Over a month ago, I bought some fresh seafood, comprised of shrimps and mantis shrimps and took it to a party at my friend's house.
The seafood I had purchased was quite special. I bought it partly because of its organic quality but more importantly I bought it because I knew its source. The seafood came from fishermen in Krabi province who catch it using environmentally friendly fishing nets, shipping the shrimps right away without any use of formalin solution. The shrimps are then sold at seafood shops as Small-scale Fishery Products (SSOF), a sustainable food campaign launched by the Earth Net Foundation.
The story of these shrimps played a part in our dinner conversation. I told my friends about the shrimps' origins — Ao Ao Luek, a fisherman hamlet in Krabi province. Given the fishing method, we knew we were eating not only healthy and fresh seafood, but products that come from a sustainable source. My friends greeted me with enthusiasm. The meat of the shrimps, especially the mantis shrimps were fresh, firm and chemical-free. A friend of mine, however, found it "too organic", saying: "I miss the regular baked fish at any one of the regular grill eateries sold along the food street. Come on, we are surrounded by unhealthy food and we eat it all the time."
With love and respect to my old pal, I do think that the future of food will inevitably change. Consumers in Thailand might seem blessed with an abundance of choice in affordable seafood, but, do we know that the seafood we consume right now comes from commercial trawlers who use destructive and illegal fishing gear? As for me, the problem is not about the matter of choice. Personally, I believe that one day future generations may not be able to enjoy fresh and clean seafood at all and if they need to eat fish and shrimps, they might only be able to eat products from aquatic animal farms, such as those from Charoen Phokphand (CP). If they want to enjoy wild-caught quality seafood, our children will have to pay a lot more money to have them imported.
It would of course have ruined the pleasant evening party to talk even more about the overfishing problem that has been occurring in Thai seas since 1976. It would also ruin everyone's appetite to say that most of the fish and shrimp caught must have been frozen in trawler's hauls for weeks on end before being shipped to market in cities, of course with the help of the preservative chemical known as formalin.
But the scene for seafood lovers in Thailand has changed even faster than I thought.
Last week, news of the seafood shortage became the talk of the town after a network of commercial trawlers (illegal fishing boats to be precise) went on strike in protest against the Royal Fishery Department's policy to not grant amnesty to around 3,072 illegal fishing boats. It is quite surprising to learn that the amount of illegal trawlers in Thailand is almost equal to the number of legal trawlers: 3,930, which is the maximum amount of vessels that, according to the Royal Fishery Department, the ecology of the Thai sea can accommodate.
For me, the reason for their striking is self-serving. Illegal trawlers made a threat to strike in protest to the state policy because it would clearly prevent them from violating the law. Even more bemusing is the fact that seafood lovers are now fearing that we might not be able to enjoy seafood as it once was. Instead of being fearful of a seafood shortage, they should be more concerned that there might not be any seafood left at all for future generations — or at least that of wild-caught seafood, if destructive trawlers and overfishing are permitted to continue in the Thai sea.
As large fishing boats have made threats to stop fishing, networks of small scale fishermen will continue to go out to sea to catch fish to supply us as usual.
Indeed, there are around 50,000 fishing families living in hundreds of fishermen villages and harvesting along 22 coastal provinces by the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. These traditional folk use small and non-destructive fishing gear for their harvesting. So, Thailand has many sources of supply for seafood, from over 6,000 trawlers, half of which are from illegal boats.
We already have the more sustainable sources that have been supplying us with seafood for generations.
I think we should honour them by acknowledging them and financially supporting them, not because it is an ethical choice but because it is only through these small scale fishermen and their more environmentally friendly harvesting methods that our future generations will be able to enjoy the good quality and wildly caught seafood that we and our predecessors have enjoyed long before.
And with love and respect to my friend, I intend to bring my organic and fresh seafood to the next party.
Yes, those illegal fishermen may continue with their strikes, because I now know where I can get my seafood supply in the future.
Anchalee Kongrut is a feature writer for the Bangkok Post's Life section.