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For Ann Singeo, being in the ocean has always been a direction of liveliness. Growing up in Palau, she and her mother would gather on the land with other women in their village. They would wade into the sea to talk, share food, and reap —hand-collecting nautical animals to eat or sell. From the other women, Singeo learned about the biology and spawning cycles of ocean cucumbers, which are normally consumed in the nation. “ But it was truly about enjoying nature and the connections with early women, ” says Singeo, now a celebrated environmentalist and Indigenous cognition recommend. When she became a mother herself, Singeo brought her daughter to glean beside her in the greenish blue shallows .
But in 2011, everything changed for Singeo and her boyfriend gleaners. Dried ocean cucumber, or bêche-de-mer, is prized in chinese cuisine and traditional medicate. In Hong Kong, top specimens can fetch an eye-watering US $ 1,800 per kilogram. In Palau, a ziploc sandwich cup of tea of the animals costs merely $ 3. so when buyers offering clear dollar arrived that year from China, Korea, and Taiwan, it sparked a covert trade in sea cucumbers that soon exploded into a collect craze .
so alluring was the return that Palauan men, who don ’ t typically target sea cucumbers, pivoted from their reef fish businesses to collect the valuable echinoderms. Although harvesting them for commercial export had been outlawed since 1994, interested fishers were quietly given license by local leaders to do sol. “ It was like a party in town, everyone was selling a distribute of sea cucumbers, ” Singeo recalls. “ But for me, it was very depressing. ”
By the time the government finally quashed the trade in early 2012, 1.1 million kilograms of sea cucumbers worth $ 1.3-million had been exported from Palau. The harvest all but wiped out the sea cucumber population, which fell by 88 percentage and still has not recovered. With the party over, men who profited from the barter returned to their fishing businesses, and women gleaners were left to bear the personnel casualty of their cultural commit and support.
“ Gleaning was such an important part of women ’ s lives in this community, and immediately it ’ mho gone, ” says Singeo. “ It feels like a part of your liveliness was taken off from you. ”
The saga illustrates how the benefits and harms of fish are unevenly shared among different demographic groups, even within the lapp village. fishing is frequently assumed to be a male occupation, but that “ narrative obscures the important function that women play in the harvest of fisheries resources, ” says Caroline Ferguson, a calibrate student studying equity in fisheries at Stanford University in California .
After spending a class in Palau and hearing stories like Singeo ’ randomness, Ferguson wanted to know how and why the 2011 export boom impacted men and women differently. By interviewing more than 200 people, she and her Palauan colleagues found that men were able to displace women in the fishery by leveraging the cognition and assets they ’ vitamin d acquired as witwatersrand fishers.
These advantages begin in childhood. Palauan boys—but not girls—are raised to spearfish and freedive on the witwatersrand. They learn about the species that live in these deeper waters, including a big and lucrative type of sea cucumber. In 2011, men were able to access this species while women were not, explains Ferguson .
Boat ownership is besides male-dominated in Palau. In addition to harvesting the deep-water species, men used their boats to target ocean cucumbers in the nearshore areas where women traditionally glean, says Singeo. “ They would fill a five-gallon [ 20-liter ] bucket with 200 ocean cucumbers, up to 20 or 30 buckets per boat. They did this every night for months. ” When areas conclude to shore became overfished, women had to travel further from home to glean. Though some marry women could use their husbands ’ boats to do indeed, explains Ferguson, unmarried women and widows were not then lucky.
Around the world, women ’ sulfur contributions to fisheries are routinely overlooked and undervalued, says Sangeeta Mangubhai, film director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Fiji. Women gleaners in Fiji, for exemplify, are offered lower prices than men for the exact like product, she says. In Tanzania, women have fought to reclaim their traditional octopus fishery from interloping men. Getting more women involved in nautical resource management is important, says Mangubhai, “ because alone then can we make surely those with the quietest voices are not being left out. ”
By the time Singeo gave birth to her youngest daughter, the sea cucumbers were gone, and so was the ritual of reap .
now when they go to the ocean, Singeo teaches her daughter how to cultivate sea cucumbers in the hope of restoring wilderness populations. The following step, she says, is to push for regulations that protect cultural use of resources so that they ’ re passed on to future generations. “ This is fair the begin of the work that we ’ ra doing. ”
