For many of the most vulnerable peoples of the South and Southeast Asia region, dried fish is of vital nutritional, economic, social, and cultural importance.
Despite this, the diverse and complex economy that produces and distributes dried fish, and the threats to it, are all but invisible in research and policy.
The Dried Fish Matters project brings an interdisciplinary team to address this major oversight.
The scale and significance of dried fish production, trade and consumption is rarely acknowledged and poorly understood … in part because of a tendency for fisheries research to focus on fishers, thereby overlooking actors and processes in mid- and downstream value chain segments. —Ben Belton, Mostafa A.R. Hossain, and Shakuntala H. Thilsted
The project director, and other key members of the project team, have been major contributors to the small but growing literature on the dried fish economy of South and Southeast Asia.
The model of Stacked Value Chains represents a new way to look at the social economy of dried fish.
Value chains are networks of actors whose activities enable the production and distribution of goods or services to consumers. All value chain actors use assets to transform inputs into goods or services (outputs). These become inputs when used by other actors further ‘downstream’ in the value chain. For example, fishers use boats and nets (assets) and labor, fuel, ice and credit (inputs), to ‘make’ an output (raw fish).
The DFM – South India research mainly covers three states in peninsular India. The Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS) Hyderabad will be main coordinating institute for The South Indian research component. Other key institutions that are involved in research in south India include Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA), District Fishermen’s Youth Welfare Association (DFYWA), Visakhapatnam, Village Service Society (VSS), Visakhapatnam and St Joseph’s College for Women, Visakhapatnam.
Bangladesh is a South Asian country. It shares land borders with India and Myanmar. The country’s maritime territory in the Bay of Bengal is roughly equal to the size of its land area. Bangladesh is the world’s eighth most populous country. Dhaka is its capital and largest city, followed by Chittagong, which has the country’s largest port .
Cambodia is a country located in the southern part of the Indochina peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is 181,035 square kilometers (69,898 square miles) in extent, bordered by Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the northeast, Vietnam to the east and the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest. With permanent and seasonal wetlands covering 30% of the land mass of the country, Cambodia has one of the largest and most diverse fresh water fisheries, following geographically much larger China, India and Bangladesh. While the contribution of the marine sub-sector to the fisheries sector has increased over the years, the fresh water sub-sector continues to strongly dominate fisheries in Cambodia, with most of the fishing activities taking place along the Mekong basin and in the Tonle Sap Lake. Fish is a traditional staple in the Cambodian diet and vital to nutrition and food security of the people.
Gujarat is a state on the western coast of India with a coastline of 1,600 km (990 mi) which accounts for 19.70 percent of the total coastline of the country and about 46 percent of the western coastline of India. It is the sixth largest Indian state by area and the ninth largest state by population. Gujarat is bordered by Rajasthan to the northeast, Daman and Diu to the south, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Maharashtra to the southeast, Madhya Pradesh to the east, and the Arabian Sea and the Pakistani province of Sindh to the west. Its capital city is Gandhinagar, while its largest city is Ahmedabad. Fisheries play a significant role in the income, employment, livelihoods, and food security of the people of Gujarat.
Karnataka is the largest state in South India. Although it is primarily an agricultural state, the Karnataka fishery is the fourth-largest in India, producing over 600,000 metric tonnes annually [1].
Located on the southwestern Malabar Coast of India, Kerala is a Malayam-speaking state with a coastline of approximately 600 km. It is home to over one million people who are dependent on fisheries, out of a total population of approximately 35 million.
Mizoram and Manipur are neighbouring states in North-East India. Sharing borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh, this region is a site of cross-border trade.
Myanmar (formerly Burma), is a country in Southeastern Asia, bordering the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, between Bangladesh and Thailand. It has a coastline of 1,930 km. The majority of Myanmar’s population is rural, with the density of settlement in each region related to agricultural production, particularly of rice. Although city populations have been growing, the pace of urbanization has not been as rapid in Myanmar as it has been in most other countries of Southeast Asia [1].
Sri Lanka is a small island in the Indian Ocean with a total land area of 65,510 km2 and a 1,760 km long coastline. With the declaration of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in 1976, the Government of Sri Lanka obtained sovereign rights over an ocean area of 536,000 km2.
The fisheries sector in Sri Lanka is basically small-scale, but is very important in terms of employment, food security and generation of foreign exchange. Fish products are a vital source of animal protein, providing around 70% of the animal protein consumed in the country.
We are pleased to highlight the participation of graduate students in the DFM project. So far we have hosted seven PhD students and one Master’s student at three Canadian universities, as well as one affiliated overseas Master’s student.
In 2014, Telangana separated from the northwestern part of Andhra Pradesh to create a new state with Hyderabad as its capital. As a landlocked state, Telangana's fisheries are entirely based on inland water bodies, which include 77 reservoirs and over 24,000 tanks providing an area of 570,000 ha [1].
Thailand is located in Southeast Asia bordering the Andaman Sea in the West and the Gulf of Thailand in the East. The country is divided into 76 provinces with about 514,000-km² total land area, total length of 2,624 km continental coastline, 394,000 km² shelf area, and a total water area of 319,750 km2. Thailand has 25 river basins with 254 sub-basins, and the two principal river systems are the Chao Phraya River and the Mekong River (FAO 2018).
Fish is the primary source of animal protein for most of Thailand’s population, particularly those in the coastal provinces. There are over 650,000 people employed in fish farms and related industries (400,000 in freshwater aquaculture, 78,000 in brackish water aquaculture, and 184,000 in processing plants).
West Bengal is an Indian state located in the eastern region of the country along the Bay of Bengal. It is India’s fourth-most populous state and the fourteenth-largest state, with an area of 88,752 km2. It borders Bangladesh in the east, and Nepal and Bhutan in the north. It also borders the Indian states of Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Sikkim, and Assam. The state capital is Kolkata.
The Dried Fish Matters project has 12 Research Teams in six countries.
In addition to the 12 geographic research teams, DFM has three thematic working groups.
The MARE conference presents an opportunity towards the end of the scoping phase of DFM to take stock of what we have achieved so far. It also gives us a chance to present our preliminary results to the broader maritime studies audience.
The three linked DFM sessions attempt to reconfigure the usual academic conference panel into a form that better reflects the collaborative spirit that drives a large international effort to build knowledge on social economies of dried fish in Asia. The three panels take a roundtable format that blends collectively authored statements on project design, case studies presented in a more conventional conference paper format, commentaries, a multi-media presentation of dried fish stories, and frequent opportunities for feedback and discussion with the audience. The goal of the roundtables is to encapsulate the energy and dynamism of the Dried Fish Matters project mid-stream through deliberate reflections on project framing, process, and emerging findings.
This page lists the research outputs of the Dried Fish Matters project. It is updated regularly from the *DFM Reports and publications collection in our Zotero library.
Dried fish is common throughout South and South-East Asia, constituting between one-quarter and one-third of fish consumed in countries in this region.
While sun-dried fish might be seen as "typical", there are also many other ways of preserving fish -- often involving the same value chains.
In the broadest possible terms, our project investigates any fish product that is neither fresh nor frozen.
This includes salted, dried, fermented, and pickled fish, and possibly even fish sauce.
The main feature of all these products is their portability: there is no need for a cold chain, so the food becomes less expensive to store and transport, and therefore more accessible to consumers in remote or less affluent places.