1.1 Women’s Unpaid Household Labor

The first element of the labor portfolio of Panguil Bay fisher households consists of several forms of unpaid women’s work. Fisherwives who were alive in the 1980s have “vivid memories of their mothers bent over something: an infant or toddler, an open stove while cooking their meals, a load of washing, a basket of fishery products” (Illo and Polo 1990: 110).¹ From those mothers and grandmothers, today’s fisherwives learned their creativity at identifying an array of activities to acquire household provisions. Fisherwives told us that they allocate more of their total lifetime of work to household provisioning and to unpaid assistance to husbands’ fishing or fishpond work than they contribute toward bearing and rearing children and doing mundane housework. Moreover, they reported that they expand their provisioning through nonfishing livelihoods any time food inputs from fishing decline. One fisherwife captured the realities when she said “women are always tired because we have multiple tasks inside and outside our homes. But men only do one thing– fishing!”

While husbands and children share responsibility for daily collection of water and fuelwood, the most important provisioning activity of women is to supply protein through their resource gathering. Wives must identify substitute foods for the exported fish, shellfish and crustaceans that were once integral to their diets. Women accumulate household protein by gathering mollusks and crustaceans from reefs and tidal flats, by fishing with hook and line or spears, by collecting fallen nuts, and by raising poultry and livestock. “Reef gleaning, the special fishing area of women, has a number of advantages. Not only does it supply significant quantities of protein, it also supplies them much more regularly” than male fishing or wages (Chapman 1987: 276). It is not unusual for the total daily catch of females to exceed the fish catch of husbands. In 2005, gleaning wives averaged 12.2 kilograms daily, spearfishing women averaged 4.9 kilograms, and male fishers averaged daily catches of 3.2 kilograms (Philippine Annual Fisheries Profile 2006). Females fish with scoop nets, traps or baskets around reefs, and some spear fish in rivers. It is not unusual for wives and daughters to fish alone in boats, or to manage their households’ stationary nets. About one-third of fisher households raise livestock, often on shares (especially cows, hogs, or sheep). To overcome their lack of land access, some households raise pigs in cages that hang out windows to allow waste to dump into adjacent rivers or Bay waters.

In addition to protein provisioning, some women cultivate or gather fruits and vegetables. They gather wild fruits, nuts and herbs from mangroves and fallen fruit from nearby farms. Households without access to farm land engage in agriculture in several ways. A few households arrange crop share agreements to plant cassava and corn for consumption. Most households cannot afford to farm, however, because they do not have access to a work animal. If they have enough cash to invest in pots, vegetables are raised without access to land. Wives sometimes plant yams and vegetables along fishponds, often remitting a share of their harvests to owners.

The stereotype that fishing is a male activity has predominated in studies of Philippine fishing communities for more than four decades (cf. Herrin 1978, MSU Naawan Foundation 2006). In reality, fishing should be viewed as a household-based endeavor with significant direct inputs and hidden subsidization by women. In the past, many wives marketed the fish captured by their husbands (Lopez-Rodriguez 1990; Siar et al. 1995). However, fisherwives are involved in several other unpaid labor inputs into their husbands’ enterprises. Nationwide, women account for 56 percent of the unpaid family workers involved in market-oriented enterprises that are home-based, and rural females provide an even higher proportion of these labors.² In contrast to the male-only stereotype, women are far more involved in fishing in boats than a majority of studies acknowledge. In the 1980s and 1990s, 78 percent of wives fished with husbands in their boats while 22 percent fished alone in boats (Castro 1986; Illo and Polo 1990). The recollection of a regular dawn fishing trip by a late 1980s fisher couple draws attention to the willingness of wives to take personal risks for livelihood. While the wife was hauling up their net, sudden high winds and waves capsized the boat. She held onto floating paddles and worried about drowning, but she still instructed her husband to save their catch. While she flailed desperately in the water, he threw his body over their net filled with crabs because he thought this catch would satisfy their trader debts (Illo and Polo 1990: 90). Since the mid-1990s, more females have been visible in small boat crews near shore (Krinks 2002). Two-thirds of the fisherwives we interviewed reported that they have actively worked with their husbands at fishing in boats throughout their married lives. The other one-third indicate that they regularly fish with husbands for short-term periods. Moreover, women still complete half to three-quarters of all pre- and post-harvest fishing work (Interviews).

Fisherwomen analyze the gendered inequalities of work allocation, but they do not employ the household/waged labor dualism that typifies many western feminist approaches. In our interviews, they emphasized commitment to household survival, and they voiced pride in their “housewife” labors. They assessed value in terms of household needs, not market prices. But they did not devalue their contributions in the ways that some western feminists have observed in other contexts (e.g., Boydston 1986). This Panguil Bay fisherwife captured the nuanced assessment of women’s diverse labors that we repeatedly heard in our fieldwork.

I don’t think about whether my work is inside or outside my home. Everything I do is work needed by the household. The work that pays cash often supplies less food than my [unpaid] work gathering from Nature. So I don’t define work in terms of money it brings in. My housewife work, inside and outside the home, is just as important as my husband’s fishing on the river. Sometimes, I actually bring in more income or food than he does. Men’s fishing is difficult. But there is so much more time involved in the wife’s work. Besides our other tasks, wives help the men with their fishing.

However, women’s unpaid household labors are “not recognized as part of the production process” (Israel-Sobritchea 1992: 279). A “cloak of invisibility”(Antonopoulos and Hirway 2010: 230) is thrown over the economic value of these unpaid household labors by public accounting (Encarnacion 2007) and by public agencies (e.g., Philippine Annual Fisheries Profile 2007). In our interviews, fisherwomen described numerous unpaid inputs into their husband’s fishing, including: boat rowing while husbands hauled nets; net hauling while husbands rowed boats; installation and repair of stationary nets, especially bungsods; harvesting catches from stationary nets; mending nets, crab pots, bamboo traps and other fishing equipment; weaving fish baskets or crab pots; helping to carry boats to and from water; helping to lay bamboo traps or crab pots; preparation of baits and hooks for fishing trips; preparation of food and other provisions to be taken on fishing trips; marketing catches; negotiation with relatives or neighbors for use of boats or fishing equipment; and arrangement of credit for repairs of boats or fishing equipment.

Women’s unpaid labor inputs into fish farming are even more socially and economically concealed than female fishing efforts. When these women work alongside their husbands in a small family fishpond, their work is socially concealed and is economically devalued. In households that manage small fish farms, wives release fingerlings for each new production cycle, and they process and classify harvested species before delivery to traders. Wives often assist wage-earning husbands with pond feeding, repairs, harvests, and the collection of wild inputs to sell to their employers. In rural Philippine households, like those along Panguil Bay, there are three times more females among unpaid family laborers than males (United Nations 2003). Historically, such female work has not been considered economically valuable by husbands or by their communities (Boydston 1986), as has also been the case in the Philippines. Similarly, the significance of child laborers is overlooked and devalued. In reality, fisher households expand their survival pools by maximizing child labor. Many households increase the number of income earners by removing children, most often girls, from school to earn wages or informal sector income, to beg on the streets, or to assume the household or provisioning labor that an income-earning mother can no longer handle (Interviews).

As we see in the household case studies that follow, fisherwives routinely provide unpaid work to their husbands, and they must regularly find ways to overcome the shortfalls caused by male low wages or declining catches. If they require cash, they sell surpluses of the same resources that they produce for household consumption. In most fisher households, wages are more erratic and less economically valuable. Consequently, we should reverse the western conceptual thinking to consider wages to be a supplement to the unpaid provisioning efforts of women. For example, Bels and Doy are one of the youngest fisher couples we interviewed along Panguil Bay, and their living conditions are below average. With three children aged one to eleven, they struggle to survive on 19 cents per capita daily. Two children walk to elementary school, but the parents struggle to pay their school fees. Three adults and three children live in a small hut constructed from bamboo and woven palm. Their house has no electricity because they cannot afford this luxury. There is neither indoor nor outdoor toilet, so the family uses the beach area. They carry water from the public faucet twenty minutes away, and they collect firewood from the disappearing mangrove behind their house. They live adjacent to a fishpond whose owner does not permit peasants to garden, but they cannot afford to invest in pots to grow vegetables.

