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Mining for Fish: Privatization of the “Commons” Along Egypt’s Northern Coastline

Ray Bush and Amal Sabri

Around 10,000 of the estimated one million people employed in Egypt’s ﬁshing sector are based in ‘Izbat al-Burg, situated at the northernmost tip of the Nile’s Damietta Branch and bordered on the east by the vast Lake Manzala. As recently as 1990, Lake Manzala was a major ﬁshing area and a collective asset for this community. Small-scale ﬁshers using simple, cheap boats and equipment fared well alongside larger operators, working in both lake and sea ﬁshing. But by the turn of the century, the lake was no longer regarded as rizq (a source of livelihood). Increasingly, local ﬁshers were prevented from ﬁshing in Manzala by state-licensed private enclosures that virtually sealed off access to the lake’s northwestern shorelines. Armed employees of the ﬁsh farm owners—known locally as the “Manzala Maﬁa”—commonly guarded the enclosures. Meanwhile, industrial, agricultural, and municipal wastes, including over 1.5 million cubic meters per day of Cairo sewage, continue to drain into the lake, negatively affecting the health of ﬁsh stocks.

The undermining of small-scale ﬁshers’ livelihoods in ‘Izbat al-Burg is emblematic of the complex interplay between state policies and aquatic resources under stress along the Nile Delta littoral. Through privatization of access to common property resources, rising costs, removal of subsidies, and inappropriately regulated ﬁshing and enforcement, state policies forced small ﬁshers out of their way of life even as overall ﬁsh production rose. Policy concern with more efﬁcient management effectively concentrated access to aquatic resource wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This process increased hardship for small-scale ﬁshers and intensiﬁed the unequal struggles for the very environmental assets the state claimed to be protecting. Says Husni, a forty-five-year-old father of six who has ﬁshed the lake for thirty-two years: “In 1993, Manzala was a source of income for all ﬁshermen of ‘Izbat al-Burg. Now the farms have destroyed everything.”

POLICY WITHOUT PEOPLE

Egyptian environmental policy discussion focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between population pressure, scarce water resources, and limited cultivable land, echoing the neo-Malthusian sense of crisis in much development discourse on Egypt. This simplistic focus fails to address unequal access to environmental entitlements and fails to include people in policy formulation. Characterizations of environmental crisis centered around resource shortage also provide the rationale for big development projects like the Toshka megaproject in the southwestern desert, which the government hoped would relieve the population pressure in the Nile Valley. Persistent neo-Malthusian beliefs—blaming the poor for lifestyles that undermine the environment and suggesting that fewer people would ipso facto mean more efﬁcient resource use—generate a crisis management mentality that distracts attention from actual processes of impoverishment of people and their environments, and the differential impacts of environmental change on different social groups.

Accurate understanding of environmental pressures in Egypt requires moving away from the Malthusian perspectives of planners, and examining actual patterns of livelihood in ﬁshing communities. In addition to pollution, the key issues of environmental sustainability addressed here are the distribution of available resources, government decisions about resource allocation, and the increasing privatization of historically collective assets.

EGYPT’S POLLUTANT “SINKS”

The four northern lakes of Manzala, Burullus, Edku, and Maryout provide a rich and vital habitat for estuarine and marine ﬁsh and their regeneration, and have always been major areas of ﬁsh production in Egypt. The Four Sisters, as they are called locally, contributed 34 percent of national production in 1976, and still provided 28 percent of the total harvest in 1998, in spite of severe environmental pressures. All have been affected by pollution, declining ﬁsh quality, and signiﬁcant reduction in size due to land reclamation.

Egypt relies almost exclusively on the Nile as a water source, and its intricate water conveyance system eventually delivers the vast bulk of outﬂows from across Egypt to the northern lakes and coastline. As a result, the Mediterranean Delta coastline and the four lakes act as pollutant “sinks,” receiving a large proportion of persistent pollutants generated throughout the Nile Valley and ﬂowing through the Delta’s terminal drainage network. Water pollution from local and upstream wastes has steadily increased as a result of the intensiﬁed multipurpose use of Nile waters, and the once-annual Nile ﬂood no longer ﬂushes the entire system. This has meant fewer ﬁsh, fewer kinds of ﬁsh, and lower ﬁsh quality.

