By Janette Bulkan and John Palmer
During their first few months of life, young fish are called ‘fry’; most do not survive to adulthood. The idiom, ‘small fry’, has been used to refer to children and people of low status since the 14th century in England and is perhaps derived from the ‘fry’ of fish. Artisanal fishers in Guyana are treated as ‘small fry’, of little consequence to the institutions that should be concerned with their welfare.
The Fisheries Department’s last published guesstimate was that about 12,000 people were directly engaged in fishing. The Marine Fisheries Management Plan, 2013-2020 noted that the ‘data collection programme for artisanal fishers covers only a small proportion of landings; it is constrained by i) lack of resources (transport) and ii) waste of resources due to lack of local knowledge (data collectors frequently visit sites where no landings are due)’. The Ministry of Labour does not publish counts of fishermen, fish processors and small-scale fish vendors. Workers in these sectors are likely lumped into the informal economy – lacking even the minimal representation provided by unions, associations and government institutions.
In economic terms, artisanal fisheries count as a ‘minor’ contributor to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) [2% in 2017 according to WWF]. However, fishers are major in terms of local livelihoods, and provisioning of fish protein to coastal communities who make up >80 percent of Guyana’s population of 800,000.
The deep-water oil fields in production since December 2019 lie about 100 nautical miles (180 km) offshore and have been described as ‘the last great frontier of the offshore oil boom’. As a recent article noted: ‘Thirty-two out of 37 of the Exxon-led group’s well tests have turned up oil, by far the industry’s highest success rate in modern history, Bank of America analysts said in a June note. The group is expected to pump more than one million barrels a day throughout the 2030s, according to analyst Schreiner Parker of energy research firm Rystad’.
Up until the coming of the deep-sea oil barons, fishers were the principal users of Guyana’s marine space. While they are still the most numerous out on the water, fishers’ rights have steadily eroded vis-à-vis those exercised by petroleum-related operators. High-risk oil exploration and production activities lie beyond the traditional fishing grounds of the demersal stocks targeted by the gill-netting fishermen. But multi-generational fishers say that the declines in fish catches accelerated with deep-sea oil exploration and seismic surveys in the 21st century, causing their declining livelihoods. The Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) prepared for the oil companies state that (a) the oil fields are so far offshore that any negative environmental effects will not reach the fishermen, the traditional fishing grounds, or the shoreline, except under unusual conditions of wind and current; (b) the northwest direction of the main Guiana Current will carry pollutants from the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSOs) vessels, including oil spills, usually away from the coastline into the Caribbean Sea; (c) wind and currents will rapidly dissipate negative effects; (d) fish ova and juveniles sucked into and killed by the pumps on the FPSOs are not likely to be the demersal species targeted by the fishermen. The requirements of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for oil field monitoring mainly would not provide assurance of insignificant negative effects.
The EPA has never required the oil companies to map the fish nurseries, feeding grounds or migration paths of fish populations in their EIAs. Nor have any before/after effects of oil field operations on the important artisanal fisheries sector been tracked by either Guyanese authorities or the oil companies.
Fishers lack a politically effective voice. The few functioning fishers’ associations only represent boat owners, not the fishers who make up the crews. Fishing crews work for a share of the catch; they are not paid for days at sea. There is no office to which fishers can go to report their observations that include the following:
Platform supply vessels moving between the offshore FPSO vessels and Guyana’s shores cross and obstruct the traditional but undemarcated fishing grounds, claiming right-of-way. Guyana’s Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) places ‘Notices to Mariners’ in the major newspapers that notify about vessel traffic and marine safety exclusion zones. However, the majority of fishers are illiterate and do not buy or read newspapers and so are not informed by official marine safety notices and exclusions. Fishers have reported that the ships that service the oil fields pose dangers to navigation and have damaged their fishing lines and nets. On the few occasions when compensation was paid, the amounts were set by the government jointly with the oil companies/contractors without a negotiation process; there was no implementation of Free, Prior and Informed Consent. The EPA said that a Trinidadian firm of consultants was used to inform the fishers’ cooperatives before production started.
Noise. Operations which may be affecting fish populations include the very loud pulses of air guns used in 3-D and 4-D seismic surveys carried out since 2000; mechanical drilling of exploratory, production and re-injection wells; mechanical and hydraulic piling of supports for subsea structures such as well heads and manifolds.
Pollution from the FPSOs and drillships of liquid wastes. ExxonMobil secured permission from the EPA to dump up to 400,000 barrels of contaminated produced water and flare 45 mmscf of associated gas per day from the two FPSOs in operation in 2022. That figure will increase to two million barrels of produced water daily when the planned 10 FPSOs are in operation, and will continue for 20 years.