Bels is pregnant for the fourth time in eleven years, averaging a baby every 2.8 years. Even though she receives free regular prenatal checkups from the midwife at the community health center, Bels has had to work at hard physical labor most of her pregnancy. Until she reached her seventh month of pregnancy, Bels supplemented family income by working as a washwoman for a middle-class urban family for $7.27 monthly.³ She plans another midwife delivery at home, even though she is visibly malnourished and chronically tired. When they were first married, Doy was employed by a fishpond operator. Even though he earned only 54 cents daily, they saved a little. At an average of $1.63 daily for the same job at another fish farm, they are not making ends meet. In fact, the household has lost ground in spending power over the last decade due to currency devaluation and price inflation. Doy supplements his wages by gathering small shellfish from the wild to feed the shrimp, for which the pond owner pays him $1.82 on a good harvest day. However, this ecological resource is nearly extinct around his village, so he must travel to the opposite side of the Bay and work all day. For family consumption, Doy fishes with hook and line during high tide. Bels labors long hours gathering and processing oysters. To supplement the household diet and income, Bels is raising three chickens and one hog, and they are producing two other pigs on shares with the owner. While most of the household’s food is supplied from fish and oysters, they can purchase a few essential items on weekly credit at a grandmother’s sari-sari store.

In contrast to Bels and Doy, Manang and her husband are in their late fifties. They combine fishing and oyster gathering as the core of household survival, but oysters have been more significant over the last decade. Every day, Manang uses the lunar calendar to determine the forecasted time for the low tides. Once the tidal flats are exposed, she wades– feet, heart and mind– into the slimy dark mud of the mangrove floor to gather oysters. She toils two to three back-breaking hours in the mud. Alternately bending, sitting on a leg, and struggling to another location, she meticulously detaches oysters from tree trunks and rocks. She gathers a pailful daily, then works another two hours to remove the meat from the shells. There are three adults and three teenagers in the household, and their three married children live nearby. Since Manang and Bert were married, their primary sources of livelihood have always been fishing and oyster gathering. In 1976, they were evicted from their assigned bungsod area when the fishery authorities created a fish sanctuary. “Everybody was assigned their respective areas by local government officials for a concessions fee,” she explains. “Whoever gets the area first is the only one who can fish that specific area.” In every alternate site they tried, people stole their fish or destroyed their net. Consequently, they abandoned their stationary net harvesting to rely on boat fishing.

Occasionally in the past, Bert was hired by fishpond operators to repair dikes at a small daily wage. Until he had an accident in 2001, he gathered small wild fish to sell to the fishpond operators. Most days, husband and wife fish together between 4:00 and 7:00 A.M., throwing their small net twice from their wood boat. (Note that the wife engages in seven hours of seafood harvesting compared to three by the husband.) She recalls that their typical catch in the 1970s was about 15 to 20 kilos of assorted crabs, fish, and shrimp. Since the early 1980s, their catch has fallen sharply, and they no longer capture crustaceans or high-value finfish. These days, they typically catch only a small bowlful. Thus the household diet consists primarily of oysters and corn, supplemented occasionally by small fish. Manang purchases corn because it costs only 63 percent as much as rice. When we interviewed this couple, both corn and rice were more expensive in the Philippines than in the United States. She cultivates sugar cane and yams in her garden without any artificial inputs, but she does not grow vegetables that require expensive fertilizer or pesticide.

1.2 Export Production Other Than Fishing

The second element of the labor portfolio of Panguil Bay fisher households consists of forms of export production other than fishing. There are few export activities in which Panguil Bay fisher households can afford to be involved. As we saw in Chapter 3, some regional peasant households manage fish farms for absentee leaseholders or engage in aquaculture on shares with investors. However, far more Panguil Bay women are engaged in shell production for export. Nationwide in 1977, ornamental shells and shellcraft articles accounted for nearly 21 percent of the total value of all fishery export. Since the mid-1990s, regional women have collected shells throughout the year to sell them annually to a regional trader. In 2004, this female export had dropped in economic significance, but it was still the tenth most important fishery export commodity. Since the mid-1990s, fisherwomen’s shells accounted for 3 percent of the total volume of fishery exports, and their 2004 outputs were valued at $1,130,127 (Philippine Annual Fisheries Profile 1977, 1995, 2004).

In two Panguil Bay municipalities, the primary export production of middle-sector fishing households is seaweed farming. While fishing agencies and NGO s herald seaweed farming as an alternative livelihood to capture fishing, it is a risky occupation for the majority of peasant households because there are many problems that threaten outputs. Small farmers must have an alternative way to earn income while waiting for harvests or when seaweed production is low. Since the growing period is two to three months, “seaweed needs a backup,” insists one producer. For that reason, these peasant households rely on fishing to insure daily food. “Where there is seaweed, there are lots of fish. We just go to seaweed and catch fish there,” comments a seaweed wife. A mid-sized seaweed grower indicates that “people still fish for daily household use.” The most popular method is hook and line fishing while they attend the seaweed. In addition, they gather the small crustaceans that attach themselves to the bamboo poles, providing another protein resource. Many middle-sector peasants combine seaweed farming with stationary net fishing, so they have daily catches for both selling and consumption. Using a hook and line, one small seaweed/fisher often catches fish to purchase household rice. In order to afford rice or corn, he sells the fish in the public market, marketing more than he holds back for family consumption. One small grower defines fishing as the only method to insure daily purchases of grains and essentials like salt. “Every day we can only eat if we work hard at fishing. Every day rice must be bought. But seaweed cannot be gathered daily.”

When production is normal for small growers, one sack of green seaweed can provide the family’s rice and salt for a week. Protein is not part of the household cash budget since they catch fish in the seaweed gardens. While most of these families often do not have enough income to supply their basic survival needs, they must “allot an additional line’s growth” to support a child’s schooling. Seaweed farming provides an unstable and erratic income, so households must have a diverse livelihood portfolio. Consequently, they pool resources from as many forms of labor as possible, including: fishing, waged labor, livestock raising, limited informal sector activities, cash contributions from children, and supplements from networks of family and friends.

After her husband died, fifty-five-year-old Nang Cora migrated from another island to Panguil Bay because she was enticed by popular claims that seaweed farming offers a better livelihood than fishing. She brought with her two children in their twenties. These adult offspring attended only a few years of elementary school because they worked from a young age to help sustain the family. Three adults and one child live in a rented one-room shack that has access to untreated public water spigots, no electricity, and “no toilet but the seas.” To build savings to enter seaweed farming, she prepared and sold barbecued bananas in the public market. After about a year, she purchased two lines in the shallows for $36.36. The second year she was able to increase the number of lines to ten and to hire a laborer to pound the bamboo base into the sea floor. In addition, she invested $63.63 in a non-motorized boat.

