Tiger prawn seed and Baishakhi as a catcher

Baishakhi Sardar, a resident of Jagatpur, lost her right arm three years back. She was catching tiger prawn seeds (locally called bagda/bagda min) in waist-deep water when a shark or kamot attacked her. It caught hold of her right arm and dragged her into deep water. Baishakhi's left hand firmly held on to the fishing net and in desperation she kept hitting the kamot with the wooden frame of the net. Sensing the danger, those fishing with Baishakhi rushed to her rescue. They grabbed her by the waist and tried hard to get her out of the grip of the kamot. Finally, they succeeded, but at the cost of her right arm. Baishakhi was unconscious as she bled profusely. She was in hospital for months before she came back home. While narrating the incident during my visit to her house in Jagatpur, Baishakhi confessed that she still went to the river to catch tiger prawns.

The Sundarbans is a land where fishing folk coexist with those who go to the forest in search of wood or honey. With rivers flowing around the settled and forested islands, fishing becomes a very important activity for the people. People set out on boats to fish at the confluence of rivers and the Bay of Bengal. They also catch fish or crab in the narrow creeks inside the forest. At times, two to three boats are anchored in the middle of the river and nets are cast wide with one end tied to the boats. Fishermen often spend hours and days catching fish. This chapter focuses on the fishers, but not on the so-called traditional fishing communities. Rather, I focus on the women tiger prawn seed catchers such as Baishakhi and people who are involved in prawn collecting, farming and trading in the Sundarbans. It is against the background of raging debates about the environmental sustainability of prawn farming, particularly in the coastal regions, that the chapter delves into the dynamics of prawn trade. However, the chapter does not look into a struggle between the state and fishing community as has been done by Jaladas (2013) in his research on the eviction of fishermen from the Jambudwip island on grounds of violating the state forest act.

Biru Sardar and the tiger

In the Sundarbans, the so-called land of tides and tigers, people's livelihood revolves around the forest, water and narrow creeks. Stories of human encounters with tigers abound. After a day's work, when people meet at local tea or grocery shops on the islands, tiger stories often figure in their otherwise mundane conversations. The most interesting story that I heard during my fieldwork in Kusumpur was how an adivasi Sardar once killed a tiger. I heard the story for the first time as it was told by a few villagers, who happened also to be the workers of a local voluntary organization (Sangathan), when one evening they congregated at the tea stall next to the organization's office. The workers were sharing tiger stories amongst themselves: stories of tigers killing people and instances when people escaped death at the fangs of the tiger. Suddenly Ratan, a worker of the Sangathan, said, ‘But nothing beats the story of Biru Sardar’. ‘There you are’, everyone present in the stall instantaneously agreed with him. Turning to me, Prafulla, another worker of the Sangathan, said, ‘You might like to hear this story, as you seemed interested in knowing about the adivasis in Sardarpara [locality where Sardars live]’. Then Prafulla and the others asked Ratan to narrate the story. Ratan happened to be the first narrator but later I heard the same story from other villagers who had all heard it from their fathers and grandfathers. According to the villagers, the incident happened when Kusumpur had already become inhabited. The story goes like this:

With foresight, the financial costs of avoiding or reducing climate change impacts are minimized if the investments are made several decades before the impacts occur. This is because the climate system has several built-in timelags, and because large and long-term investments are required to avoid future climate change challenges, particularly in the energy sector.

People value income in the future less than income in the present. Economists capture this ‘time preference of money’ as a number known as the discount rate. A high discount rate favours the present over the future, while a low discount rate favours the future. The choice of discount rate used has an enormous effect on which investments are deemed cost-effective. At one extreme, private sector investors equate the discount rate to the cost of borrowing money, which is usually 5% or more above the inflation rate. The social discount rate is the return expected on social investments, and is significantly lower – perhaps 1 to 3% per annum. At the other extreme, some people apply ethical arguments to suggest that the discount rate should be zero or even negative. The basis of this argument is that almost everyone values their children's and grandchildren's lives above their own, and will make great personal sacrifices on their behalf.

Whether it is cheaper to tolerate climate change or to prevent it has always been a technically challenging analysis, given the large uncertainties on both sides. Arguments based on commercial discount rates and promoted by sectors with a strong interest in maintaining the status quo suggest that the costs of avoiding climate change far exceed the costs of adapting to climate change. Their preference is to emit greenhouse gases now and deal with the consequences later. In this view, mitigation costs tend to be overestimated, for instance by not considering the co-benefits of reducing pollution and waste, or underestimating the fall in cost when new, renewable technologies are adopted at large scales. In contrast, the true adaptation costs are underestimated.

The way in which we have transformed the land surface is obvious, but we have also altered the composition of the atmosphere, raised the temperature of the air and ocean, caused rainfall to increase in some places and decrease in others, and caused ice bodies to melt andsea levels to rise. The changes we observe have a direct connection to human well-being. The sheer number of people alive today is partly responsible for the size of our footprint on the planet, but the dominant cause is the dramatic increase in modern times in the per person consumption of resources and production of waste. The lifestyles to which many people in the developed world have become accustomed, and to which the less fortunate legitimately aspire, come at a large cost to the environment. Most of that debt will be borne by future generations: our comfort and luxury create future disadvantage. This raises profound ethical issues as well as practical difficulties in persuading present generations that the problem is real and urgent. The combined inertia of the global climate system, the political systems which govern our actions, and the technology systems that satisfy our demands for energy and mobility mean that, by the time everyone feels the heat, we are likely to have overshot the climate ‘comfort zone’ in which modern civilization evolved. This will place the welfare of humans and the millions of other species with which we share the planet in jeopardy.

The purpose of this book is to explain the scientific understanding of climate change as simply as possible, but without glossing over the complexity of how the world works. Other books with similar objectives exist, but none focuses specifically on Southern Africa. Our intended audience is educated citizens: people in a variety of professions, university students, high-school learners, and people who have an interest in the world and keeping it in a liveable condition for their children and grandchildren.