Of the Four Sisters, Maryout and Manzala are by far the most polluted. Lake Maryout receives a large proportion of Alexandria’s industrial and sewage efﬂuent and is undergoing an extreme state of anaerobic decomposition. The largest and most productive lake, Manzala, reportedly still provides about 50 percent of total Delta lake production. Yet the lake receives ﬂows from ﬁve major terminal drains carrying pollutants from agricultural, industrial, and municipal discharges, including the Cairo sewage mentioned above. Water quality is further declining because the Salam or Peace Canal project diverts Nile water (mixed with drainage water originally ﬂowing to Manzala) for land reclamation in Sinai. The water diversion reduces the dilution of pollutants in the lake. A UN Development Program and Ministry of Environment report on the lake’s environmental health noted increased pollution, causing damage to ﬁsh stocks and ﬁshers’ livelihoods, tourism, and the habitats of migratory birds.

According to surveys of ﬁsh in the 1980s, over 60 percent of ﬁsh sampled in the four Delta lakes contained DDT and benzene chloride. Numerous other investigations in the four lakes have shown high levels of heavy metals, pesticides, and PCBs in ﬁsh. Fishers themselves are usually the highest consumers of ﬁsh; they are the most exposed to the health hazards posed by ﬁsh contaminated by heavy metals, pesticides, and sewage. Large numbers of Manzala ﬁshers and their families have worm infestations, while incidences of salmonella, shigella, and viral hepatitis are also high. Fishers know of the dangers, Husni says: “The water in the lake is sluggish and the smell is bad . . . like something dead.”

Physical changes in the landscape also affect ﬁsh yields and species composition along the Nile Delta littoral. Land reclamation decreased overall lake surface area, and ﬁsh yields were reduced by the closure of sea-lake inlets through siltation. The reduction of the river’s outﬂow, which once deﬂected offshore currents, together with a lessened silt load reaching the sea, means that sea currents produce net erosion along the delta’s coastline, altering coastal conﬁguration and wetland channels to the sea. These processes have affected water circulation within the lakes and ﬁsh habitats, and obstructed vital migratory routes both within the lakes and between the lakes and the Mediterranean Sea. As early as 1977, prior to the dramatic increase in private ﬁsh farming enclosures, lake surface areas lost to land reclamation were already 60 percent in Maryout, 29 percent in Edku, and 11 percent in Manzala. By 1988, losses had risen to 30 percent in Manzala and 62 percent in Edku. By 2000, al-Ahram reported that Manzala’s surface area was down to a mere one third of its original expanse of 327,000 feddans (one feddan equals about one acre).

Fishermen from Lake Maryout demonstrated along the Cairo–Alexandria highway bordering the lake several times during the early 1980s, to protest the degradation of the “commons” due to pollution and landscape change. The demonstrations were quickly quashed. In the mid-1990s, the Lake Maryout Fishers’ Federation began a long, difﬁcult, and thus far unpublicized lawsuit seeking compensation for loss of livelihood. In Lake Manzala, ﬁshers met numerous times with various authorities to voice their complaints about pollution and the authorities’ neglect of the closed sea-lake inlets. The meetings followed a predictable pattern: the government promised remedial action, and the problems remained unsolved.

“FREE-MARKET” FISH FARMING

Adopting USAID recommendations, over the last twenty years the Egyptian government has promoted privately run intensive ﬁsh farming along the Delta Lake shorelines—imposing exclusive access upon areas that were originally public domain, and especially hurting small-scale subsistence and artisanal ﬁshers. Private ﬁsh farms proliferated so rapidly that they reportedly contributed 76 percent of total aquaculture production in 1998. These farms raise rather than breed ﬁsh: farm operators simply rear the young ﬁsh known as ﬁsh fries and ﬁngerlings to market size, harvest them, and restock the farms for each cycle. In contrast, ﬁsh-breeding farms, which are presently rare in Egypt, breed ﬁsh and raise the fry.

A lucrative market for ﬁsh fries now exists. Entrepreneurs who have purchased exclusive rights of access to plots along lake shorelines buy the young ﬁsh from the General Authority for Fishery Resources Development (GAFRD) and transport them to their farms. A huge percentage of fries—as much as 40 to 50 percent—die during handling and transport to the farms. The ﬁsh fry “industry” that arose in response to the steep increase in demand is a drastic example of unsustainable ﬁsh resource “mining.”

The GAFRD developed hatcheries to respond to the growing demand for ﬁsh fries and ﬁngerlings to stock the ﬁsh farms, but the establishment and management of hatcheries is complex and difﬁcult. Capital costs are relatively high and they require special inputs like imported hormones. In practice, the GAFRD, at least in Damietta, relies strongly on ﬁsh fry collection centers (referred to locally as the mugamma‘at al-wilda) rather than hatcheries to supply young ﬁsh to the private farms. The collection centers draw their supply from open waters, and therefore directly promote the “mining” of ﬁsh fries. These practices effectively deplete the lakes’ natural ﬁsh stocks.