In the first eighteen months, she averaged $90.90 monthly, or an average of about $3.30 daily, so she thought her investments had been well-made. In the early months, both her adult children helped with daily seaweed maintenance, then she and the daughter took over the responsibilities. On those days, Nang Cora began her days at 4:00 A.M. with the preparation of small strings to tie the seaweed plants to the lines. Typically, they worked six or seven hours daily in the seaweed, starting early enough to be done by mid-afternoon when the heat became unbearable. As it was their only livelihood, they harvested every month, unlike the bigger gardens where they wait two to three months to insure peak production. When her lines in the shallows stopped producing due to pollution and disease, the family fell upon hard times. At this point, Nang Cora did not have a cash-earning backup. She was afraid to risk limited household capital to return to street food selling because the prices of bananas, sugar and margarine had risen too high. “How can you make profit,” she inquires, “when commodities cost so much? Who is crazy enough to buy such an expensive barbequed banana?” By her third year of seaweed farming, she had lost all her accumulated savings due to “failed production,” and her “debt was piling up.” At first, she borrowed seedlings from other seaweed farmers, but she no longer tends the unproductive shallows garden. “When seaweed is fine, we are also fine. But if seaweed is not okay, we are not okay,” she explains, demonstrating that she knows that her household does not have a sufficiently diversified labor portfolio to provide their needs.

Excluding debt repayment, this household needs cash to pay rent and to buy rice, salt, and charcoal for cooking, but they are only bringing in 20 cents per capita daily. The daughter located a waged job as a domestic servant at less than $1 daily, but her adult son does not help with household income. He erratically tends fighting cocks for an affluent man, but he only earns a small percentage of the owner’s erratic gambling wins. Since the cock typically loses, he contributes nothing to the household and is dependent on his mother for his daily sustenance. The seven-year-old granddaughter has never attended school because the household cannot afford the school fees. Moreover, her small earnings are needed. By picking up seaweed that has washed onto the shores and by guarding pedicabs for one peso while the drivers rest, the girl contributes more income to the household than her uncle. The grandmother stretches three kilos of rice or corn over three days, the family rarely having sufficient protein. While she hopes that somehow her seaweed production will improve, she recognizes that their situation is precarious. “I must run fast and work hard to catch the rice and something to eat with it,” she told us.

1.3 Paid Labors in Putting Out Systems Other Than Fishing

The third element of the labor portfolio of Panguil Bay fisher households consists of forms of paid labors in putting out systems other than fishing. Investors are quite creative in their development of putting out methods to capture peasant labor at minimal cost. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was some export handicraft contract work among Panguil Bay households, but fisherwomen report that these piecework opportunities have disappeared due to national economic conditions.⁴ A new seaweed putting out system has emerged. In one community, local investors provide technology that permits young male divers to produce seaweed on shares. One wife reported that her teenaged son “dives to collect seaweed from the ocean floor, with the backing of a financier who takes most of the revenue from sales.” According to one seaweed grower, “this is a very lucrative way to collect seaweed. Harvesters scavenge plants that have dropped to the sea floor. It only takes about one hour under water to gather 300 kilos or more.”

However, the putting out system that absorbs more fisher households than any other activity is palm frond thatching. The primary consumers of woven palm are rural households who need cheap materials to construct the roofs and walls of their huts. In Bay communities that still have sufficient mangroves, at least one-third of the households earn income from this craft. When mangroves are controlled by fishponds, households eke out a living by paying bribes or rent-shares to harvest palm tree branches. Dominated by women, thatching palm fronds is a labor intensive process to which a few males provide support roles. This back-breaking job consists of tedious tasks repeated all day in a sitting position, six days a week. Females work eight to ten hours daily thatching the fronds, but additional unpaid work must be done at home to prepare for each day’s piecework. Girls begin to learn at age five and can thatch proficiently by age ten or eleven.

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Because most peasant fishing households rely on canals for bathing and washing clothes, there is a higher incidence of schistosomiasis in the Panguil Bay provinces than in the rest of the country. Many peasant households keep boats in or near canals because they are their only access to coastal waters

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On average, an experienced palm thatcher produces enough to earn $2.50 to $4.75 weekly for her piece production. However, women rarely collect in any week the true value of their labor, for they frequently draw household advances from buyers against future production. Since this livelihood provides the family’s staple grain, it is at the heart of household survival. However, palm thatching is a livelihood that is vulnerable to ecological changes, to restrictive fishpond practices and to public fishery policies. These thatchers have two concerns about the future. First, floods threaten this livelihood. Thatchers “cannot work because nobody can harvest palm in the mangroves. The floods often destroy trees and wash away stored thatching supplies.” Second, thatchers are worried that palm harvesting might be prohibited in the future, as part of conservation efforts.

Struggling to raise eight children on 22 cents per capita daily, Vera and Jose manage a household that is dependent upon her capacity to be a productive palm thatcher every day. After an economic downturn caused them to lose their sharecropping parcel, they migrated from an upland agricultural section of the country. They are among the poorest households along Panguil Bay. Inexperienced in fishing, Jose cannot afford to acquire a boat or equipment. As a newcomer, he lacks ties to men with whom he might fish on shares. In the hope of eluding fishery officers, Jose leaves the house before sunrise to try to electrocute fish with his pangoryente (a car battery attached to two long rods) in irrigation ditches and rice fields. Jose’s livelihood is illegal, but this is the only technology they can afford. “If Jose gets caught,” Vera explains, “our pots will be upside down,” i.e., they depend on his fishing to supply the daily protein in their cooking pots. It is a dangerous method, she says, because the fisher might get electrocuted while he is standing in the water. He is also at high risk of contracting schistosomiasis because he spends so much time in infested water. He often does not catch enough fish to provide food for his household, so he almost never markets any.

Six people live in Jose’s household in a one-room woven palm hut, with no electricity, and an outdoor pit toilet. They bathe, swim, and wash clothes and dishes in an earthen irrigation canal where they are exposed to chemical pollutants and the risk of schistosomiasis. Vera is eight months pregnant, and she has had nine pregnancies in eighteen years. Though she tried birth control pills several times, she always had to stop taking them when they triggered breathing difficulties. Vera attended school only to the fourth grade, and her children are not likely to have much better chance at acquiring an education than she experienced. Elementary school is too expensive for them because “the teacher is always asking for a contribution.” Her seven-year-old daughter has already dropped out of the first grade because a flood washed away the bridge, causing her to be absent and fall behind. Vera is thankful that she did not return to school because she will need her help at home when the new baby comes.

Like her husband, Vera begins her work day at 4:00 A.M. Using wood gathered from the mangrove, she boils corn grits every morning she has them. While the children are still asleep, she prepares vine to tie the day’s woven palm, an unpaid task she must undertake as often as possible if she hopes to keep her production as high as her household needs. By 7:00 A.M., Vera has fed her children and is off to the buyer’s site to thatch palm fronds until dusk. The shifting of traditional gendered labor roles makes it possible for her to earn thatching income every day. After the husband returns from fishing, he tends the children, does some household chores and prepares meals. If he has fish to market, he arranges that himself. Turgo (2015) refers to such shifting roles as “fishermen-turned-house-husbands” and “disrupted masculinity” that can lead to rising tensions among spouses. However, James Eder (2006: 408) reports a shift in gender roles that more carefully captures what we saw in Vera’s household.

The presence of sexually jealous and domineering men in the rural Philippines is today thrown into relief by the simultaneous presence of far greater numbers of men who… share child care and domestic chores, for as the economic role of women has changed, so too has the domestic role of men. Nonetheless, men vary significantly in their willingness to take on domestic chores on a regular (and hence predictable) basis, and for most women their own responsibilities in this area remain an important constraint on their ability to propose and pursue income-earning activities outside the home.

