by: Afrina Choudhury, Surendran Rajaratnam and Cynthia McDougall
“When we only collect data on men, we miss half the story. If we want to make informed decisions about our fisheries, we need to find ways to count all the people involved,” Dr. Danika Kleiber
Sex-disaggregated data and gender statistics are central to making informed policy and development program decisions for people reliant on the fisheries and aquaculture sector. However, this data is still not systematically collected and is overall lacking worldwide. This was problematic before COVID-19 but has been exacerbated with the onset of this global pandemic. As governments and other organizations are working to tackle the disastrous economic and social repercussions of the pandemic and its related restrictions, the lack of data and recognition about needs, resilience and relative risks to people of different wealth, caste, ethnic or minority groups including people without legal citizenship — all of which intersect with gender – creates gaps in the ability of policy and programming to work for the people who need it the most. This is particularly important in order to benefit the women and men reliant on the fisheries and aquaculture sectors, notably small-scale and informal fishers, processors and retailers. Below are some examples from India and Bangladesh on how and why COVID-19 related assistance and policy decisions have gendered implications for women and men who are reliant on fisheries and aquaculture.
Women play major roles in and make significant contributions to the fisheries and aquaculture sector worldwide, but these mostly remain unrecognized from household to policy scale and are often reframed as ‘supporting roles’ to ‘men’s work’ (Kleiber et al 2014; Harper et al 2020). This is no different for Bangladesh and India.
In fish and shrimp processing factories and drying sites in Bangladesh, almost 80 percent of the workforce are women. However, these women are predominantly employed in low level positions, with low income, inadequate safety standards and hygiene in place (Choudhury et al. 2017). These are some of the few employment opportunities for women in the sector. When COVID-19 hit Bangladesh, the lockdown issued by the government drastically reduced orders, fish landings, and supplies in general. Most of these plants and drying sites had to either shut down or significantly reduce operations, leaving thousands of women workers jobless and with few alternatives. Furthermore, male internal return migration as a result of loss of jobs is putting pressure on areas where women relied on for their livelihoods, such as shore-based fishing and gleaning.
To combat livelihood losses, the Government of Bangladesh has continued to issue rations to registered fishers, registered being the key word here. Women in Bangladesh are not recognized as fishers, are thus not registered as fishers, and are therefore unable to access this ration. Unfortunately, policy definitions of ‘fishers’ exclude people involved in other parts of the value chain as well as those involved in gleaning, which is where women are primarily involved. Therefore, dry fish producers (including women), laborers in processing plants and drying sites (mostly women) have no fisher ID cards — hence do not get government support. The narrow definition and resulting exclusion by governments perpetuates gender inequalities.
In a scoping study we conducted in communities reliant on pond aquaculture and beel (freshwater wetlands) fisheries in Assam, India early this year, we found women to be taking primary responsibility for reproductive activities such as food preparations. At the same time, however, members of the household (including women) conform to inequitable gender norms regarding intra-household food distribution. Women are treated as being lowest priority for a share of food because of the perception that they are not generating income for their family, as their reproductive work is unpaid and little recognized or valued. The state-wide lockdown imposed by the Government when COVID-19 hit the country affected the income and food supply of households, worst for the poor who do not have adequate food stocked. Women members in these lower socio-economic groups and families where reproductive work is not valued are likely to be heavily impacted by this inadequacy and the low quality of food, given the pre-existing inequitable norms. Even with food assistance given by government and non-government agencies, failure to understand and address gendered intra-household food allocation deteriorates women’s nutrition and health. Moreover, this has intergenerational consequences as it undermines critical nutrition in the first 1000 days, affecting the development of unborn children and infants.
Women’s engagement in, their contributions to, and the gender barriers that persist in the sector need to be identified and acknowledged in government and non-government responses to COVID-19 and future shocks. Moreover, policy, development, private sector and research actors need to rethink what counts as fisheries. In the field of research in development, we have been working to shed light on the importance of women’s contributions to the fisheries and aquaculture sector. However, we have a long way to go to achieve gender equality (Harper et al 2020, Bennett et al 2020, IHH project).
