MARE Conference 2023
MARE Conference XII: Blue Fear – navigating ecological, social, and existential anxieties during the Anthropocene.
University of Amsterdam, 26-30 June 2023
DFM Panel (Panel # 6): Honoring Professor Mostafa (Ranu) Ali Reza Hossain’s transdisciplinary knowledge building for fisheries and aquaculture in Bangladesh
Chairs/Organizers: Ben Belton and Derek Johnson
Professor Mostafa Hossain passed away on January 29, 2023. To his many students, colleagues, and friends, he was a remarkable man. Perennially humble and approachable, always bright-eyed and curious about the world, he was one of the most important and prolific scholars of Bangladesh’s fisheries and aquaculture over the past 30 years. Mostafa made enormous contributions to understanding the biology of fishes in Bangladesh and to domesticating local species for indigenous aquaculture production. Mostafa was much more than a fish technologist, however. He understood the importance of development processes and social relations to realizing the promise of fish for food and nutrition security, cultural heritage, cuisine, and economy in Bangladesh. He had, in short, the breadth of perspective and the tremendous interpersonal skills necessary to motivate societally beneficial and equitable change in Bangladesh’s fish-producing sectors. Mostafa embodied collaborative knowledge production of the best sort. In this panel, we honour his legacy with papers and discussions by Mostafa’s long-standing collaborators and the new generation of students inspired by his work.
Keywords: Mostafa Hossain, Bangladesh, collaborative research and practice, interdisciplinarity.
Dr. Mostafa Hossain’s contribution to knowledge co-construction in Bangladesh fisheries and aquaculture
Shamsul Alam, Ben Belton*, Saiful Islam, Derek Johnson, Nahiduzzaman, Shakuntala Thilsted
Dr. Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain (1967-2023) was one of the foremost experts on freshwater fish taxonomy in Bangladesh, with a passion for documenting and sharing knowledge on the country’s rich ichthyofauna. He was a pioneer, singlehandedly establishing Bangladesh’s first Fish Museum and Biodiversity Center on the campus of Bangladesh Agricultural University, the institution where he worked for his entire career. Central among the museum’s many exhibits is an extensive catalogue of beautiful photographs of the freshwater fishes of Bangladesh that Mostafa compiled painstakingly over a period of many years. Mostafa was widely revered as a ‘walking encyclopedia’; the first person to be consulted on all matters pertaining to fish. He was a natural transdisciplinarian with an equally deep appreciation and understanding of fish biology, aquatic ecology, and the lives of people dependent on these resources. Mostafa was an extremely gifted field researcher with a knack for connecting with people and gently encouraging them to share their thoughts and experiences, regardless of their position or status. All these qualities made Mostafa central to the Dried Fish Matters project. His early research on dried fish value chains in Bangladesh provided much of the initial inspiration for the DFM project proposal, and he was a cornerstone of the DFM Bangladesh country team, a regular and active participant in DFM global, and a source of encouragement, advice, and inspiration for many members of the wider project team. Mostafa was widely admired and deeply loved for his generosity, modesty, and wisdom by the many students, colleagues, and friends whose lives he enriched. He embodied many of the finest qualities of transdisciplinary science and academic service. His life was also in many ways an exemplar of the idea of social wellbeing, the point of connection in a dense web of affective relationships that gave meaning to all.
Inclusion and exclusion in the dried fish wholesale markets of Bangladesh
Md. Mahfuzar Rahman
There is significant regional variation in Bangladesh's dried fish production and trade. One of the reasons for this diversity is the inter-generational continuity of involvement of dried fish actors who strive to maintain regional distinctiveness in their production, storing, and trading of dried fish. However, the degree of variation is not the same in all regions and in all segments of dried fish value chains. While the inter-generational involvement of many dried fish actors and their effort to maintain regional distinctiveness is favourable for those already involved in the sector, it hinders new entrants or entrepreneurs in many ways. Despite having the most dried fish actors, many of whom have been doing the job for generations, and being the most competitive segment, the processing segment of dried fish value chains is still relatively open to new entrants. In contrast, all three major wholesale dried fish markets in Bangladesh restrict new entrants in the name of maintaining tradition, distinctiveness, and avoiding chaos. Regionalism, family, and kinship ties strongly influence the wholesale markets. These characteristics serve the interests of existing wholesalers, their relatives, and allies, while excluding others. The written and unwritten rules and regulations of the wholesale dried fish traders’ associations have not only restricted the participation of new entrants in the wholesale market; they have also threatened the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable participants. Dried fish processors are most affected by restricted wholesale market access. Due to the absence of an alternative wholesale market for dried fish, most dried fish processors are forced to abide by the rules and conditions of wholesale traders' associations and sell their products at unfairly low prices. This biased and coercive system threatens the development and sustainability of the dried fish sector by increasing the vulnerability of the already vulnerable dried fish processors.
Operationalizing transdisciplinarity in fisheries: Researcher-practitioner reflections from the Lakshadweep Islands, India
Ishaan Khot and Naveen Namboodiri
Accumulation by Dispossession: Evidence of Shrinking Space for Small-Scale Fishers of Karnataka Coast
Amalendu Jyotishi, Shruthi Suripeddi, Ramachandra Bhatta, Prasanna Surathkal
Small-scale fisheries play important economic, social and cultural roles in coastal Karnataka even today despite being subjected to several natural and anthropogenic stressors for a long time. They are not explicitly considered by policymakers, and their contributions to the state’s fish supply and their role in livelihood creation do not receive the due recognition. The premise of this paper is that there are new set of stressors emerging that could ultimately make these small-scale fisheries unviable. The goals of this paper are to provide a systematic review of literature around these stressors, and to describe how these are being played out in coastal Karnataka. Among these stressors, we delve in depth on the new Blue Economy policy of India since it is likely to have severe antagonistic effects in combination with other anthropogenic stressors. Our opinion is, Karnataka has already started witnessing many of these ramifications of interventions/stressors and the coastal landscape of the state is set to be transformed over the next couple of decades or so. Small-scale fisheries of the state are likely to be some of the most impacted communities from these interventions. Harvey’s conceptual framework of accumulation by dispossession resonates with the development in Karnataka.
The give and take of credit: revisiting advances and debt in the global literature on fisheries
Ben Belton, Derek Johnson, Tara Nair, Jessie Varquez
Credit is a recurrent theme in the fisheries literature. It is a feature of fisheries around the globe and is present across the length of value chains. Despite this near omnipresence of credit, a systematic review of the literature on credit does not exist. This paper fills that gap in its analysis of more than 130 papers drawn from Google Scholar and SCOPUS that directly address issues of advances, debt, and credit in the literature on fisheries. We begin with a descriptive overview of the shape of the literature: its geographical pattern, disciplinary orientation, value chain segments of focus, and degree of attention to gender, among other characteristics. Our analytical discussion reflects on typologies of credit providers and credit arrangements, considers the fundamental tension in the literature between credit as functional adaptation and credit as exploitation, draws out the recurrent theme of credit’s social relational embeddedness in ties of patronage, and assesses evidence about the motivations and effectiveness of formal institutional credit from state and NGO actors.
