#BottomTrawlers operating in #India are fishing largely for prawns, a high-value export product. The practice uses a very fine net that sweeps across the ocean floor, catching not just prawns that live on the bottom of the sea but also all the other forms of marine life. Read on.

These non-target, (often commercially unviable) #species caught in nets are collectively called ‘bycatch.’ #Bycatch comprises multiple things such as other fish that live on the sea bottom, young ones of many fish species and even shells, sea snakes and mantis shrimps.

Bycatch that has no economic value is usually discarded back into the sea and is known as ‘discards.’ However, these trends have been gradually changing over the past few years.

As prawn catches dwindle, the nature of the trawling industry is changing from a fishery that targeted prawns to a biomass-driven fishery - one that catches anything and everything from the sea and derives economic value from it by converting it to products such as fish meal.

Fish meal feeds the poultry and aquaculture industries! While these trends are concerning, it’s important to note that trawling became widespread in India as a result of policies that favoured large-scale, mechanised fisheries that could maximise the ‘revenue’ from the oceans.

Now that the implications of trawling are well-known, some regulatory measures are underway in a few coastal states such as disallowing registration of new trawlers and incentivizing fishers to convert their trawlers to deep-sea fishing vessels.

Additionally, state fishing laws restrict #trawlers from fishing in near-shore waters in order to reserve them for small-scale fishers, though #fishers have reported poor implementation in many places.

While it’s crucial to regulate and potentially phase out bottom trawling completely, equitable measures of doing this need to be thought of so that the thousands of livelihoods that currently depend on it are not suddenly left in a lurch.