Looking ahead, we are conducting a number of studies to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the fisheries and aquaculture sector. With the large number of invisible, unreported women working in the lower rungs of the value chain or in small scale production, sampling and contacting these women has proven to be challenging. Furthermore, there are also positively deviating women business owners and entrepreneurs working in non-stereotyped roles in this sector, who also remain unreported. Working with social distancing guidelines and using phone interviews, women are at a risk of being left out of these studies unless special measures are taken. At WorldFish, together with ACIAR, we have produced a blogpost about gender integration research during COVID-19 (see McDougall & Curnow, 2020) and a Guidance Note on Research Quality during distance research (forthcoming), which are helping us to combat some of these challenges.
We have to be extra cautious about gender integration since COVID-19 cases are fast rising in the South Asian countries of India and Bangladesh. Given the high populations and population density in India and Bangladesh, the multiple challenges people face in accessing and benefiting from the healthcare services, the loss of livelihood and income and many other challenges the disease brought to the countries, the impact of COVID-19 in reality could be far worse than what is being reported. These impacts are gendered, with women and girls bearing the brunt and often not receiving the needed support to overcome the challenges brought by the pandemic. With persisting gender gaps in access to inputs and resources already, we need to take extra precautions to ensure the COVID-19 response is gender-responsive. Gender data gaps lead to not only gender blind policies and frameworks, but also to implementation of pandemic responses that may exclude women from the safety nets, support, and investments that are much needed for an inclusive recovery and building forward better.
Acknowledgment:
This work was undertaken as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Fish Agri-Food Systems (FISH) led by WorldFish. The program is supported by contributors to the CGIAR Trust Fund.
Sources:
Harper, S., Adshade, M., Lam, V.W., Pauly, D. and Sumaila, U.R., 2020. Valuing invisible catches: Estimating the global contribution by women to small-scale marine capture fisheries production. PloS one, 15(3), p.e0228912.
Bennett, N.J., Finkbeiner, E.M., Ban, N.C., Belhabib, D., Jupiter, S.D., Kittinger, J.N., Mangubhai, S., Scholtens, J., Gill, D. and Christie, P., 2020. The COVID-19 Pandemic, Small-Scale Fisheries and Coastal Fishing Communities.
Choudhury, A., McDougall, C., Rajaratnam, S. and Park, C.M.Y., 2017. Women’s empowerment in aquaculture: Two case studies from Bangladesh. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation ; Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish
McDougall, C. & Curnow, J. Safeguarding gender integration in research during the COVID-19 pandemic. Retrieved from https://pim.cgiar.org/2020/05/29/safeguarding-gender-integration-in-research-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/
Kleiber, D., Harris, L.M. and Vincent, A.C., 2015. Gender and small‐scale fisheries: A case for counting women and beyond. Fish and Fisheries, 16(4), pp.547-562.
Photo credit: Mr. Suvendra Dash
Afrina Choudhury works as Research Fellow (Senior Gender Specialist) for WorldFish, Bangladesh where she is responsible for the design and implementation of pro-poor gender responsive strategies. Working in the field of aquatic-agriculture, her research has revolved around the integration of gender into technical interventions in ways that are sustainable and transformative. In particular, she has been focusing on building the evidence for gender transformative approaches as a way to break systemic inequalities in enhancing equitable development efforts. She also co-created and chairs the Bangladesh National Gender Working Group, which brings together gender and equity work in Bangladesh. She holds a Masters degree in Development studies from BRAC University and is currently pursuing a sandwich PhD between WorldFish and Wageningen University with a focus on inclusive business development and women’s entrepreneurship in aquaculture.
Surendran Rajaratnam is a Postdoctoral Fellow at WorldFish, Malaysia. He is currently working to integrate gender into technical aquaculture and small-scale fisheries work with the Government of Assam, India as part of the Assam Agribusiness and Rural Transformation Project. His current research interest covers rural masculinities, collective action for gender equality, and feminist political economy. Surendran serves the GAF Section of the Asian Fisheries Society as an Executive Committee member and the editor of the section’s newsletter. He completed his Ph.D. in Social Work with the Universiti Sains Malaysia.
Cynthia McDougall is the Gender Research Leader for WorldFish and the CGIAR Research Program on Fish Agri-food Systems (‘FISH’). She is an interdisciplinary social scientist with over 20 years of experience in food security, gender and social equity, and natural resource governance. In her current role, she leads gender strategic research as well as the integration of gender in aquaculture, fisheries and nutrition research in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Her particular interest is in mixed methods, participatory action research and gender transformative approaches and how these can leverage scalable shifts towards empowerment, equality, poverty reduction, food and nutrition security and sustainability.