The Indian Ocean

by Michael Pearson

  The implications of this revolution are profound. Ports around the Indian Ocean rose and fell according to how quickly they provided the facilities needed for container traffic. Colombo was very fast off the mark, and became the hub for all of South Asia in the 1980s. Over the last decade or so Mumbai has built a whole new container port, and Colombo has suffered from this competition. In East Africa Mombasa assumed the same role, handling 1,300 containers in 1975, and no less than 80,100 in 1983. Some totally new ports have appeared. One example is Marmagao, developed to export unprocessed iron ore. In the 1950s it was not a major port at all, but in the 1960s it was ranked third in India in terms of volume of traffic, and second in the 1970s and 1980s, behind only Mumbai.41 In southern Arabia proximity to oil has dictated success. Aden was reduced to very minor significance, and Dubai/Jebel Ali, closer to the oil money, took off.

  Southeast Asia provides an excellent case study of the implications of this revolution. Before containers Singapore was far and away the greatest port in the region. The colonial capitals, such as Jakarta, played a regional role. They had connections with the metropole, and were also centres for a dense local traffic handled by smaller steam ships, some owned by Dutch interests and some by migrant Chinese. Traditional craft retained a minor role feeding in to the larger circuits. The situation overall was not positive. Bangkok, for example, was located 30 km up-river, and the bar at the mouth downstream from the city meant only ships with a maximum draft of 16 feet could enter. Dredging in the 1960s increased this to 28 feet, still nowhere near deep enough for the new generation of monster ships. Bangkok was an inefficient port: in 1965 they unloaded 400 tonnes in every 24 hours, while a more competitive rate was about 750 tonnes in eight hours.

  The arrival of containers produced major changes, essentially imposed from Europe and the United States, for southeast Asian ports which could not provide the facilities the rich world insisted on were simply bypassed and left to wither. The need was not only for new docks, but more generally intermodal ports which linked road, rail, and ship in one operation. Singapore moved very quickly, and by the 1970s was 'on line'. By 1983 over one-half of Singapore's liner cargo was containerised. Today it is the biggest container port in the world. Other southeast Asian ports followed, and the number of containers loaded and unloaded in ASEAN ports rose from 200,000 TEU in 1972 to 1.1 million in 1978, and 2.5 million in 1983. Singapore acts as a regional hub, along with Colombo, Mumbai, and Hong Kong; about 70 per cent of containers landed in Singapore are trans-shipped. Increasing size means that all these ports have to constantly expand, running fast to stand still just as was the case in the race between engineers a century ago (see pages 211–12). The big container ships today, 6,000 TEU or more, are called post-Panamax, meaning they are too big to go through the Panama Canal, which can only take up to about 3,800 TEU; but economies of scale mean that they are still viable, even though they have to go around Cape Horn.42

  The end result is that the 'traditional' Indian Ocean port city, which we have described at different historical times, has begun to disappear. In particular, there are now very few remnants of what used to be the norm, that is port cities which are primarily ports. Today there are places where ships call to be sure – Mumbai, Kolkata, Basra, Kuwait, Mombasa, Bangkok and so on – but these are no longer dominated by their port function: they are really cities, part of whose function is to have a port attached. The port is no longer the raison d'être.

  The other major, and analogous, change was the arrival of specialised ships which are purpose built to carry only one cargo. First were oil tankers, which in the 1930s carried oil from Abadan. These are real monsters. The biggest today is apparently the Jahre Viking, which is 458 metres long, weighs 565,000 dwt, has a beam of 68 metres, and a draught of 24 metres. So vast is the deck space that the crew get around on motorbikes. Other purpose-built single-cargo monsters carry dry cargo, such as iron ore, bauxite, coal and phosphate. Another variant are the unsightly car carriers operating from Japan and South Korea to all parts of the globe, which essentially are floating car park buildings. My local newspaper recently described one entering Sydney harbour. 'She's pig ugly – a charmless, grey, round-fronted flat-backed 50,000 tonne brick with off-white funnels slapped drunkenly around the deck.' But they are efficient. This one carried 3,300 Japanese cars to five ports around the Australian coast. The round-trip was to take only 35 days. The master and engineer were Japanese, the crew Indian and Filipino, the registration Panamanian.43

