Fish, Food, and Hunger: The Potential of Fisheries for Alleviating Malnutrition by George Kent

Author:George Kent [Kent, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429712845
Google: qXakDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53096875
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-04-09T09:15:55+00:00

Processing

Most fish consumed in India is fresh or preserved by sun-drying. Fish is also smoked, salted, and fermented. Freezing and canning are not carried out on a large scale except for the export market.

Canning and freezing generally are too expensive for products destined for poor people. Even if they were not expensive, they might not be advantageous for the poor. One major effect of preservation is that it increases the likelihood that the product will be shipped to markets at great distances from the point of production. Prices are so high in Calcutta, for example, that it draws fish from all over southern India, both east and west coasts. The modernization of fisheries in general, and improved preservation in particular, regularly result in moving fish away from the poor. Poor people in remote areas might not get any fish at all if it weren’t so perishable.

However, there are some cases in which better processing might be helpful to the poor. Improvements in traditional low cost processing techniques can be sought specifically for those products that are favored by the poor but are not particularly attractive to the middle and upper classes. For example, work done at the College of Fisheries in Mangalore indicates that salted and pressed sardine and dried whitebait might provide higher quality dried fish than is obtained currently by sun-drying fish on the beach. This dried sardine product can be important for bridging the three-month monsoon period when fresh fish is not available. Undoubtedly there are many ways in which traditional preservation techniques can be improved to reduce wastage and improve the quality and durability of the product.

In India and elsewhere, much attention has been given to the improved utilization of “trash” fish so that instead of being discarded or used as animal feed it is used for human consumption. Processes have been developed for producing attractive edible products. For example, the Gujarat Fisheries Aquatic Sciences Research Institute has developed good quality salted and dried fish fillets with a long shelf life. The institute has also used trash fish to make fish protein concentrate, and used this product to make several different food items popular in Gujarat (papad, papadi, chakri, sev, ganthia, sakkarpara, salted biscuits).36 Much of this sort of work in India and elsewhere has been geared to the preparation of products for the regular commercial market, and not for products targeted for the alleviation of malnutrition. However, some products such as the Gujarati fish fillets have been well received by the local poor. Whether products designed for the poor can be commercially viable remains an open question. If there is no subsidy, processing for middle class markets or for animal feed is likely to be more profitable.

Many inland fisheries suffer from very uneven production schedules. In some districts the tanks dry up in the summer, with the result that all have to be harvested almost simultaneously. Local demand is saturated and the fish farmers are obligated to dispose of the fish at very low prices, often to outsiders.

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