The young daughter accompanies the mother to learn to thatch, so the ten-year old son feeds the mother’s pigs and sometimes prepares the evening meal. Thatching is taking a physical toll on the pregnant mother. After a full day’s work, her arms and hands “feel numb and will shake.” During the work day, she rarely rises from her squatting position, so by day’s end her “back is terribly painful.” Before sleep every night, Vera must use her numb hands to prepare vine to be ready for the next day’s work. Day-to-day provision of the family food supply is Vera’s foremost worry. If there is fish, it is a “very lucky day.” Yesterday, Jose was fortunate enough to electrocute three kilos, most of which he sold for less than $2, holding back two small fish for the family. That was sufficient for only one meal, so yesterday’s lunch was a cooked tough banana. For today’s breakfast, she had to thin the food to have enough for all the children. “I put more water into the cooked corngrits,” smiles Vera nervously. Interviewees often smiled or laughed when reporting negative or stressful information. Smiling or laughing in such a context is not intended to trivialize events but, rather, is a common Filipino coping mechanism. The typical breakfast is boiled salted corn grits, and she will leave the remains for the three youngsters to eat during the day. “Today, all I left for the children is cooked corngrits. If my husband has a catch, they can have fish for lunch.” Since such daily protein is rare, the two-year old boy is so malnourished that he participates in a public community feeding program.

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Many fisher wives spend two or three hours daily bent over rocks during low tide to gather oysters (top). Then they must spend an equivalent amount of time using a heavy iron blade to force open the shells to remove the meat (bottom). Oysters are a women’s market commodity, so peasant households consume few of the captured iron-rich molluscs

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This household would have even fewer food resources without Vera’s palm thatching. Each day, she asks for an advance of corngrits against her weekly production. She budgets one kilo of corn grits each meal for two adults and four children, but that is rarely enough. They cannot plant vegetables because of frequent flooding and destructive stray animals. Because both humans and loose cows devour wild bananas, Vera’s son is able to collect little of this wild food resource. To complicate matters, the family does not gather the nutritious wild green vegetables that abound in the rice fields because she fears they will contract schistosomiasis from them. After a flood drowned their sixteen chicks, Vera decided not to butcher their remaining hen or consume its eggs. “We must take extra care with this one remaining chicken. Much as we want to eat the eggs, especially the children, we cannot. We have to raise new chicks.” An attempt to raise pigs on shares failed miserably. After purchasing feeds for nine piglets over four months, they died, and Vera “lost big.” If the animals had survived, they would have 4.5 piglets to supplement household survival needs. Instead, they just “returned the sow back to the owner,” having lost their monetary investment.

1.4 Informal Sector Marketing

The fourth element of the labor portfolio of Panguil Bay fisher households is informal sector marketing. Throughout Asia, the informal sector is expanding, and the vast majority of households draw income from these activities (United Nations 2003). As a direct result of neoliberal policies, the informal sector has exploded in poor countries, creating “a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade.” Since 2000, the informal sector has created half to two-thirds of the new jobs in Asia, and women are over-represented in these activities (ILO 2007). In the Philippines, there are more men than women in the informal sector, but females are more likely to earn informal income than formal-sector wages (United Nations 2003). Moreover, women’s informal sector activities become the mainstay of households when male fishing or wage earning declines suddenly. While these coping strategies provide little income to most households, informal sector activities multiply women’s labors, generating a “female double burden” of market labors and household maintenance (Illo 1997: 36). For men to be able to cling to fishing, household survival requires several breadwinners who have multiple sources of income and resources. In fact, as much as 60 percent of income derives from nonfishing activities that are undertaken by women and children (Interviews).

When there are young children in her household, a fisherwife is deterred from seeking formal wages or all-day piecework, but she can “multi-task” informal sector production and marketing alongside household duties. Among the poorest families, female income from informal sector production and marketing is very significant to the household budgets. Women sell cooked foods, medicinal herbs, fresh produce, livestock, chickens, coconut shell crafts, hats, baskets, crafted lanterns, pottery, mats, and several other items in public markets (or by peddling) near their homes. After harvests in adjacent areas, some wives and children collect and sell crop rejects, such as mangoes. Some engage in crude coconut oil processing for the Ozamiz City soap factory. Females also operate “sari-sari” stores, very small neighborhood retail shops that offer a small array of goods at inflated prices. For example, they sell cigarettes one at a time or as little as a tablespoon of cooking oil. Customers purchase small refurbished or crafted household items, bread, coffee, snacks, soft drinks, sometimes used western clothing. Out of their homes, some females provide seamstress, embroidery or tailoring services, sell cosmetics or operate beauty shops. A declining number of women are fish traders in public markets.

Women salt, dry, or smoke about half of the municipal catch of smaller fish for local selling (Philippine Annual Fisheries Profile 2008). Some wives process dried fish to be sold to brokers who market it all over the country. Almost all females (and a few older men) engage in oyster gathering, one of the most important income-generating activities. Since the 1990s, some Philippine women have been engaged in oyster and mussel farming (Siar et al. 1995), but we did not find female oyster farmers in the Panguil Bay area. Fishpond operators and male fishers are attuned to high tides that will permit flushing of shrimp farms or bring in the fish that can be captured. In contrast, oyster gatherers organize their work around low tides when mangrove floors are exposed, and the mudflats will sparkle with these mollusks. On average, a gatherer will produce about three cups of oyster meat daily, part of which will be marketed fresh for 18 cents per cup. To acquire twice the cash return of the raw mollusks, many women process oysters to sell to a trader at 32 cents per bottle. In addition, women save the oyster shells and pack them in sacks to await the December arrival of a buyer. Each labor intensive sack is sold for 36 to 72 cents to be pulverized into fertilizer.

“Whatever I can think of to make money, I do,” one fisherman told us. Males sell fuelwood and charcoal, collect wild fry to sell to fishponds, sell crops or livestock from share farming, produce and sell coconut wine, or sell short-term blacksmithing, carpentry, or construction services. Males can drive pedicabs if their households can afford to invest in the equipment. Children are an important source of resources and income for fisher households. Young children beg, do odd jobs on the streets like shining shoes, gather trashed plastic bottles to sell to seaweed growers to use for floaters, or earn daily income doing tasks at the seaweed cooperative. Children also gather seaweed that washes up on the shores, dry and sell them.

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Female production of roof thatching. This pregnant wife (top) thatches nipa eight hours daily, sitting in the same cramped position continually except for brief breaks. This seven-year old girl (bottom) is already proficient at thatching, so she no longer attends school. Her household relies on daily advances of corn, sometimes small amounts of cash, against future nipa production

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A few fisher households resort to criminal activities to provide household food and income. In addition to illegal fishing with dynamite and electrocution, some males engage in seaweed theft (JEP-ATRE 2004). Small growers are convinced that seaweed is stolen because it brings easy cash at the public market, especially when there is a shortage of supply for local consumption. Thieves “will steal the seaweed, dry them and sell them,” in order to buy their household food for the day. Larger planters contend that new poor farmers steal seaweed for seedlings. According to a local government official, “Newcomers need capital and don’t have enough to buy ropes or seedlings. We stopped our seaweed farming for seven years because of thefts. The seaweed stealing sometimes resulted in violent encounters, so we stopped growing it.”

Just as export of fish and seaweed integrates Panguil Bay’s small peasant producers into globalized food chains, world-wide commodity chains of smuggled drugs absorb some of them into another exploitative capitalist venture over which they have no control. At the same time in the 1980s that external Asian investors were attracted to shrimp aquaculture in the Philippines, “Hong-Kong based syndicates with strong connections with Filipino-Chinese counterparts” established the international drug trade in the country. Northern Mindanao exports each year significant amounts of marijuana, crystalline methamphetamine and heroin (Philippine Center on Transnational Crime 2000). Philippine media and government agencies regularly document Ozamiz City’s “rising illegal drug trade” and its high incidence of drug abuse and dependency. One media account describes Ozamiz City as “a factory of shabu.” One study of the roles of children and teenagers in Philippine drug trafficking points to two salient trends, First, arrested teenagers consistently report that some municipal and community officials are involved in the trade. Second, most of the children have left school due to family financial constraints (Manila Times, 27 March 2004).

