the Philippines was ranked as a food-deficient country with serious nutritional deficiencies among 40 percent of women and children (FAO 2014b), and its croplands, inland waterways and coastal areas had suffered three decades of severe ecological degradation due to exploitation of natural resources for export (Pineda-Ofreneo 1991; Broad and Cavanaugh 1993; World Bank Philippines 2003).

Our third research target area is a Philippine fishery that has been articulated with the global food system. A Philippine coastal region is an ideal area to explore the impacts of integration into the global agro-industrial food regime, for these are ecozones in which farming, agribusinesses, capture fishing and aquaculture rival for control over natural resources. In order to investigate what happens to local peasant communities, ecosystems and households when a country transforms itself into a food extractive enclave, we focus on a Philippine region that has been nationally targeted for intensive reorientiation of its natural resources and productive systems. Our study region, Panguil Bay, is located in northwestern Mindanao (see Figure 3) where the shift to export agriculture, fishing and aquaculture began in the 1980s. We selected this seafood exporting area because it has been repeatedly targeted by national development plans for intense exploitation of its natural resources and for deeper integration into the global food system. The bay is 29 kilometers wide with a coastline that extends 112 kilometers, and 29 major rivers pour into it. Because of these characteristics, Panguil Bay was in the past a breeding ground for many species of finfish, shellfish, crustaceans and mollusks. Considered the richest shallow water fishing ground in Mindanao, the hydrological characteristics and the confined waters of Panguil Bay make it ideal for capture fishing, aquaculture and seaweed farming (JEP-ATRE 2004).

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Philippines, showing the island of Mindanao. The star indicates the location of Panguil Bay

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Between 1982 and 1991, fishponds expanded 18 percent annually, tripling the area utilized by export aquaculture in just a few years (Naawan School of Fisheries 1991). Within a decade, small-scale, family-owned, polycultural aquaculture aimed at domestic markets was displaced by export-oriented fishponds (Primavera 1995). In the same time period, commercial capture fishing expanded finfish exports significantly (Philippine Annual Fisheries Profile, 1983–1992). In addition to fishing and aquaculture, Panguil Bay is ringed by farms, industries, and beach resorts that pollute the coastal waters (MSU Naawan Foundation 2006). A majority of the households along Panguil Bay have been marginalized by the export agendas, and fishers are increasingly at risk of government-stimulated depeasantization. The vast majority of these peasant fishers (referred to as artisanal fishers by many scholars) work in small wooden boats or use small nets to average daily incomes of less than $1, situating these families below the World Bank demarcation for absolute poverty. Once one of the richest fishing grounds in the Philippines, Panguil Bay has been pushed to the point of severe crisis over the last thirty years, as its ecological resources and its peasants were integrated into global commodity chains. Because this fishery was quickly degraded, it has undergone more than a decade of failed ecological rehabilitation initiatives (JEP-ATRE 2004; MSU Naawan Foundation 2006), only to be targeted for more intensified resource extraction since 2000 (Republic of Philippines 2000).

2.2 Statistical and Archival Sources

We triangulated global, national, regional and local community vantage points through analysis of electronic statistical databases and archival documents. For global and regional trends, we relied upon the electronic archives of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. To analyze micronutrient deficiencies, we drew upon the World Health Organization databases. Trade databases at the ASEAN Food Security Information System, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Trade Centre were useful in our analyses of Asian and Philippine export patterns, as well as dependence on imported foods. Unlike most Southern nations, the Philippines maintains public websites through which researchers can access a wealth of statistical data and archived policy and legal information. We analyzed agricultural, fishery, import and export trends from databases available at several government websites, especially the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, the Quickstat Census Database, and the Rural Sector Statistical Information System. The country’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute provides (a) national household survey data that can be used to assess the geography of hunger and nutritional deficiencies and (b) policy information that helped us to link public dietary standards and policies to corporate goals and to food exporting agendas.

In addition to these statistical databases, we explored nationally-funded electronic archives of Philippine local governments to secure information about industries, agricultural outputs, fishing and aquaculture activities, and socioeconomic conditions. Websites of the Philippine Department of Agriculture, the Philippine Information Agency, and the US Foreign Agricultural Service posted archives of press releases and program descriptions that helped us to gain insight into Philippine agricultural policies and subsidies. The news archive of the Department of Agriculture provided information about subsidized programs, export targets and recruitment of foreign investors. News archives of the International Rice Research Institute, the Philippine Rice Research Institute, and the Seaweed Industry of the Philippines gave us insight into public policies about these two crucial commodities and about public controversy over genetically-modified rice seeds. In addition, we consulted the websites of government-sponsored blogs to identify problems that local fishers challenge the national government to rectify, e.g., the intrusion of foreign commercial fishing vessels into the waters of Panguil Bay.

