Fishermen in south face new challenges

Sitting in his rickety boat and surrounded by big fishing nets, Radi Sa'doun glances at the impressive fish he has just caught. "Now we can even take big fish home," he told IRIN in the Al-Faw region of Basra in southern Iraq. During Saddam's time, the price of fish was fixed at 7,000 dinars a kg (almost US $3) and they were going only to the banquets of the ruling family and their followers, he said. The fishing is good on the six-kilometre long river in Al-Faw. The town lies southeast of Basra on the Shatt al-Arab river. It's one of the richest fishing areas in Iraq, formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and flowing southeast into the Persian Gulf, forming part of the Iraq-Iran border. Fishermen say trade was really bad during Saddam's regime and that they were allowed to go to sea for a maximum of 10 days at a time and had to pay a fee of 10,000 dinars (US $5) in order to do so. "It was not profitable to go fishing when we had to sell our big fish to the Fishing Association for very little money. We couldn't go out beyond 15 km because we would be harassed by the nearby Iranian side," he explained. Sa'doun said anyone who stayed longer than 10 days at sea would go to court. "Now we have all this freedom, but we don't have enough oil. Instead, it's getting smuggled out of the region without any government control," he claimed. The fishermen now face another problem. Kazim Mahdi was repairing his fishing boat when he told IRIN that they used to be given cheap fuel during Saddam's time. "We used to have 10 barrels of petrol for each 10-day trip. Although we couldn't sell fish to the Iranians or the Kuwaitis since we had wars with them, we could at least sell the fuel we had left over on the black market," Mahdi said. "There's a shortage because it's getting smuggled illegally," he claimed, adding that the price of a barrel, which contains 20 litres, is now $25. Mahdi added that that wasn't the only problem. After the war, the Fishing Association that they belonged to became the city council's responsibility, which is not yet fully operational. They used to have direct links with the Agriculture Ministry. "Now we have to [work elsewhere in order to buy] spare parts for the boats and fishing tools and they are hard to find. The shore which used to be cleaned every two months because of pollution hasn't been cleaned for over a year," he explained. Ali Hadi, head of Animal Resources at Basra's Agriculture Administration, told IRIN that fishermen used to have a union which was responsible for their administration. "We were importing motors for boats for example. Providing fuel was coordinated between us, the port administration, the committee for oil products and the customs office. Now there is no customs office and individual boat owners have to deal directly for their petrol," he said. Iraqi tanker companies will soon be able to bid for contracts to transport fuel for fishing boats under a scheme launched by the South Distribution Companies (SDC). "What we are going to do is to make the fuel process transparent. To be able to monitor the outgoing fuel, we are going to use a registration process so that all drivers of oil tankers should eventually register themselves in order to regulate fuel sales," Kevin Thomas, the fuel representative for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the south, told IRIN. However, the new scheme supposedly only applies to the Abu Flous port in Basra, which is used primarily for trade, not fishing. As many fishermen said, most of the attention has been given just to the commercial port at Abu Flous. But Thomas said that he hoped the CPA would extend the scheme to the other ports.