Article

Fisheries

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Fisheries

Fisheries

The fishing industry of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore constitutes one of the region’s oldest and most economically significant sectors, encompassing a wide diversity of gear types, ethnic communities, and marketing arrangements that have evolved considerably from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. From the fixed-stake traps of the Perak coast to the offshore palisade enclosures of Singapore, from the purse seine fleets of the Kedah and Perak river mouths to the trawler fleets that dominated the industry by the mid-1970s, the fishery has been shaped by monsoonal cycles, technological change, and shifting patterns of capital ownership. The records preserved in the Society’s journals document this history across more than eight decades, from colonial administrative surveys of the 1880s to quantitative analyses of the post-independence economy.

Gear, Methods, and Regional Specialisation

The earliest systematic catalogue of Malayan fishing methods appears in the work of Arthur T. Dew, who in 1891 surveyed the fishing industry of the Krian and Kurau districts on the Perak coast. Dew documented a range of fixed-stake traps—collectively termed blat—distinguished by their position relative to shore and the species they targeted. The Blat Jerumal, an out-shore enclosure of stakes with a bamboo or rattan net, was set in approximately three and a half fathoms of water at low spring tides and worked by hauling up a bottom net called the daun (leaf) when sufficient fish had entered [1, pp. 96–97]. Smaller in-shore variants, the Blat Telok and Blat Langei, were constructed of lighter materials and targeted smaller species such as Ikan Sembilan and prawns [1, pp. 97–99]. Mobile gear included the Pukat Hanyut (drift net), 80 to 100 fathoms long and 6 fathoms deep, which dragged the boat along in both tides and required only one or two men to operate, and the Pukat Lengkong (seine net), which encircled fish in shallow water and required five men [1, pp. 100–101]. Dew also recorded the Rawei, a line carrying up to 2,000 unbaited hooks suspended from a rope up to 200 fathoms long, which caught scaleless fish such as shark and skate [1, p. 104].

T. W. Burdon, head of the Singapore Fisheries Department, produced a far more comprehensive taxonomic survey in 1954, organised around a classification scheme he had proposed to the Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council in 1951. His system divided all methods into those securing fish individually (foul-hooking and clean-hooking appliances) and those operating on groups or associations of fish (entrapping, closing, entangling, and investing structures), with a final category for indiscriminate methods such as poisons and explosives [2, pp. 5–76]. The dominant feature of Singapore’s fishery was the kelong, an offshore palisade trap that provided approximately 68 to 70 per cent of domestic landings from local waters, equivalent to 15 per cent of total market supplies including imports; 310 licences were issued for kelong sites in 1952 [2, pp. 37–38]. Construction of a kelong with a 32-depa net in three fathoms of water cost over Straits dollars 16,000 in 1953, with deep-water traps reaching up to Straits dollars 35,000 [2, p. 37]. Burdon also documented the moro ami, a Japanese drive-in net introduced before 1920 that at its peak accounted for nearly 40 per cent of total market handlings but had been reduced to four active units by 1954 following the closure of Indonesian reef fisheries to Singapore-licensed boats [2, pp. 48–49].

On the west coast, the purse seine (pukat jerut) mackerel fishery represented a distinct and highly productive specialisation. K. Gopinath, a Senior Research Officer with the Travancore Fishery Development Scheme, documented this fishery during a four-month field visit in 1948. The purse seine was concentrated at only two locations—Pangkor and Kuala Kedah—and was used almost exclusively for mackerel (Scomber microlepidotus and S. kanagurta) [3, pp. 75–78]. In 1947, 134,580 piculs of mackerel were landed at Pangkor by purse seine nets, forming 58 per cent of Perak’s total fish catch [3, p. 75]. The nets ranged from 140 to 180 fathoms in length and 25 to 30 fathoms in depth, with a uniform half-inch mesh [3, pp. 79–83]. Gopinath contrasted the Chinese method of deploying the net from two sampans moving in opposite directions in a pincer-like encirclement with the Malay method of one boat remaining stationary while the other rowed around the shoal, judging the Chinese technique to be more efficient [3, pp. 79–91].

Economic Structure and Capital Relations

The economic organisation of the fishery varied considerably by region and period, but a recurring theme in the records is the relationship between capital provision and labour. In the Perak coast fishery of the 1880s, the large out-shore blats were owned and worked by Malays, who sometimes received advances from Chinese dealers at the fishing village, agreeing in return to sell their catch through the dealer at a 10 per cent interest rate [1, p. 105]. The smaller blats were generally owned and worked by the Chinese themselves [1, p. 105]. A complete Pukat Lengkong concern—house, net, boats, and furniture—cost approximately $350, and in good seasons one net yielded 50 to 60 pikuls of salt fish per month, falling to 8 to 10 pikuls in bad seasons [1, p. 107]. The six men working a net each held one share of a 7.5-share division, the owner holding an additional 1.5 shares [1, p. 107].

Mubin Sheppard’s 1933 observations of the fishing industry in Kemaman, Terengganu, documented a more pronounced dependency relationship. The industry was divided into the dried fish trade (the principal occupation), the cooked fish trade, and a seasonal whitebait trade, with Singapore as the principal export destination [4, p. 7]. Because nets cost beyond the means of individual Malay fishermen, they had long been dependent on advances from Chinese fish dealers at Kuala Kemaman, and the Dagangang (dealer-creditor) effectively controlled the auction of fish caught with the net for which debt was owed, depressing prices for other dealers [4, p. 8]. Sheppard noted that a Malay Dagangang, Haji Wan Osman, had previously provided competition but was excluded by the arbitrary pricing power of Singapore merchants, and he saw no prospect of the trade returning to Malay control without government interference [4, p. 8].