Without consulting the fishermen, the government contracted removal of wrecks which the oil companies alleged were obstructing vessels’ travel between drillships and FPSOs and shorebases. Fishers said that the wrecks had served as fish accumulating devices (FADs) and that they have not been compensated for their loss.
Disturbance to fish habitat and nurseries from geophysical and geotechnical surveys, bottom profiling, surveys and trenching for fibre optic cables and gas-to-energy pipelines.
The sea bed drilling and the emplacement of sub-sea structures for the production of oil and re-injection of associated gas and treated seawater, to maintain reservoir pressure have cumulative impacts on marine life, including what fishers term ‘vibrations in the water’. Sound travels well in water, the oil companies acknowledge the negative effects on cetaceans and turtles but not on fish.
Poaching. The oil workers are illegally fishing off their vessels without permits, allegedly catching high-value tuna species.
Piracy is symptomatic of Guyana’s lawless sea frontier. Newspaper articles from 2010 to the present document the stories of the survivors: the seizure of boats, engines, fish, ‘glue’ (swim bladders); the uncounted number (at least a few hundred in the 21st century) of murdered fishermen, thrown overboard to die by drowning … propelled by criminality and/or a fight over ‘turf’ in the open access fishing grounds. The ‘pirates’ are reputedly other Guyanese fishers, taking advantage of the lack of institutional protection or action in Guyana.
The international legal definition of maritime piracy encompasses criminal acts of violence … on the high seas. The definition of ‘piracy’ in Section 5 of Guyana’s Hijacking and Piracy Act, No. 8 of 2008, expands on that definition by including ‘any illegal act of violence or detention or any act of depredation committed … within Guyana’s … rivers, internal waters or the territorial sea of Guyana’.
The Government of Suriname has legal jurisdiction over both banks of the Corentyne River, an anomaly in international jurisprudence, as the custom is to use the talweg, which is the centre of the principal navigable channel of the waterway, as the demarcation of an international boundary. As many acts of maritime piracy were/are committed by and on Guyanese nationals in Suriname’s waters, Guyana’s 2008 Act addresses jurisdiction: ‘… where an offence under this Act is committed outside Guyana, the person committing such offence may be dealt with in respect of the commission of the offence as if the offence had been committed at any place within Guyana or its territorial waters … [if] the offence is committed on board a vessel registered in Guyana; (b) the offence is committed on board a vessel being leased without crew to a lessee who has his principal place of business in Guyana or … his permanent residence is in Guyana; or (c) the alleged offender is a citizen of Guyana or is on board a vessel in … which the offence is committed when it enters Guyana or is found in Guyana’.
However, the years-long delays in Guyana’s court system translate into justice denied. We summarize two examples. Firstly, on 28 May 2016 four fishers were brutally murdered at sea. The sole survivor left adrift in the sea somehow ‘managed to contact persons at the Number 66 Fishing Complex and informed them of the attack and gave a description of the boat that was used by the perpetrators, the police said. The following day the police went to the Number 65 Village foreshore, Corentyne, where they saw a boat matching the description given. Five men who were aboard were arrested’. The SN article informed further that 7 ½ years after the Police had arrested the accused, the five men pleaded guilty and will be sentenced in December 2023.
The second example concerns two horrific piracy attacks on five fishing boats in Suriname’s waters on 27-28 April and 1 May 2018. The piracy was allegedly set into motion by two Guyanese brothers, and resulted in 16 murdered fishers and nine survivors. One year later, the trial of nine Guyanese fishers ended in a Surinamese court. Subdistrict Judge Marie Mettendaf sentenced seven of the fishers to 25 years each on one charge and 10 years each on another. She sentenced an eighth fisher to 15 years and the ninth to 5 years imprisonment. The rapid application of justice (1 year) in Suriname stands in contrast with the 7 ½ years and counting in Guyana.
On the Guyana side, on 28 June 2019 then President Granger appointed Dr Rishee Thakur to lead a Commission of Inquiry into the piracy attacks and deaths in April-May 2018. Dr Thakur’s report, including six recommendations, was handed over to the President on 31 January 2020. There has been no official response in the four ensuing years – characteristic of the incoming PPP-administration’s response to any initiative taken by their predecessor in government.
Small-scale fishers continue to be treated as small fry, surviving as best they can in a marine space in which oil is King. Fishers repeatedly remind us: ‘We can’t eat oil’. But who in authority is listening?
