The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia, c.1850-2000

4. Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s

Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s 75© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore 4 Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s As the demand for fish products grew, fishers exploited old fishing grounds more intensively with existing fishing gears and gradually moved on to exploit new fishing grounds that were ecologically similar to the old ones and so could be fished with the same fishing gears. For several decades the existing fishing gears and somewhat bigger versions of them caught enough fish to maintain roughly the same level of fish consumption per capita. As mentioned in Chapter 3, however, catches did not increase steadily throughout Southeast Asia. On the contrary, catches soared in some places, grew very slowly in others, fluctuated in others, and fell in at least one place. I will try to explain this phenomenon by examining fisheries in six different areas, namely, the Gulf of Siam, the Straits of Malacca, the north coast of Java and Madura, the Kangean Islands, and, in less detail, the Philippines and Burma. I will then suggest that in some of these areas it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep on increasing catches with the same fishing gears. Gulf of Siam The main target of the fisheries of the Gulf of Siam (Map 4.1) was Indian mackerel, known locally as pla thu. It was the favourite sea fish of the Thais, and it had long been exported to Singapore and other ports.There are no statistics showing changes in mackerel catches or the number of fish corrals — poh — erected along the coast to catch them, but it is clear that by the 1890s the fishery was very extensive. When Warington Reproduced from The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 18502000 , by John G. Butcher (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.Individual articles are available at Chapter 4 76© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore Smyth sailed along the coast just to the east of the mouth of the Chao Phraya River he found that “here and there fishing stakes dotted the horizon out to the 5 fathom [9 metre] line”1 and along the west coast he found poh in Sawi and Langsuan bays as well as in Chumphon Bay, where there were more than sixty. The practice at this time was for the Map 4.1 Gulf of Siam Catching More with the Same Technology, 1870s to 1930s 77© 2004 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore government to farm out the right to sell licences to operate poh and to collect a royalty on fish catches. According to Warington Smyth, the royalty amounted to “10 per cent or more” of the catch. Whether the operators of the fishing stakes paid this royalty in cash or in fish is unclear, but either way we can assume that the farmer took an active part in promoting the fishery, since he was able to keep for himself any money that he collected over and above what he had agreed to pay the government. At some stage the government abolished the farm and instead sold licences for the right to erect a poh in a particular place as well as taxing the poh itself. The government also taxed salt used in the fisheries, but in 1923 the government’s revenue from the tax on salt amounted to no more than 10 per cent of its total revenue from fisheries.2 None of the (English) sources I have used suggest that the tax on salt or the final cost of salt to fish processors restricted the expansion of the fisheries in any way. The low cost of salt, nearly all of which came from the salt pans along the inner gulf, enabled the processors to preserve the fish with much more salt than was used in some other parts of Southeast Asia, most notably Java, where in 1911 the price of salt was six times that in Siam.3 The prosperity of the fishery fluctuated wildly as the abundance of mackerel went up and down from year to year, probably due almost entirely to natural changes in the size of the population...