1.5 Wage Earning

The fifth, and least significant, element of the labor portfolio of Panguil Bay fisher households is wage earning. We are exploring wage earning as the last element of a fisher labor portfolio for two reasons. As indicated earlier, export activities have generated few wage jobs in or near fishing communities, and those waged positions are under-paid and often short-term. Second, these households accumulate very little of their total survival needs from wages, and they move into and out of waged positions frequently. Only about one-third of male fishers earn wages from nonfishing livelihoods, and most of these earnings are from part-time jobs. Males occasionally work for wages planting or harvesting for larger seaweed planters. Some find erratic or seasonal employment in the city’s small businesses, operating pedicabs or working as wharf porters or warehouse laborers. Some earn wages for washing clothes in middle-class households. In the past, a few women earned wages from fish canneries, but these rural facilities now rely on piece-rate workers, who hope to be selected from the hundreds who gather every day at the factory gates (Strait Times, 10 September 2007).

More than one-quarter of Panguil Bay children earn wages while many more assist parents with farming, fishing or informal sector activities. Because of the high incidence of poverty, children in Bay fisher households are more likely to work as child laborers than is true for the rest of the country.⁵ Some teenage sons find rare waged employment as store helpers or as warehouse laborers. If very lucky, they might earn $5.40 a month for tending newly planted mangoes. Rarely, a younger child is hired as a part-time farm laborer at 18 to 54 cents daily. Daughters can work as salesgirls or as domestic servants in urban areas.

Households that become dependent on wages are highly vulnerable because the earnings are never enough to cover more than a small proportion of survival needs. The following case study demonstrates that women’s income earning and resource gathering are crucial to households in which males provide only low and erratic wages. Since 1963, the extended families of Nina (aged 51) and Rene (aged 60) have been dependent on fishpond laborer wages. “We started working in the fishpond when we were little,” Nina explained. “My father and my husband’s father both worked in the fishpond. Also their respective families.” For most of their married life, this couple has also relied on fishpond wages. However, Rene’s wages and supplementary resources have declined sharply over the last three decades. In 1963, he was paid daily, and he received benefits that are no longer available to the household. He recalled that “goods and food were then very cheap. Worker households all lived inside the fishpond, built our houses on [corporate] land and used the edges of the ponds to grow yams and a few vegetables. We were allowed to use hook and line in the fishpond to catch unwanted fish that were among the shrimp. After workers had sorted the shrimp harvest, we were given the rejects that were too small to be sold.” Before the fishpond was flushed after harvest, the fishpond management hoisted a white flag to alert the community that they could come and glean the fish left in the water. Throngs of people flocked to the fishponds bringing sacks, baskets and buckets. The corporation ended this practice in the early 1980s when the fishpond management “realized these fish were profitable for export, so they no longer would give them free to the community.”

Rene worked as a crane operator in the fishpond, earning $65.45 monthly, about $2.18 daily. A ten-year old son helped in the fishpond at less than one cent per hour. His employer required him to “work six days a week. Sometimes, he would work twelve hours or longer with no overtime pay.” During harvests, Rene overworked and did not take time off for bronchitis, fearing he might be terminated due to disability. Consequently, he developed pneumonia, the number one cause of death in the Philippines. As his health worsened, his wages and supplementary benefits declined, forcing Nina to intensify her self-exploitation. Her husband’s fishpond income was “never enough,” she explained, “and we were often short.” Thus income from her palm thatching was quite often “bigger than her husband’s wages,” so it became more crucial to household survival than his wages. In those days, she said, “I could hold real money!” Because she cut palm fronds inside the mangroves of the fishpond, Nina had to “pay the management 50 percent of whatever revenues” she derived from her sales, but she still netted more than his wages. Her husband grew increasingly concerned that she had to do the back-breaking palm cutting in the hot sun. Even with his low and erratic fishpond wages, “we were not in bad shape because I worked so hard,” Nina is convinced.

Rene left his long-term job for what he thought would be a better-paying position at another fishpond. They moved away from the place where they grew up and spent most of their married lives. They “did not have much money to start a new life” because they had to settle their debts with the previous fishpond operator. Nina doubts this new job is a positive change because the employer is stricter about absences and makes more wage deductions. They live in a dilapidated one-room woven palm hut that is much worse than their previous dwelling. It has no toilet, no electricity, no access to safe water, and is “always reached by the flood waters” that carry debris and dangerous cobras. When they lived inside the previous fishpond, she could plant yams along the dikes, but the household does not have such gardening privileges with the new employer.

The worst disadvantage, however, is that the fishpond operator requires his employees to purchase their survival needs through an exploitative “company store” arrangement with a merchant outside the fishpond. Since their household purchases are deducted from his wages, they are trapped in debt bondage. To complicate matters, the couple doubts that he is being paid his full wages. Nina is concerned that she has “not seen any real money from his fishpond wages. Often, the wages are not even enough to pay for our advances in the store.” As long as he is not sick, all is well. We can eat, we can live simple lives. But when he gets sick, it is a big problem. And I have to find a way to make up the missing money.” They are nearing retirement age, so Nina worries that their future will be as problematic as her parents’ older years. Even though the fishpond owner failed to file her father’s Social Security payments, the government never took any action. “We were so surprised that the government office had no record of my father’s social security remittances because the company always deducted the premiums from his wages.” Because there is uncertainty about her husband’s wages, she suspects the new employer is not filing his social security payments.

I think what we suffered in the fishpond is shared by all the workers. We bear all the hardship so that we will be eligible for the old-age pension. Our only consolation is the thought of a government pension when we get older. It is small but is sure money every month. When we get older, we cannot depend on our children. Maybe they can help us with food but not money. So we deem it important to work for the pension. That is the major reason we stuck it out with fishpond waged work.

Nina is ambivalent about whether her own situation has improved. On the one hand, she can no longer garden like she did at the previous fishpond, so they are forced to charge foods against his wages. On the other hand, the working conditions of her palm thatching are somewhat improved. While her total work hours are the same, the working conditions are better. Nina planted new trees and gathers palm from the parcel assigned to her under the Mangrove Stewardship Program. To accumulate more income, however, she illegally rents 1.3 hectares to a logger.⁶ “Before I had to be under the sun to gather and trim palm fronds. Now I don’t have to expose myself to so much heat. I love to cut palm, so I don’t mind doing it. But not under the scorching heat of the sun.”

2.1 Self-exploitation by Household Members

During crises or shortfalls in basic needs, households have few options for broadening their resource pools. Consequently, they deepen self-exploitation by working longer hours, sleeping less and expanding the number of family laborers. Two strategies predominate among Panguil Bay fisher households: working longer hours and taking children out of school. As one Philippine fisherman observed, “it is solely your body that earns a living. If you rest, you will have nothing to eat.” The exigencies of survival necessitate a pattern of self-exploitation in which households take on multiple forms of resource accumulation, and adults almost always have a diversified labor burden that combines household activities with cash-earning. “You can eat only if you work hard!” is a theme voiced over and over. One Philippine fisher indicated that he “looks for food and work wherever he can find it,” and he “constantly worries” about how he will “keep his family from going hungry.” To provide household basic needs, however, it is the wives who most frequently juggle a multi-activity work portfolio in order to have a security net.