To supplement public sources, we gleaned the electronic archives of Philippine newspapers and periodicals for information about government development agendas in the fishery and aquaculture sectors, about the introduction of new agricultural and aquaculture technologies and species, about the opposition of fisherfolk associations to government policies, and about the state of rice availability in the country. In several instances, we substantiated information from fisher interviews through websites of local and regional newspapers. Finally, we searched the electronic archives of associations of fishers, peasants and small farmers to pinpoint the problems these groups experienced from Philippine land reform approaches and from the country’s commitment to export aquaculture and cash crops. On the ground in the Philippines, we explored every possible resource base where information about Philippine fishers has been retained in paper form since the 1970s. We acquired unpublished reports and internal memoranda from local government entities, regional offices of the Bureau of Fishing and Aquatic Resources, community health centers, and city fishing offices. We were provided access to published and unpublished reports by NGO s, local universities and Philippine scholars.

2.3 Methodological Flaws in Databases

Because of the methodological flaws in public data sources, we became increasingly aware that we offer conservative underestimations of the actual extent of hunger in the Asian fisheries. Most researchers rely uncritically upon data collected from FAO Food Balance Sheets, but “indirect proxies such as those based on the balance of a country’s known or estimated production, imports and exports, can be seriously misleading” (Godfray et al. 2010: 2776). Indeed, they are flawed in four ways. First, the Sheets are not consistent in reporting categories, especially for comparative purposes over a period of years. Only recently have the Food Balance Sheets begun to estimate nonfood utilization, but limiting those estimates to feeds and seed reservations at production sites. These Sheets do not take into account the conversions of fishery commodities into nonfoods after they leave production sites. To overcome this gap, we have sought out the latest national and scholarly research about nonfoods. Second, the Sheets, in recent years but not over time consistently, estimate wastage losses that occur at production sites, but not after fishery commodities are sold. For that reason, we have drawn upon the latest research about food wastage to offer better estimates in our tables. Third, the Balance Sheets often show lower fishery exports than actually occur. For that reason, we report and analyze export data drawn from UNCOMTRADE. Fourth, there is a three to four year time lag, so the current year statistics are typically based on data reported three years prior to the publication date. We took care to make sure that we compared data that was collected in the same year, but many scholars report these data as though they occurred in the year of publication. As a result of these FAO reporting problems, most researchers arrive at overly optimistic estimates about food security.¹⁶ We will remind readers of these data source weaknesses when we discuss our tables about nutritional shortfalls.

2.4 Ethnographic Field Research

While we investigate the fishery crisis and food insecurity at global, national, and regional levels of analysis, we also explore what happens to local peasant communities, rural households and women when their region is integrated into the global food system. To accomplish this significant component of our investigation, we conducted ethnographic field research in local Philippine communities. Our field research targeted local government officials, NGO and nonprofit cooperative staff, and peasant fishing households. The frequent hospitality and insights of NGO staff helped our complex research process to run smoothly and guided us toward the kinds of questions we should address to the fishing households we interviewed. In addition, some of these organizations helped us to initiate contact with fishing households, fishpond operators and seaweed growers. Because of the hospitality of local people, we were often invited to attend community activities where we benefitted from the honesty and the openness of grassroots participants. Initially, we interacted with fishermen and fisherwomen in informal focus groups. We often adapted our group inquiries to the exigencies of real-life circumstances. In one community, for instance, we initiated a group discussion after a female community meeting. Though women were the invited participants, male onlookers offered unsolicited, but very useful, extensions of the female responses. In another community, an impromptu group discussion occurred with women who thatch roof shingles from palm foliage. While they waited to be paid by the buyer, they offered insights about the causes of ecological degradation in Panguil Bay and about the difficulties of survival in fishing households. In addition to meetings of community organizations and women’s groups, pedicab drivers proved to be excellent sources of information about economic conditions and about governmental politics.¹⁷

We conducted in-depth interviews with fisher husbands and wives in their own dialect. Husbands and wives were first interviewed together, followed by separate in-depth interviews of wives. While most were interviewed in their homes, we observed many at work sites outside their households. These interviews were designed to secure details about household living conditions and livelihoods, social and ecological impacts of seafood exporting, survival strategies in the face of declining catches, and gender inequalities. We also asked interviewees to evaluate how their fish catches, their livelihood strategies, and gendered work roles had changed over time. We quickly learned that many respondents could not estimate their daily or weekly incomes because they were enmeshed in debt bondage systems with fish traders from whom they rarely received cash. Since we needed to devise a strategy to make meaningful estimations, we asked them how much rice or other food they obtained weekly and what other expenses they covered through their fish exchanges in local markets. Subsequently, we converted those estimates into local prices. Later, we realized that this accidental rich household data about consumption would permit us to compare Panguil Bay fishers with national and Asian regional statistics about food shortfalls and nutritional deficiencies.

