pulau betong fishermen livelihood threatened

my fellow citizen journalist (CJ) team-mate, jimmy leow had made two videos before about the plight of the fishermen in pulau betong.  it seemed that their livelihood had been threatened when  commercial trawlers encroached into their fishing grounds within the 5 nautical miles radius.

on sunday, when janet steele, who monitor our ICCJ works was here, jimmy had invited her to go to the fishing village to talk to the fishermen personally. since i was free, i decided to tag along. another CJ, b.s. lim drove janet and me there where we met up with jimmy.

you know, i had been staying in penang all my life and yet i have never been to pulau betong before, so this was my first time setting foot on pulau betong.   when we first arrived, we went to the coffee shop and had a chit chat first… with tan ah kee, the chairman of the pulau betong inshore fishermen association and two other fishermen, lim ah kee and chew moy kong. (see their pictures below)

they told us about their problems (see the star report  and jimmy’s video). i’m not going to write more about their problems here in this blog as i might write in details their problems later on. right now, i’m just going to write on my personal experience and view.

anyway the gist of it was that when the commercial trawlers encroached into their space, the trawlers naturally catch all the fishes and left only a few or none at all for the inshore fishermen and this affect their livelihood. we were told this happened as long as 40 years ago and yes they did made police report (over 10 reports!) but yet the authorities did nothing. well they did at some stage… but then the trawlers after staying away a while, came back again.

tan and chew then took the 4 of us to the jetty area. while janet, jimmy, lim followed close behing chew, i was waking and talking with tan. tan then explained to me about the different fishing nets. wow. i didn’t realise there are so many different kind of nets – that are used for different catch. even fishes alone, different nets for different kind of fish. there are ‘1 layer’ nets (used for prawns), ‘2 layers’ net and ‘3 layers’ net. tan was kind enough to let me go down to the boats to personally touch and feel the nets. he showed me how the net is said to be ‘3 layered’.

this is where all the boats are lined up, reading to go out to the sea. the fishing nets are also inside some of the boats and this was where i got down to the boats to have a close view of the nets.

later on, i got into talking with lim, where i asked him further about the trawlers that encroached into their space.  also asked him something about the village. he said there are about 70 chinese fishermen and about 50 malay fishermen. they  sell their catch directly to some villagers and to 6 households, who will in turn sell them to retailers.

here is a picture where you can see, from a far, some kind of security ‘lighthouse’  (for want of not knowing what to call it. haha). where lim told me that will light up during the night.

here is a close up pic of the ‘lighthouse’. wow! my new camera do have a good zoom feature. it was quite far away and i managed to get a close up picture, though i did not use the full zoom yet.

i have more pictures on my facebook. here is the 2nd video taken by jimmy leow.  jimmy became an investigative video journalist! he set out with tan, into the sea to spy for trawlers.  unfortunately they didn’t manage to catch any that day.