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Women’s paid and unpaid household labors. In this photograph are displayed several forms of unpaid and paid women’s work. To provide household protein and informal sector goods, she raises chickens and gathers oysters. She bottles oysters and collects their shells (piled mid-ground behind net) for selling to regional traders. Behind her is one of her husband’s fishing nets that she is currently mending. Early this morning, she washed the family’s clothing (top right) in buckets outside the house

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Most fisherwives live most of their married lives with men who cannot support their households through their fishing or their wages in fish farming. In reality, the daily unpaid and paid labors of these women far exceeds the total workload of their husbands. It is important to emphasize that these women assume the added workloads because the household budgets they manage are insufficient. In short, wives self-exploit to a greater degree than husbands in many of these households. While women take on the burden of double or triple work days, males do not typically match the level of female contributions through the same degree of self-exploitation (Illo and Polo 1990). During crises, households most often expand their resource pool through an intensified work load for women and children. In order to accommodate these new extra-household labors, women lengthen their work days in order to articulate their income-earning labors with conflicting household chores, provisioning, and gathering activities. During men’s fishing off-season and when male catches decline, women seek out new alternatives to earn income or to secure resources. On average, women generate half or more of total fisher household income. However, many of the interviewed women account for a majority of the cash income during much of the year, especially in those households in which husbands are trapped in debt bondage relationships with traders or financiers. In the early 21st century, fisherwomen women bring in a greater share of household cash income than they did in the 1980s and 1990s.⁷

Fisherwives also self-exploit by taking sole responsibility for work to generate school expenses. For example, one interviewed fisher household needs $1.40 daily to cover basic survival needs and the costs of sending three children to high school. The wife celebrates when her daily harvest of oysters is enough for household consumption and a surplus that will cover the cost of her children’s transportation to school. “Most of our cash needs and school expenses are derived from the oyster gathering and selling,” she asserts. In addition to her oyster income, she often raises pigs on half shares with the owners, as a means of accumulating the funds to meet educational costs. “There are a lot of expenses for school,” the mother frets, “so I save on household expenses however I can.” She walks to church rather than pay for public transportation, and the earthen kitchen floor has not been covered with bamboo or wood. The children carry their lunches to school, herbal medicines are used for health problems, and she forgoes electricity in the house. She also budgets house repairs and maintenance gradually in order to keep the needed cash flow to cover school expenses. So far they have been able to keep their children in high school while a majority of their neighbors do not. Many fisher parents were taken out of school themselves during household crises, and they, in turn, remove their offspring from school when income drops too low.

2.2 Inequitable Work Time Allocation

Households manage their diverse labor portfolios through inequitable allocation of work to members. What was new under historical capitalism was “a steady devaluation” of the work of householders and “a corresponding valorization of waged labor” (Wallerstein 1983: 24–25). However, waged laborers contribute less total work toward household survival than their nonwaged peers. Throughout Asia, women work more total hours than men, and wives allocate far more time to household chores than husbands (United Nations 2003; UNICEF 2007: 37–38). In addition, daughters do more of the unpaid household labor than sons. Even when wives in poor countries provide significant income to their households, their contributions do not afford them enough leverage to convince males to assist with domestic work. Women’s capacity to maneuver their conflicting workload is very limited. They can mobilize claims to other female labor, but women are rarely able to significantly diminish their own workloads by having husbands expand their share of domestic work (Beneria and Roldan 1987: 146).

Several studies indicated that inequalities were probably wider in rural areas where husbands provided only about one-third as much time to unpaid household labor as their wives. Rural men also contributed less time than women to household market activities and to informal sector marketing. According to the 1999 Philippine Human Development Report, there is “a tendency toward ‘overworked’ rural females and ‘underworked’ males,” especially since men average two hours daily leisure that are not available to women. Rural women respond to household economic shortfalls by increasing their work hours to a greater degree than men (Lim 2000). In 2005, the Philippine National Statistical Coordination Board estimated that women provide nearly 60 percent of all unpaid household labor. If the GDP incorporated the real economic value of unpaid labors, women’s work would add nearly 40 percent while men would add less than 27 percent (Encarnacion 2007).

In the 1980s and 1990s, studies emphasized that, unlike their husbands, women rarely engaged in personal leisure activities, preferring instead to allocate those hours toward income-generating labors. To maximize time utilization, these wives “multi-tasked” by merging their household tasks, such as child care, with cash-earning work near their homes (Ardales 1981). In fisher households, women provided three times more hours to unpaid household labors than men, and husbands completed only one-fifth of the labor hours toward reproductive tasks, caregiving and household maintenance (Pineda-Ofreneo 1985). Indeed, scholars reported that wives cross boundaries between reproductive and productive tasks to a far greater degree than their husbands (Lachicha 1993). Moreover, women were expected to assume part of the male workload, but husbands did not widen their completion of household tasks (Israel-Sobritchea 1993). While about a third of men helped regularly with household tasks, a majority of women took on part of the fishing-related tasks (Pineda-Ofreneo 1985). One wife described these inequalities as never ending. “Women work day and night. When men finish their work outside, they can rest sometimes. But women come home from their work outside of the home and do most of the house chores and care for their children.” She also argued that males are healthier because their wives work harder (Kwiatkowski 1998: 87, 282). According to Mabunay (1995: 353), men “prefer to spend time finding recreation outside. Thus the situation has not changed the amount of time spent by the men outside the home. The men in the community go about their usual routine of staying out of the house and leaving their women to do all household chores.”

In reaction to their husbands’ fishing schedules, women must reallocate their labor time to different tasks across seasons, and they shift income-earning roles throughout the year to accommodate their labor time conflicts in ways that men do not (Dessing 2002). During off-seasons or when weather prevents fishing, most husbands do not apply their freed time toward household labors. In Panguil Bay fisher households, wives provide slightly more of total household income-earning labor than husbands, but they also contribute more than 60 percent of total unpaid household work. Moreover, children provide about the same amount of time to unpaid household work as their fathers. In comparison to earlier studies, however, fisherwives account for a higher proportion of income-generating work time than men. We did observe, however, that some younger males are assuming more child care responsibility in those households in which females were engaged in all-day income earning activity away from home.⁸

4.1 Changing Fisher Household Composition

Nationally, fishing households have declined in size since 1990, and fewer households have enough resources to incorporate extended kin.⁹ Fosterage is the primary strategy that fishing households employ to diminish their size during resource shortfalls. For example, Vera and Jose cannot afford to keep all their children with them, so their four teenaged boys live with relatives. Because they work for their room and board, these sons cannot contribute any funds to their parental household. Some Bay households must expand their boundaries to absorb elderly extended kin who can no longer support themselves. Bels’ father stopped fishing nine years ago due to a type of chronic lung congestion that is typical among Philippines fishers, but he contributes his small government retirement pension to the household. He has lived in his daughter’s household more than a decade, able only to help with cooking and child care. The grandfather remembers with pride his past fishing days when ecological conditions were good enough for him to harvest six kilos daily with his wood canoe and hook and line. Unlike his son-in-law today, he did not worry about affording rice for his family. On the one hand, his catches were bountiful enough; on the other hand, rice was much cheaper. About fifteen years ago, he could earn twelve pesos per kilo for fish, but rice cost half that much. The elder fisher was able to send six children to elementary school and one to high school. Pondering that his son-in-law’s average daily catch rarely reaches two kilos while the cost of living is escalating, the grandfather shakes his head in despair. “Fishing was good in the past,” he laments. “Now, we cannot live through fishing any longer.”

Labor migration is a third strategy through which household composition is altered. The Philippine state brokers the transnational migration of nearly one-fifth of the Philippine labor force to 186 countries (Rodriguez 2010). The laborer remittances flowing back into the country total nearly $8 billion annually and account for more than half the country’s GDP (Escobar 2004). In 2002, one of every 48 workers in the formal labor force was employed abroad. In 2012, more than 12,000 Panguil Bay laborers were working abroad, a majority of them males employed on foreign ships.¹⁰ In return for cash advances, some fisher households contract the labor of teenage sons to foreign ships (ILO 2020). Remittances from these transnational workers make fisher households less vulnerable to fluctuations in resources, but the absence of husbands intensifies the workload of wives. As more teenagers and young adults migrate to find distant jobs, Bay households draw part of their household income from regular remittances from those offspring. However, some fisher parents engage in “reverse remittances” when (a) they pay the educational expenses of migratory offspring but receive no economic return, or (b) they provide financial assistance to distant offspring who lose employment or cannot make ends meet (Agree et al. 2002).