Because there were many opportunities to observe the daily lives of these peasant households, we developed an extensive photographic journal of the Panguil Bay fishery. We captured as many aspects as possible of the economic activities in which fishing households engage. We made a special effort to photograph women’s fishing work because these activities are typically rendered invisible by researchers and policy-makers. The photographs proved to be an invaluable source of empirical information about ecological impacts of aquaculture, about survival strategies, and about the ways in which women are undertaking work that is traditionally credited to men. Our living arrangements with local families provided opportunities to experience first-hand the degree of difficulties involved in aspects of their daily lives. There are no viable health care facilities in their communities, and most of them die without ever seeing a doctor. Sickening high mold levels permeate their surroundings. Foul fishpond and garbage odors corrupt the breathing air. The water they collect from public spigots is impure, few of them have access to electricity, and many of their communities lack sanitary toilets. They bathe and do laundry in canals and streams where they are frequently exposed to chemical pollutants and deadly parasites. Every day, women ignore unhealed skin rashes to gather oysters and small fish from coastal waters polluted by fishpond discharges and industrial waste. We saw firsthand how pregnant mothers dangerously deprive themselves of food so their children do not go totally hungry. We did not have the physical stamina to endure the twelve hours with knees folded under, like the women who thatch palm fronds to earn extra household income. After a day of such hardships, thousands of rice fleas fill their limited sleeping hours.

One is struck with awe by the resilience of families who live a Spartan existence inside a tiny stilted cabin that stands precariously over tide waters or beside a mud-banked fishpond that periodically breaks and destroys everything around it. We witnessed one of the “dreaded floods” that have become routine over the last thirty years. In a typical pattern, heavy rains in the adjacent mountains overflowed Panguil Bay communities. However, the flood control device had been designed to protect fishponds, not fishing villages or rice fields. The rushing flood transformed irrigation canals into moving walls of water that engulfed roads, uprooted wooden bridges, contaminated springs and public water sources, damaged fisher homes and carried dangerous waste and snakes into their living spaces. We accompanied wives who rushed in small canoes to carry to dry ground the palm fronds they had gathered to produce the roof shingles that would earn them critical household income.

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Philippine fishing villages then and now. Despite government claims that Philippine fishing villages have been “modernized,” living conditions in most communities are much the same as they were at the turn of the 20th century. The top photograph was taken by the US Army as soldiers moved through the Panguil Bay area during World War II. In our bottom recent photograph, the only noticeable change is that the contemporary peasant household now “squats” illegally next to a fishpond whose operator leases what was once a public commons

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To conceal the identity of our interviewees, we have employed pseudonyms and removed specific descriptors that would make them easily recognizable in their own communities. Eliminating names is not enough to shield the identities of our interviewees because their communities are too small. It is necessary to obscure community names because a description of the particular characteristics of a fisher family, NGO staffer, or government employee would make it easy for local officials or neighbors to recognize them. As an added security measure, we have not utilized quotes or work histories from any of the individuals who are depicted in photographs.

2.5 Gleaning Philippine Scholarship

For three decades, Philippine social scientists and ecologists have been raising alarms about the ecological dangers of commercial capture fishing and aquaculture, about the ways in which these activities threaten peasant communities and livelihoods, and about the negative impacts of fishery exports on Philippine food security. Because their investigations have received little attention in the United States or Europe, we seek to draw attention to their ideas. On the one hand, such studies made it possible for us to compare our findings about Panguil Bay with other Philippine fishing communities. On the other hand, these earlier investigations permitted us to estimate the degree to which the survival threats to fishing households have worsened over time. We also drew heavily upon accumulated national and university research about time allocation within households, as the Philippines is one of a few Southern countries with expertise in this area since the 1970s (e.g., Ardales 1981; Quezon-King and Evenson 1983).

Since most western feminists are uninformed about the long tradition of Philippine feminist scholarship and activism, we tapped into this accumulated reservoir of knowledge, especially those analyses that have focused on the work roles of rural women (e.g., Pineda-Ofreneo 1985). Since the early 1980s, several of these feminists have challenged the western perception that the Philippines is more gender egalitarian than most Asian countries (e.g., Israel-Sobritchea 1992). Moreover, they have questioned the claims that agricultural and fishing wives exist in their own separate housebound sphere from which they rarely engage in income-earning activities (e.g., Illo 1995). Several earlier analyses of fishing households pointed to the frequency with which females engage in labors that are culturally credited to males and to the tendency for that female work to be economically devalued and rendered invisible (e.g., Castro 1986; Illo and Polo 1990). In addition, many of them depict the Philippine household as a conflictual, hierarchical unit in which “men unambiguously exercise direct power over women” (Eviota 1992: 113). Some of them focus on the ways in which the household budgeting roles of wives make them inequitably responsible for household survival needs and position them to be the targets for domestic violence from husbands (e.g., Mabunay 1995). Their earlier work provided clues about intra-household inequalities we should explore and presented us a backdrop against which to pinpoint questions we should direct to fisherwomen. While their insights and ethnographic details were useful, we offer a global context and a feminist conceptual approach that is our own.