The Indus unchained

Courtesy:- Muhammad Ali Shah & A. Ercelan

In celebrating the contribution of nature to human prosperity, we must also recall society's ingratitude to our rivers despite their generosity.

For our own sustainable security, we cannot continue to make nature a slave to our greed. The damage by heavy rains and severe floods are one reminder of the furious rebellion by cruelly mistreated forests, soil and water.

Across the country, the livelihood of millions of peasants depends upon secure supplies of clean freshwater. However, the peasants abuse their leashed rivers. Both the irrigation (and drainage) system and farm methods deny adequate water to other tail-end and downstream peasants.

We emphasise that amidst extensive peasant suffering, there are also several million fisherfolk who are excluded from decent livelihoods.

Extreme inequality in land ownership is a major constraint in equitable access to water, and leads to mass poverty. Only serious land reform can rapidly eradicate poverty caused by the inequitable ownership of productive natural resources.

As the UN Research Institute for Social Development recently reminded us, when domestic demand is limited because of severely unequal livelihoods, export-led growth cannot create sufficient synergy between agriculture and industry for rapid eradication of mass deprivation.

Exports in the current neoliberal globalisation have failed to expand decent work matching the market-led economic growth.

The official policy to keep minimum wage below the poverty wage, and to be so lax in enforcement that millions of workers

remain deprived of even the low minimum wage.

The pervasive and persistent malnourishment of women and children in Pakistan is confirmed by several national and international observers. This raises grave misgivings about relying on productivity growth to

eliminate poverty in future generations.

The link between rivers and fisheries needs little elaboration. Our irrigation system is based on extensive diversion of freshwater from rivers to farms.

Dams and barrages are constructed as barriers to natural flows, with canals adding to the diversion. Whatever the storage, the riverine ecosystem suffers from the impounding of nutritious sediments along with the water. The consequence is reduction in soil fertility.

To offset the loss of productivity, massive amounts of chemical fertiliser are used. This, along with the large-scale use of chemical pesticides, poisons the canals, downstream rivers and the coast. Mega drainage schemes have compounded damage even in normal years. The recent rains and floods have wreaked devastation because of careless drainage.

A tragic example is that of the Indus delta, whose suffering began with the Sukkur Barrage as a grand scheme to increase state revenues. Heavy rains are infrequent in the delta, and even those cannot counter the loss of silt due to upstream storage and diversions. For deltaic ecology, upstream floods are a blessing since the delta remains the drainage system for the Indus basin.

Less nutritious freshwater reduces feed for fish and hence the productivity of fisheries. Polluted waters further degrade fisheries. So extensive is the damage that lakes and ponds created by dams and barrages just cannot offset the downstream damage.

A situation of sharply declining stocks is accentuated harshly by extensive and intensive over-fishing, aggravated by the use of murderous technology. This includes not just fine mesh and lengthy nets but also replacement of human labour by winches.

Bans remain ineffective because of a lethal combination of fisherfolk poverty, market greed and state obsession with exports.

Ecological restoration of fisheries requires sacrifices across the board. As was observed some years ago, a complete ban on industrial fisheries still requires other adjustments.

Since they do the least damage and are least capable of alternative livelihoods, subsistence fisherfolk - relying entirely on wind-driven small boats or just nets - deserve to be burdened with minimal adjustments, such as the discarding of destructive

nets and implementation of no-fishing zones.

Next in priority are owner-driven, semi-commercial vessels. These employ the vast majority of fisherfolk. Their adjustments will have to embrace all critical elements, including elimination of bottom trawling and reduction in trips and fishing duration.

We can no longer afford unrestricted commercial fishing: this will require strict enforcement of fewer licences and low-catch quotas even for commercial fishing in distant waters.

The restoration of our ecological health will take years of adjustments aimed at replenishing stocks before fisherfolk get larger catches. This process can be accelerated by restoring freshwater flows to fishing areas. Currently, crews are compensated

through shares in catch. In good harvests, this system may provide a living wage. It usually does not, and can further deteriorate during the adjustment period. It is essential to license fishing on the condition that crews will receive a decent wage

regardless of the catch level. The incentive to participate fully can be easily implemented by shares in the remaining catch after meeting labour costs.

Cleaner and cheaper energy through dams is a fiction. With unabated global warming, there will soon be years of insufficient water to store. Dam and barrage management has only worsened flood damage. More large dams are lethal foolishness.

Unchaining the rivers is the only just and sustainable option for people and nature. Fossil fuels can be replaced by renewable energy, lowering costs by removing the large transmission losses that plague our energy system, and providing almost

zero-pollution energy.

Freedom for rivers is a South Asian issue. When all countries protect and promote local livelihoods there will be less reason for people to take cross-border risks of lengthy imprisonment, with cruel impacts on families who lose their breadwinners and

unemployment due to boats seized and left to rot.