4.2 Inter-household Networking

Asian households routinely construct survival networking systems that reach beyond their own confines, and they receive one-quarter to one-half of all resources and credit through these networks. In this way, “several households may form a reproductive system for one” (Meyers 1983: 277). Inter-household support is quite common among parents, siblings, and extended kin in Philippine fishing communities. “Through a bilateral network of consanguineal, affinal, and ritual kins, the mobilization of labor and other resources involves more than just one household. The support from affinal kins, particularly parents-in-law and members of one’s own natal family, are a necessary ingredient for the reproduction and the firming up of material foundation of the households” (Illo and Polo 1990: 104). For example, some older parents supplement the household resources of their struggling married children by sharing food or by providing cash to help them establish informal sector earnings (Interviews).

Rural Philippine households cannot depend on local governments for anything other than water and some limited medical assistance. Consequently, inter-household networks are the survival strategy that fisherwives most often employ during resource shortfalls. In addition to outright gifts, these networks provide “quasi-credit,” or flexible, informal loans with zero-interest (Fafchamps and Lund 2003). If there is not food for the day, “we have to ask from neighbors,” reports a seaweed wife. “It’s in sharing that we find solutions.” Another woman indicates that it is common practice for friends and family to share food resources with adjacent households who are having a hard time. “Neighbors give us fish when we don’t have any. When we have extra and they need some, we do the same.” When one older fisher couple catches a large number of small fish that have little market value, the wife shares the surplus with three married children and needy neighbors. Some seaweed growers donate seedlings to small producers who cannot afford them. A privileged minority of households have family or friendship ties to fishpond operators who permit them to help in the harvests for a share of the rejected shrimp that fall below the standard export size. However, networking does not always bring needed resources, as one wife indicated. “When we don’t have enough food, we go to our kin or to neighbors. Generally, they help, but many times they can’t because they are facing the same problems we are. I also think the community is changing. A trend of self-preservation is setting in, so some neighbors don’t help others.” After her seaweed production failed, one indebted 55-year-old woman began to take her granddaughter to the shore when boats returned. There the child begs incoming fishers for a small part of their catch. “This really helps us,” she says gratefully, but she knows this is an unreliable way to try to accumulate food for three adults and the child. Some days, the fishers do not catch enough for their own households, so they have none to spare her. On those days, she says, “we try to bear our difficulties.”

Previous studies of Philippine fisher communities indicate that inter-household sharing of catches is not random. Family and neighbors primarily share with those who have assisted them in the past. Surplus catches provide fishers the means to strengthen networks with people whose assistance their households will need in the future. However, this food giving is strategically managed like an investment. “Choices have to be made and limitations introduced so that [only] a select few, receive fish. … Networking is selective and manipulative. … To choose recipients of one’s gifts implies that one has chosen to enter into a cycle of exchanges and therefore of rights and obligations with certain people.” Among impoverished fishers facing the same threats to survival, networks are “always unstable shreds and patches of connective social tissue” because they depend upon the capacity of the parties in the network to provide resources when they are most needed (Dumont 1992: 177). In the wake of export targeting, declining catches and widespread food shortages, customary sharing of catch is less common. Moreover, many fishers have less control over their catches or their harvests from share ponds and stationary nets because they must deliver their outputs to traders or landings specified by those to whom they are indebted.

However, fishers and their wives continue to network in ways that do not involve fish catch sharing. Men lend tools, fishing gears or boats to relatives and selected friends. Two-thirds of interviewed women indicated they share food other than fish with relatives, friends and neighbors, and about half reported that they have received such help in the last few months. Mothers and mothers-in-law assist couples throughout the first year or two of setting up their new households, especially during pregnancies and child deliveries. When they are ill or during their child deliveries, women extend work assistance and other forms of help to relatives and friends. Among females who sell their husbands’ catches, women will transact marketing activities for one another. Women routinely borrow small amounts of salt and cooking oil from one another, and they exchange children’s clothing as their offspring reach different ages.

5.1 Inequitable Distribution of Resources

Rather than being egalitarian, the household is a capitalist structure in which conflicting interests lead to unequal pooling and access to resources (Rocha 1994). Because they reflect the capitalist valorization of income-earning labor (Wallerstein 1983: 24–25), households allocate an inequitable share of their resources to male income earners (Wilk 1989). Access to resources is determined by a household member’s status in a hierarchical order based on gender, income-earning capacity, and age, with male earners at the top and mothers falling last (Young et al. 1981). Like the capitalist system itself, the household is grounded in patriarchal principles that lead to gendered inequalities in resource distribution (von Werlhof 1983, 1985). Like capitalists, some householders are so driven by self-interest that they exploit the altruism of others. Wage earners often behave in the household as though their monetary contributions are far more valuable than the back-breaking labor of others. They expect to be treated as though the wage (no matter how low) is enough to validate their demand for a greater share of household resources and a lesser share of unpaid household labor (Thomas 1990). Consequently, women and girls receive less than their fair share of the total resource pool even though they contribute more labor power to household survival than males (Mies et al. 1988).

In a majority of Asian households, women and men prioritize provisioning in very different ways. Indeed, “husbands and wives differ in the definition of the basic necessities of the family complex, their consumption priorities, the way in which income should be distributed, and the proportion to be allocated for the common fund” (Beneria and Roldan 1987: 123). When resources are scarce, women generally prioritize the nutrition of family members. Thus income-earning women spend three-quarters of their funds on family food while men allocate less than one-quarter of their income to food. Moreover, increased female income leads to additional household spending on basic survival needs, but an increase in male income does not necessarily expand household food (UNICEF 2007: 26).

During crises, the inequitable allocation of household resources becomes most pronounced, but malnutrition and hunger are not spread evenly across all household members. In one-third to one-half of Asian households, parents go hungry in order to feed children, the mother experiencing the greatest degree of deprivation. In another one-third to one-half of households, there is an hierarchical order for resource allocation that is especially noticeable in differential access to protein. Even though they work more than household males, women consume less of the food pool. In times of shortage, income-earning males take precedence over nonproductive children, and the mother almost always receives the lowest allocation. Children do not receive an equitable share in relation to adult or teen males, but girls receive the lowest allocations of food. Despite mothers’ sacrifices, the Global Hunger Index for Philippine children has remained serious since 2010 (Concern Worldwide 2010–2019), and one of every three rural Philippine youngsters is undernourished (FAO 2012a). Sick children receive the least food, followed by adults who are ill enough to be likely to die. With respect to the allocation of extra-household services that require monetary payments, households often engage in “selective neglect.” Males are less likely than their wives to prioritize child health care, and income-earning males are more likely to receive health care than ill children, girls, or pregnant women. When resources are scarce, female fetuses are more frequently aborted while infanticide and selective neglect are most often directed toward girls (UNICEF 2007). In addition, poor Asian and Philippine households are more likely to invest in the education of boys. As a result, a vast majority of the world’s illiterate adults are Asian females (United Nations 2003).

Men and women set different priorities for the use of limited household income. While men tend to provide cash erratically for the household pool, women allocate everything they earn for household needs. Many men see little cash because they are trapped in debt bondage arrangements with traders or financiers, so they apply small surpluses to fishing equipment repairs (Interviews). Moreover, Philippine gender ideologies and laws have entrenched the notion that men have a right to personal spending money while women’s income is for collective use (Feliciano 1994). The result is an inequitable pool in which men contribute less of their income toward household needs than do wives. In addition, many husbands demand funds from their wives’ income when they lack pocket money (Interviews).