  These mono-cargo ships need new jetties specialising in the rapid loading of one specific commodity. Examples are Kharg Island for oil, Paradeep, Dampier and Marmagao for iron ore, or Aqaba for rock phosphate. These loading places are very different from traditional ports. Dampier, in northern Western Australia, will stand as a case study of this new phenomenon. In 1966 Hamersley Iron, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, began to develop iron ore mines in sites 300 km inland from the coast. Six are operating today, with a seventh due to come on stream soon. The statistics are impressive. Ore is carried to the wharves at Dampier in trains 2.5 km long, consisting of 226 wagons, each of which carries 105 tonnes of ore. Nine trains a day make the journey. At the port, in Dampier Sound, two wharves are used, one 295 metres long, the other 325 metres, which respectively can handle ships of 180,000 dwt and 250,000 dwt. Two wagons, carrying 210 tonnes of ore, are emptied on the manual wharf, the smaller one, in 130 seconds. On the automated bigger wharf it takes only 90 seconds. Up to 500 ships call at Dampier each year, the largest being dependent on tides, as the departure channel is only 15.5 metres deep. Every year no less than 55 million tonnes of ore are exported to destinations all around the world.

  All this is impressive enough. However, what is most interesting is that Dampier, like the oil terminals in the Gulf, is hardly a port at all, at least not in the way we have described Indian Ocean ports in earlier periods. The process of loading is very highly mechanised, especially on the newer, longer, wharf. A minimum number of skilled workers drive the machines. None of them normally board the bulk carriers. All this contrasts strongly with earlier times, when stevedores linked wharf and ship. Similarly, ports used to be distinguished from inland towns by their cosmopolitan nature and heterogeneous population. This no longer applies. These huge ships are fully loaded in 24 to 30 hours, and their maximum turn-around time is 36 hours. Few of the crew have time to land. The crews are almost entirely non-Australian, so that visa requirements also hinder going ashore. There is a complete dichotomy between the crews and the wharf workers: the former never go ashore, the latter are only very remotely connected with the sea in any way at all. Even the bulk carriers in a way seem to deny the sea. They are ugly, but efficient, monsters whose sailing is in no way constrained by deep structure matters: the sea has been defeated.44

  The social changes which have resulted are also dramatic. Most obviously, the workforce on the docks has declined very rapidly. This has meant the end, at least in the first world countries around the ocean, of a wharf workforce which traditionally was among the most militant of trade unionists. They have been replaced by a handful of skilled workers, highly paid and often not unionised at all. In third world ports a mass of 'coolie' labour has also been dispensed with. So also on board ship, where the transition has been to the employment of largely unskilled, and very low paid, third world crews.

  Westerners cruising for pleasure have a very different maritime experience, if indeed they have one at all. Today some cruise in small yachts, others travel on vast cruise ships. One gets little ozone in their accounts. They do not describe a liminal experience. One author wrote acerbicly that cruising yachts come into the harbour under power, not sail. 'For them the harbor is motel only, a stop along a longer passage, a stop promising a yacht-club mooring, a yacht-club hot shower, a yacht-club dinner.'45 An account by an Australian woman of her travels with her husband in 1992, on a voyage Singapore–Galle–Oman–Aden–Red Sea–Suez Canal, reinforces this. Between Galle and Oman,


  The days seem short and the nights tediously long. I take the first watch until midnight, and my second from 4 a.m. to around 7 a.m. After that I can sleep for as long as I like but to my annoyance I invariably wake around nine. By the time I do the usual morning things – breakfast, wash up, clean and tidy the boat – the morning has gone. After lunch we read, listen to music, and enjoy being together. Alan [her husband] keeps radio skeds with other yachts every six hours and these are often fun if there is a 'Recipe Swap' or a 'Trivial Pursuit' or some other light-hearted attempt to brighten the day. Their greatest value, though, is in the passing on of information about conditions ahead: sea state, wind strength, weather, traps and nets, other shipping, floating objects, schools of fish.

  On fine days she washed her hair, shaved her legs and baked bread.46 So also on the vast cruise liners, where it is the bars, restaurants, gambling facilities and duty-free shopping which seem to be the main attraction. Modern stabilisation devices mean that there is hardly any sense of being at sea at all.

