Sebnem Bal, 24, wanted to be a designer ever since she was a kid. But, after three years of graphic design education at a university in Istanbul, she had to quit school. She now works as a full-time cashier at a supermarket on the outskirts of Istanbul to support her family, which is in financial trouble.
Osman, her father, speaks in a soft, tired voice. Sipping from his tea, he tells me he started fishing at a very young age. “My father never wanted me to be a fisher, but I insisted. I started by assisting the fishers in our area when I was as little as 12.” Now, at 52-years-old, he regrets being a fisher: “Fishing is a passion for me, but I can hardly make ends meet. I have a family of four. My wife isn’t working. I’m financially doomed. Telling my daughter she had to quit university to support our family was one of the toughest things I did in my life.”
Bal is not the only Istanbul fisher who is going through financial difficulty. Small-scale fishing is in a state of crisis in Turkey. Via video call, academic Saadet Karakulak explains that the rise of industrial fishing has taken a toll on traditional fishers: “Due to the assertive neoliberal economic policies of the ruling AKP government, the fishing industry in Turkey grew immensely in the past decade. Industrial fishers increase investment year after year, reaching farther and deeper,” says Karakulak. “However, as the focus shifts towards industrial fishers, traditional fishers face the threat of disappearance as both their catches and livelihoods worsen.”
The fishing industry employs 250,000 people in Turkey, which is less than 0.5 percent of the population. There are 10-to-15,000 traditional boats and around 30,000 traditional fishers. They catch around 45,000 tons of fish every year–which is only about 10 percent of the total 431,000 tons of national yield. A few decades ago, the picture was completely different: in the 60s, there were almost no industrial fishing practices in Turkey. It all changed very quickly when the center-right Ozal government ambitiously started setting up industrial fishing boats, only for certain types of fish like anchovies and alalonga in the mid-80s. Of course, the scope widened very quickly. Prospering immensely in the past decade, Turkish industrial fishers have even reached out to other markets: 52 seiners have been fishing small pelagics in Mauritanian waters since 2015.
Commercially important pelagic fishes migrate from the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea by passing through the Istanbul Strait in northwest Turkey–bringing Europe and Asia together. This geographical advantage makes fishing economically important to Istanbul; the Bosphorus Strait is home to an ecosystem that makes up 15 percent of the total fishing economy of Turkey.
Erdogan Kartal, 58, has been a traditional fisherman on the Bosphorus for almost 40 years. He says the working conditions were very different when he first started, too. “I remember the days when one could easily make a proper living by fishing. How funny does it sound now! I can safely say that we used to earn two-three times more than what we make today,” says Kartal. There is not any record on how much traditional fishers make on average, as small-scale boats do not have a monthly salary system. For each trip, the captain gets half of the total profit, sets some money aside for the expenses, and distributes the rest between crew members. But Kartal explains that even for the fairly experienced, with the best equipment and team, you can make no more than 2,780-3,180 TL a month as a crew member. The best-case financial scenario for traditional fishers in Istanbul today is earning just about the net minimum wage for single people—which is 2,826 TL a month. Some, however, make just barely 1,500 TL a month. The payment system in traditional boats naturally results in less people doing more work for more share from the profit, worsening the working conditions for the crew.