Through this inequitable pooling and other intra-household inequities, men receive far more than they contribute. That polarized pattern results largely because wives adhere to the familial ideology of feminization of responsibility for the needs of children. Vera’s household helps us see these conceptual ideas in practice. Even though she is eight months pregnant, this wife still earns more from her palm thatching than her husband contributes to the household pool. She cannot sleep through most nights because she worries about what they will eat the next day and about kawad-on (literally translated “nothingness,” i.e., doing without entirely). “If we only have enough corn left for cooking one meal, I cannot sleep anymore. Then I lose my appetite, and I don’t eat. That is good though. The children can eat more,” she says uneasily.

There are three sharp indicators of gender inequalities within Bay households. First, these parents reported that they were more likely to keep girls out of school and to allocate limited resources to education for their sons. One fisher mother of three girls and one boy told us, “I really want to give my son a high school education even if I have to eat nothing but salt and rice.” Second, females are disproportionately impacted by ecological change (Mies and Shiva 2001). Destruction of mangrove trees and wildlife eliminates household resources that females gather for food and for income-earning. To wash clothing and gather mollusks, women wade into polluted waters filled with health risks while men primarily work in boats on the surface of these waters. Thus, females and children are inequitably threatened by water-borne diseases that lead to death and lifetime health problems. Moreover, the chemical residues in Bay waters are greater health risks to females, especially those who are pregnant. Third, inequalities in allocation of food resources are evidenced in public statistics that make it clear that food shortfalls fall hardest upon mothers and children younger than five (WHO 2008, 2017). Over all, several nutritional deficiencies occur less frequently among males. Nationally, households allocate less iron to mothers and adolescent girls while fathers consume more than is needed. In rural households, the most malnourished member is the mother while most males receive more calories and more protein than the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA). Thus women consume only 87 percent of the RDA of calories and only 79 percent of the RDA of protein (WHO 2008).

In Mindanao fishing communities during the 1980s and 1990s, intra-household food distribution discriminated against females while husbands consumed 101 percent of protein RDA (Tinker 1990). In contemporary Panguil Bay households, the harshest evidence of inequitable food allocation lies in the higher incidence of chronic malnutrition, nutritional deficiencies, and iron deficiency anemia among pregnant women and young children. As a result, the life expectancy of a Bay fisherwife is four years less than that of her husband, primarily due to chronic nutritional deficiencies over her lifespan.¹¹ In addition to higher mortality risks, mothers inequitably bear the psychological burden of hungry offspring. In the words of one mother, “it’s torture when I have to listen to my four-year-old son cry when he is hungry. My husband’s fish catches are so small, and rice is so expensive. I try to make do with what is available, but it is just not enough most days. It’s hard. Sometimes I feel like my heart will break. My husband does not feel our [resource shortfalls] the way I do. I sacrifice for the sake of our child, but he won’t.” Mothers like this one often reported to us that they lowered their own intake in order to feed children, but we rarely heard such comments from men.

5.3 Self Deprivation to Survive Household Shortfalls

Unrealistically, interviewed males stressed the need to increase their fish catches as their primary survival strategy during household shortfalls. To accomplish increased catches, they worked longer hours, they traveled further and into deeper waters, and they employed more exploitative approaches, either by taking on additional debt to secure new technologies or through the use of illegal capture methods. Fisherwives pinpointed six strategies that they employ during resource and income shortfalls. First, they broaden their provisioning workloads in order to reduce monetary costs through resource gathering. Second, they seek new income-earning sources. However, they must then balance the increased conflict between income-earning, household tasks and child care by multi-tasking and through personal reductions in sleep and leisure. Third, they adjust household diets by substituting cheaper, less nutritious foods and by relying on carbohydrates rather than more expensive protein sources. Thus the household rarely has fish or meat, and there will be inadequate levels of fruits and vegetables. Wives stretch food resources by eating two meals daily, by watering food, by recycling food that is about to spoil, and by lowering the intake of themselves and younger children. Salt and cooking oil are so precious that they purchase tiny amounts and “make it last.” Women described to us how they would send a child with a plastic bag to the sari-sari store where the week’s ration of oil would be poured. At home, they rubbed the plastic over their cooking grill or pans. These strategies lead “to decisions on food intake being made to favor men and children. The woman will eat the least when there is not enough food. Also, protein foods will go to the man even though the woman’s working hours are longer” (Dios and Rocamora 1992: 61). Fourth, women eliminate or delay expenses like electricity, house repairs, health care and clothing purchases. Fifth, they will keep children out of school. Sixth and least successful, they will try to stimulate husbands to broaden their nonfishing income earning or resource gathering.

In the household histories we have recounted throughout this study, fisherwives voice their extreme fatigue from endless work, their constant sense of crisis, their worry about the future, and their reluctance to spend household assets toward their own needs. Women deprive themselves in order to feed children, a decision that exacerbates their higher rates of iron deficiency anemia and other nutritional deficiencies among females of child bearing age. One young pregnant wife is just beginning what will become continuing deprivation for her. “I am always too busy with work,” she says, “so I do not take time to eat. I can survive without eating much because I’m not really fond of food.” Fifty-six-year-old Manang has practiced such self deprivation all her life. Because of her many hours of oyster gathering and processing, Manang is the foundation of her household’s survival. She does not complain that her eighteen-hour day is longer than her husband works. She shows the physical signs of a life of hard work and malnutrition. She is underweight and under-height, and her small frame is beginning to stoop, probably from osteoporosis. When asked if her life has become more difficult, it is hard for her to measure degrees of increase in her blinding work pace and her family’s financial shortages. “Our situation before and now has always been one of hardship. The important thing is to be hard working!”

The explanations of the fisherwives we interviewed reflect notions about “sacrificial motherhood” that pervade Philippine familial ideology and laws (Feliciano 1994). These women are not simply stating personal preferences, for they are acting in line with the ideologies that have emerged historically to justify the structural sexism that is embedded in modern capitalism (Wallerstein 1983). However, they are not simply being controlled by the invisible male hand of capitalist patriarchy. As Tinker (1990: 181) points out, “the bitterest task is to acknowledge the complicity of adult women in socialization for inequality.” For more than three decades, Philippine fisher households have had to survive repeated global and national economic downturns through ever-expanding workloads. As a result, their offspring have been educated early in “endlessly toiling” (Illo and Polo 1990: 84). The parents of today’s adult Panguil Bay fishers began working at a variety of tasks at an early age. Through observation of parents and their own work assignments, they were socialized by age six into their gendered roles of more or less sacrifice for the sake of family. In turn, they are training their sons and daughters to adhere to gender-biased ideologies and workloads that inequitably shift to females the responsibility for household survival. Consequently, women like Manang become intergenerational bearers of some of the worst gendered inequalities of the capitalist system that keeps them poor and marginalized.

Nationally, households spend far more of their income on male health care services and medicines than is dispensed for females (Heinonen 1994). It is difficult to discern such a pattern among Panguil Bay fishers, for a majority of these adults go their entire lives without any health care services, except the free or cheap services of herbal healers, midwives, or small clinics that do not have doctors. However, the most dangerous form of self-deprivation involves failure to seek health care for pregnant women. As a result, fishing households have the highest incidence of maternal and infant mortality in the country (Bautista and Martillan 2007). Women also deprive themselves of other forms of health care that they budget for husbands and offspring in their households. Even though she has allocated past household income for husband and child dental care, Nina does not go to the dentist about her infected teeth because she would have to lose work time from the palm thatching that is essential to household survival. “I have to work! Hopefully, in the near future, I can attend to my teeth,” she jokes. What she does not say is that she cannot afford such dental work, for this household lives on 44 cents per capita daily.