Despite evidence that current techniques encourage unsustainable depletion of Egypt’s ﬁsh resources, USAID continued to push for privatization. The erstwhile Mubarak regime did not change a policy that had “efﬁciently” increased aquaculture’s annual ﬁsh harvest from 300 tons in 1972–73 to as much as 136,500 tons in 1998—a ﬁgure exceeding 25 percent of Egypt’s domestic ﬁsh harvest.

THE MANZALA MAFIA

During the mid-1980s, in line with national policy, the governorate of Damietta (where ‘Izbat al-Burg is located) began extending ﬁve-year, renewable leases on areas along the northwestern shorelines of Lake Manzala to private ﬁsh farmers for the establishment of enclosures. The farmers pay an annual rental fee, in addition to selling their ﬁrst 100 kilograms of ﬁsh per feddan at government-imposed prices. By the 1990s, over 5,000 feddans in Damietta were leased for ﬁsh culture. Small-scale ﬁshers operating from sailboats or rowboats, or ﬁshing from the shore with a simple hook and line, used to provide cheap ﬁsh for poorer sectors of ‘Izbat al-Burg. But the new enclosures have denied small-scale ﬁshers access to large areas of the lake.

According to respondents in ‘Izbat al-Burg and media accounts, a spoils system dictates the allocation of licenses for both ﬁshing fries and for ﬁsh farms from Manzala to Edku. Veteran ﬁsher Husni explains: “Now there are hundreds of feddans of farms that belong to the elite. For every farm, there are armed guards and vicious dogs.” The Manzala Maﬁa—comprising government ofﬁcials, bureaucrats, and local elites—sometimes expands the area of enclosures beyond their allocated sizes, and their armed guards have been known to ward off ﬁshers outside of the enclosures’ perimeters.

Ironically, Article 48 of the Fisheries Law 124 promulgated in 1983 speciﬁcally prohibited the establishment of ﬁsh farms within lake waters. A decree of the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation in 1997 ordered all encroachments onto lake surface areas removed. But the authorities did not implement either of these provisions, at least on Lake Manzala and Lake Edku further west. The Agriculture Ministry’s Fisheries Committee, and the Proposals and Complaints Committee of the People’s Assembly, complained that ﬁsh farmers’ encroachments, along with pollution, constitute the “assassination of Lake Manzala.” Meanwhile, the livelihoods of small ﬁshers hang in the balance.

THOSE WHO SWEAT

The hunting of ﬁsh in open waters involves the catching, processing, preserving, and sale of hauls, and the manufacture, repair, and maintenance of boats and auxiliary gear such as nets. Fishing communities have a complex set of customary rights and social conventions to regulate their ﬁshing and allow sufﬁcient time for ﬁsh to breed and grow before harvesting, but these processes have all been altered by policies and practices beyond their control.

As in every other Delta region, ﬁshers in ‘Izbat al-Burg are bound by a web of government ﬁshery regulations designed to conserve aquatic resources, yet they are continually exasperated by the open ﬂouting of the regulations by powerful interests. The government further confounded ﬁshers by exempting the capture of young ﬁsh fries from a range of prohibitions on ﬁshing. Those with licenses to catch fries and ﬁngerlings can do so all year long, and use of prohibited ﬁne-mesh trammel nets and purse seine (shanshulla) ﬁshing continues during the night.

Reduced access to the lake pushes local owners of simple boats and rafts, and rod-and-line anglers, permanently out of their original livelihoods. They try to obtain licenses to catch ﬁsh fry, or work as crew members on others’ boats. Boat owners still ﬁshing from ‘Izbat al-Burg ﬁsh at sea in large motorized wooden or high-tech ferro-cement boats. Social differentiation between motorized boat owners and owners of non-motorized vessels has increased apace. Seventy-eight year-old Sa‘id, a ﬁsher since he was seven, puts it this way: “Now he who suffers, suffers a lot, and he who is well-off is extremely well-off. There is no place to put a foot in Manzala anymore.”

Boat owners, ﬁsh laborers, and their families complain about pollution, declining catches, reduced access to ﬁshing areas, and increased costs of ﬁshing inputs and of ﬁsh. The increase in the price of ﬁsh is not passed on to ﬁsh workers, but appropriated by ﬁsh merchants. Fishers must cope with increases in loan interest rates and the rising costs of boats and various ﬁshing inputs. The latter include supplies for ﬁshing trips, spare parts, maintenance, and repair works. In ‘Izbat al-Burg, the cost of motorized wooden boats increased from between £E 70,000 and £E 100,000 in the late 1980s to more than £E 400,000 (about $120,000) today. The price of fuel and maintenance has also risen. Essential cotton yarn for net manufacture and repair costs 300 percent more than it did eight years ago. These increased costs encourage owners to engage in boat shareholding, often between as many as eight partners.