  At least this cannot be said of the round-the-world racers. Some see these as mere indulgent showing off by people with more money than sense, especially as when one gets into trouble it appears to be requisite that the nearest land state provide all possible assistance, regardless of cost, and with no thanks given. Others see them as merely opportunities for sponsors to hawk their brand names. Yet at least this is extremely maritime. Racing along in the roaring 40s and furious 50s at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, speeds of 22 knots (25 mph) and even 30 knots can be achieved, albeit hazardously and with great discomfort. One Whitbread competitor, nearing Fremantle, wrote that 'Everything's broken, everybody's hurt, we stink, the boat stinks, we haven't been out of our foul-weather gear for 16 days.' 'It's scary to have a 30-foot wave chasing you.'47

  Other modern seafarers are rich first world people who anachronistically make replicas of 'traditional' craft and sail them. Examples are many: the various replicas of the ships of the European early voyagers: Columbus, Captain Cook, the VOC ships the Batavia and the Duyfken. Thor Heyerdahl did this, and we have quoted his account of his reed boat earlier. In 1979 Tim Severin began to build a dhow using authentic materials. It was 97 feet, with cotton sails, and held together with coir, though it is revealing that he had to import craftsmen from the remote Laccadive Islands to help, as no one in the Gulf, where the boat was made, had experience in making sewn boats. His long account, in both a video and a book is at least an attempt to find out for today what dhow sailing from the Gulf to Guangzhou was like 1,200 years ago. Other dhows are still being built for oil rich Gulf potentates, this time for racing.48

  More seriously, the Indian Ocean today is very much part of a worldwide economy. The preferred term is globalisation, which briefly means the compression of space and time. The implications for life around and on the ocean are major. As one concrete example, the World Bank interferes, or gives advice, quite routinely, and this has to be followed on pain of no more loans. In 1995 the Prime Minister of Madagascar dismissed the Governor of the island's Reserve Bank. True he had been reckless, but his end was mandated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as the price of their continued assistance. In the same year the IMF forebodingly made it clear that it was 'disappointed' with how the Comoros economy was going. Five years earlier they had insisted that the numbers in the Civil Service of the islands be reduced. Certainly the numbers were bloated, but the service had been the main white collar employer on the islands.49 In similar fashion, we pointed out earlier that Mauritius for a time was given privileged access to the European Union, but when their textiles became too competitive quotas were imposed.

  Case studies of the fishing and pearling industries, and of tourism, will show clearly the benefits and losses from globalisation for people around the shores of the ocean. We can distinguish three broad periods in the modern history of Indian Ocean fishing: the colonial period, when traditional fishers were undermined by western intrusion; the period after independence, when newly independent states tried to promote indigenous enterprise; and then the last twenty years or so, when an increasingly integrated world economy has impacted in deleterious fashion on these nascent industries.

  The colonial state had an effect on India's fishing communities quite early on. The Kolis were the traditional fisherfolk of Mumbai. Once the British took over the port they were subject to taxation. The British appointed a headman for the community, who was not a member but was one of the Parsi community, famous as intermediaries between the colonial power and local people. His job was to collect taxation on behalf of the British government. In the 1830s however the British sacked the Parsi collector and established direct tax collection. This is to be seen as one of many examples where the colonial state began to impact directly on its native subjects.50

  Independent India made great efforts to turn fishing into a major generator of food for the domestic market, and foreign currency earner from exports. The fish catch rose from a little over 500,000 tons in 1955–56 to 1.7 million tons in 1988–89. The value of the total catch was estimated at Rs 30 million in 1941, and Rs 3,473 million in 1981–82. Yet these gains, which were mirrored to an extent in other littoral states, did not mean that the ocean was a major producer in global terms. This is not solely a result of outdated techniques; warm oceans in general produce fewer fish than cold ones, as the warmth keeps phytoplankton production low. The most productive part of the Indian Ocean is in the extreme south, and this is far from the major states of the ocean. The ocean has 20 per cent of the world's ocean area, and 30 per cent of its population, but produced less than 4 per cent of the total world fish catch in 1960. By 1975 of the total world catch the Pacific produced about 52 per cent, the Atlantic and Arctic oceans about 41 per cent, the Mediterranean 3 per cent and the Indian Ocean about 5 per cent. However, by 1998 the Indian Ocean catch had risen from 3 million tons to 6 million tons.51 How was this achieved, and what were the benefits and costs? We will concentrate on India.