G. Sivalingam’s 1986 analysis of the fishing economy between 1955 and 1975 traced how successive waves of technological change—from lift and gill-drift nets to purse seines and finally trawlers—restructured the organisation of production and progressively worsened income distribution [5, pp. 51–80]. The shift from labour-intensive to capital-intensive gear created a new class of non-operator capital owners—fish dealers, finance companies, and government cooperatives—who displaced the traditional owner-operator juruselam (fishing expert) and his cooperative crew structure [5, pp. 51–52]. In 1940, 60 per cent of lift net fishermen owned boats and net components; by 1963 under purse seine dominance, only 10 per cent owned both boats and nets, and 62.29 per cent owned neither [5, pp. 71–73]. The 1970 Census reported that more than 62 per cent of all fishery households had no boats [5, p. 75]. The labour share of cash proceeds declined from approximately 63 per cent on lift nets to 45 per cent on purse seines and to roughly 30 per cent on large trawlers [5, pp. 71–77]. Total industry income rose from $105.5 million in 1960 to $541.9 million in 1975, while total employment fell from 125,231 to 116,889, a decline of 7.1 per cent [5, p. 78].

Administrative and Regulatory Frameworks

The regulatory history of the Malayan fishery begins in the records with the licensing regime imposed on the Perak coast in the 1880s. Dew documented the transition from the December 1885 order, which imposed $10 per large stake, $8 per small stake, $8 per large pukat, $10 per small pukat, and $4.80 per prawn net (total $40.80), to the October 1887 revision that reduced the total to $30.80—a 25 per cent reduction—by charging $5 half-yearly per stake set plus 60 cents half-yearly per individual fisherman [1, pp. 109–110]. The fishermen of the district had petitioned against the original order, and the revision was the product of nearly a year’s deliberation [1, p. 109]. Dew also proposed specific conservation measures: out-shore stakes limited to three and a half fathoms depth with a minimum spacing of 400 fathoms and maximum length of 300 fathoms; in-shore stakes limited to two and a half fathoms with 200 fathoms spacing and 120 fathoms maximum length; and the Rawei to be made illegal [1, pp. 118–119].

By the 1960s, the regulatory framework had expanded considerably. The Marine Fisheries Regulation of 1967 classified trawlers into three groups by tonnage and horsepower with distance-from-shore limits of 3, 7, and 12 miles, though enforcement was weak due to a shortage of police vessels [5, p. 56]. Trawlers, which were non-existent in 1955, had by 1975 reached 3,823 boats on the West Coast and 1,922 on the East Coast, generating over 51 per cent of total value added in the fishing industry [5, pp. 51–52].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on fisheries spans more than a century and reflects shifting disciplinary priorities. The earliest contribution, Dew’s 1891 survey, is an administrative document produced in the course of official duties, combining direct interviews with fishermen and farmers at five coastal villages with customs export data [1]. Its export tables remain among the few quantitative records of the pre-World War I Perak fishery [1]. The 1954 monograph Papers on Malayan Fishing Methods, edited by Burdon and Parry, marked a significant advance in systematic documentation, providing a taxonomic framework within which all gear types could be classified and compared [2, pp. 5–76]. Burdon’s Singapore study, grounded in the Fisheries Department’s licensing records and landing statistics for 1952, established the classificatory scheme that organised the companion studies by Parry (Kelantan and Trengganu) and Gibson-Hill (boats) [2].

The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of more analytically oriented studies. Gopinath’s 1950 paper on the purse seine fishery, written from the perspective of an Indian government officer assessing a foreign fishery for possible replication, introduced comparative benchmarks against American purse seine operations and provided detailed technical specifications of equipment [3]. Sivalingam’s 1986 article represented a further shift toward political economy, applying a Marxian analytical framework to document how technological change redistributed income between capital and labour in the fishing sector [5, pp. 51–80]. His work bridged the gap between R. Firth’s earlier ethnographic fieldwork (Malay Fishermen, Their Peasant Economy, 1966) and the quantitative policy debates of the 1970s [5].

Several records in the Society’s collection—Alfred’s 1966 annotated bibliography of Malayan fresh-water fisheries, Banks’s 1958 note on stakes, Ishak bin Ahmad’s 1941 study of Malay fishermen’s superstitions, and the 2009 volume on boats, boatbuilding, and fishing—indicate the breadth of the subject as it has been approached from ecological, technical, cultural, and material perspectives, though the full text of these items is not available in the present records. The overall trajectory of the literature moves from descriptive colonial administration through systematic gear taxonomy to economic analysis, reflecting both the transformation of the fishery itself and the evolving concerns of the scholarly community.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. A.T. Dew (1891). The fishing industry of Krian and Kurau, Perak JSBRAS 23: 95–122.
  2. T.W. Burdon (1954). The fishing methods of Singapore. { In Papers on Malayan fishing methods JMBRAS 27(2): 5–76.
  3. K. Gopinath (1950). The Malayan purse seine (pukat jerut) fishery JMBRAS 23(3): 75–96.
  4. Mubin Sheppard (1995). A note on the fishing industry in Kelantan, 1933 JMBRAS 68(2): 7–8.
  5. G. Sivalingam (1986). The fishing economy of Malaysia 1955–1975 JMBRAS 59(2): 51–80.