The people hardest hit by the transformation of ﬁshing in Egypt are the ‘arraqa—literally “those who sweat”—who work for boat owners. On a typical boat of 152 horsepower, the supply of diesel, grease, ice, and food for a ﬁshing trip at sea normally costs £E 2,000–3,000, while the total revenue from a good catch on such a trip is about £E 4,000 (about $1,200). Since the owners are chronically short on cash, they ﬁnd it difﬁcult to finance the costs of the trip. If they do make the trip, the crew of six or more splits the proﬁt after the owner’s share. Each crewman’s share amounts to £E 100–150 (roughly $30–$50), and often less.

In these dire circumstances, some small ﬁshers resort to indiscriminate ﬁshing practices that lead to overharvesting, including the use of illegal ﬁne-mesh nets and the catching of ﬁsh fry, ﬁshing during spawning or breeding seasons, and the use of dynamite or poisons. But, as demonstrated above, the increased demand for ﬁsh fry, at least, is stimulated by ﬁshery policy rather than ﬁshers’ recklessness. One ﬁsher expressed the dilemma as follows: “This is destroying our tomorrow, but my family has to eat today.”

When the price of fuel was raised sharply to £E 80 per barrel in July 1983, ﬁshers from ‘Izbat al-Burg and neighboring areas sailed together up the Nile to demonstrate in front of the Damietta governorate headquarters. More recently, the 1996 prohibition on ﬁshing during the prime summer months prompted similar demonstrations. But in numerous other coastal areas where ﬁshers live in informal settlements, protest is avoided for fear of eviction. As more and more shoreline is privatized for ﬁsh farming enclosures or tourist and other coastal developments, ofﬁcials call more frequently for evictions, and sometimes issue the warrants.

A major obstacle to organized actions among small-scale ﬁshers in Egypt is that existing ﬁsher cooperatives must belong to the Federation of Fisher Cooperatives, run under the auspices of the GAFRD. Membership in almost all of these cooperatives is restricted to boat owners, the most influential of whom are “elected” to administer the cooperatives. Attempts continue to register alternative cooperative societies to better represent the demands of small-scale ﬁshers, both boat owners and ‘arraqa, for more favorable terms of work. Meanwhile, some ﬁshing communities have registered “community development associations” with the Ministry of Social Affairs to provide basic social services: insurance against work-related injuries and death at sea, general health insurance, and monthly retirement pensions. Given the crisis in ﬁshers’ livelihoods, more and stronger alternative grassroots associations are likely.

LOSS OF THE COMMONS

Despite grassroots efforts, small ﬁshers on Egypt’s northern coastline suffer from mounting debt and reduced employment opportunities. To cope with the changes, women intensify and diversify their productive activities—manufacturing nets for sale, working long hours in paid ﬁsh processing, and engaging in petty trading of ﬁsh. Many households face the costs of increasing household debt: longer working hours for those who can get work, declining use of expensive medical services, and hard choices about which children—if any—will receive or continue education. The outcome of these “choices” is likely to be increased social differentiation between those who can remain in the ﬁshing industry and those who lead a marginal existence. Simply feeding a family has become a major drain on ﬁshing families’ income. Bahiyya, whose husband works as a partner on a wooden boat, says living standards in Manzala have declined “because it has become a private farm. The whole town is in a bad condition. We only eat ﬁsh twice a week, instead of every day.”

In Egypt, “efﬁcient” management of ﬁsh resources has meant privatization of the commons, concentrating access to ﬁsh resources in fewer and fewer hands. The GAFRD aims to increase annual per capita consumption of ﬁsh by intensifying ﬁsh farming, improving ﬁsh management, and developing cooperation with neighboring countries. But unless the needs and strategies of small ﬁshers in places like ‘Izbat al-Burg are included in these plans, Egypt’s aquatic resource management policy will continue to marginalize the ﬁshing communities around which ﬁsh production should be centered. From the perspective of policymakers, small-scale ﬁshers are apparently almost invisible. For small ﬁshers, “environmental action” entails standing up to be acknowledged and to defend their lives and livelihoods. Creating a policy context within which fisher lives and livelihoods can be advanced will be a major challenge for any “post-revolutionary” government of Egypt.