  In the decades after independence Indian fishing went through the painful process of a transition from using artisanal techniques to developing industrial fishing practices. Traditional fishing was caste based, used manual power, and produced small catches. In Kerala, for example, most fishing was done by traditional communal fishing groups in small canoes. On the other, Coromandel, coast even in the 1970s fishers used catamarans, and masula boats, the latter being sewn-plank craft with no floor or frame ribbing, and using no sail. The catamarans were merely several logs lashed together, yet they ventured out up to 15 miles to fish. As we have pointed out previously, the high surf on this coast was a constant menace when these boats came back to shore. A detailed study of one village in Tamilnadu in the mid 1970s found all the inhabitants were dependent on fishing, and all were from one low caste. The main boats they used were simple log rafts which came from Kerala. Each night the logs were separated and dried, and next day tied together again. These people also engaged in beachseining, when a boat took a large net out and then it was dragged in from the shore, hopefully with a catch inside. This method is clearly very 'low tech', and the returns erratic and unpredictable. The nets, which were large and expensive, could not be used when they were wet, so the fishers needed nine of them for each day's fishing.52

  The overall changes which occurred in Indian fishing were analogous to the Green Revolution in third world agriculture. In the 1970s India's potential catch was 4.5 million tons a year, and only 1.5 million was actually being achieved. Part of the problem was low domestic demand; the average Indian ate 3 kg a year, the average Japanese 40 kg. The government, often in alliance with western aid donors, promoted the use of trawlers, hoping to increase exports. But increased exports have led to decreased availability, and higher prices, in India. Most of the trawlers are foreign made and owned, most of the profits leave India, even the labour on the deep sea trawlers is not Indian. On locally owned craft owners sometimes prefer using crew from groups with no background in fi
shing, they being cheaper and more malleable than traditional fishers.53 Theorists who write about third world 'dependency' would find all this very familiar.

  In Kerala major changes began in the 1950s, helped by foreign assistance. This increased in the early 1960s as there developed a huge rise in demand for frozen fish in Japan and the USA. Exports to these markets went from 500 tons at the end of the 1950s to 1,500 tons just three years later. The brokers made huge profits. The landed price for fish caught by artisanal fishers was about Rs 150 a tonne, but the export value could be even Rs 4,000.54 The key change was the move to using European-type boats with inboard motors; this change was promoted by a joint Norwegian–Indian project. Other changes included the use of nylon nets, as opposed to coir or cotton ones, and freezing so that fish and prawns could be exported to America and Japan. Local fishers had to compete with foreign trawlers, which vacuumed up marine life in a totally random way. Especially hard hit were demersal (bottom dwelling) fish species. Once a given fishing ground was no longer productive the trawlers could move on: the traditional fisherfolk could not.

  This Kerala case study typifies the dramatic and painful transition. 'The greatest asset of the fishermen of Kerala is their accumulated knowledge about fish, fish habits, waves, currents and stars which they have, through generations of learning by doing, handed down from generation to generation.' Now this was all cast aside. Motors neutralised their skill in rowing and sailing, fish finding equipment made redundant their folk wisdom which told them where to find fish. Wages in the new sector of the industry rose much higher than did those in the artisanal area.55

  The decline of the traditional sector was advanced by a shift in demand in the early 1960s. From this time prawns, in America shrimps, have been a major export for India and some southeast Asian countries. The results were mixed and changed over time. Prawns are caught by large deep-sea trawlers, but by the mid 1970s these were, in Kerala, fishing too close in shore, to the detriment of the artisanal sector. Subsequently this sector began to compete by using motors also, and nylon nets. Now the problem became overfishing and declining stocks. On land the women of the male fishers, who traditionally handled cleaning and marketing, were slowly replaced by people not from fisher communities, but rather new capitalists who treated fishing as what it in fact was becoming: an industry. In a related area, local women used to smoke and salt fish to preserve it. They lost this role when cold storage came in.