By Maher Hamoud Close Up Marginal Investment This country is home to millions of Sudanese migrants, a community that experts believe has the potential to stoke economic development — if someone would let it By Maher Hamoud By Maher Hamoud By Maher Hamoud By Maher Hamoud By Maher Hamoud

By Maher Hamoud

The Damiettans did it!” This is how people of Ezbet El-Burg like to portray the Hollywood-style drama that unfolded off the coast of Somalia in August this year. Residents of the small town on Egypt’s north coast are still talking about the heroic escape of their fellow fishermen; freeing themselves from pirates, killing four and capturing another eight. Ezbet El-Burg, literally ‘the sailor’s town,’ and its fishing fleet, the largest in Egypt, have been facing adversity for years now. And piracy is far from the residents’ biggest concern.

The community here, like many others across the country, is dealing with a burgeoning array of obstacles from rising costs and bureaucratic intervention, to worsening fishing conditions that are making it increasingly difficult for the town’s residents to continue the traditions that made the industry what it is today.

As the residents struggle to cope with the pressures of modernization and doing business in Egypt, there is a growing sense of persecution and helplessness in the face of change.

Traveling north to Ezbet El-Burg from Damietta City is an adventure all of its own. A narrow single-lane road is the town’s only land connection to the outside world, helping to preserve the place’s unique local flavor. The town is caught in a time warp, and looks not unlike Cuba, with legions of 50-year-old Dodge cars lining the streets.

Ezbet El-Burg is literally an island: The Mediterranean is to the north, Manzala Lake to the west, the Nile to the east and the Ratama Canal to the south. The geography has made it a natural fishing harbor since ancient times, a past that is reflected by the fact that the Greek language is still widely spoken.

Estimates put the number of boats in the town at a little over 2,700, which would make it the largest fishing fleet in the Middle East. It is certainly Egypt’s largest.

Houssam Khalil, head of Damietta’s Fishermen and Boat Owners Organization says that this number is not quite accurate though. “Ezbet El-Burg has 1,050 registered boats. The rest are generally boats registered in other Egyptian harbors that prefer to operate from here where the market is bigger,” he says.

Boats range in length from 15 to 35 meters and host crews of between eight and 40 members. Not all of the crews are necessarily Damiettans. Boat owners bring in labor from all over Egypt, making the town important to the wider Egyptian economy, says Khalil.

The town is dominated by the fishing industry from mechanics and food suppliers to spare parts stores. While men fill most jobs, a small number of women peel shrimp and clean calamari.

The fish market itself is a perfect example of a free market economy, for which modern authorities can claim no credit in its development. Boats arrive throughout the night, racing to be at the front of the supply line to their particular harbor’s fish ring, the unit that brokers deals between boats and the fish markets.

The real business starts around 6am when the offloading of fish begins. The first boat back receives the best price for its haul from the fish ring traders, as it is considered the freshest. Then the second boat’s catch is worth a little less and so on for each boat until about 9am.

Next come the retailers. In another highly organized scene, they buy stocks from the fish ring in an open auction free from bureaucracy.

“A standardized fish box normally weighs between 20 and 22 kilograms. A small boat would have capacity for 60 to 80 boxes and a big one would carry from 75 to 100,” says Sameer Khalil, owner of a fish ring.

Boat owners are friendly people, who prefer to keep problems to themselves, instead focusing on the businesses that support their families and those of their crew. On most occasions they are diplomatic, simply smiling politely and referring inquisitive reporters onto another captain saying, “He’s a good guy. He knows everything.”

But behind the smiles, all is not well in the industry. As one captain of a busy, well-maintained boat put it: “We have a lot of problems. God is great and his mercy is expansive.”

The huge Ezbet El-Burg fleet sails both the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, fishing in international waters as well as the territories of Libya, Malta, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan and Djibouti, despite the fact that this is often illegal.

“Many fishing agreements had been established with neighboring countries, but all are currently expired and the General Authority for Water Resources of Egypt does not care about renewing them, so every boat is solely responsible of any risk,” says Khalil.

Tales of crews being arrested somewhere or other can be heard on a monthly basis in the town, with Libyan authorities reputed to be of most concern. “You can be in international waters and suddenly find yourself in Libyan waters [because they] are very large,” says Mohamed Ahmed, one of the town’s older fishermen. “Once you’re caught, there’s no mercy and they never reveal where the crew is kept. They even deny any arrests they make for months. Libya has been like that for so long,” he claims.

Pushed by financial commitments, boats regularly sail in terrible weather conditions, with no regulations to forbid them from taking such risks. There are many stories of crews and boats lost to storms, and of the government neglecting its responsibilities on the high seas.

The tragic story of 12 men who drowned in Egyptian waters, just north of Alexandria last winter is still fresh in the minds of many people. Gamal Maylo, a 34-year-old fisherman remembers that disaster well.

“They called every port on the coast by radio and even used mobile phones that still had network coverage, but no one wanted to help. After two hours, a rescue boat was sent from Port Said, but took two hours to reach them and by then the crew was already dead,” he recalls.

Mohamed El-Sonny, a former fisherman in his late twenties who now works in Damietta City’s successful carpentry industry (see story page 78), calls the fishing industry “red death,” but for most community members the proud maritime trade is their only way of life.

Mother Nature, piracy and foreign governments are not the only challenges that the fleet has to face: economics and politics also play a part in the industry’s fortunes.

Diesel costs have always been a burden on fishermen, taking a large proportion of each trip’s budget, but following a 2008 reduction in subsidies that saw prices increase by 46%, this has become an even greater expense.

According to Sameer, “gasoline prices have jumped from LE 70 to 220 per [159-liter] barrel in less than three years, which has severely cut down boats’ revenues.” Fish prices should have increased as a result of the rising fuel costs. Unfortunately for the fishing industry, an ongoing influx of imported fish into the local market has kept prices down.

“Despite all the difficulties that fishermen have to go through and the increasing cost of their business, imported fish recently have prevented them from having a fair profit,” says Sameer.

Even Yasser Zaher, a fish importer, is critical of the impact of fish imports. “I know very well that the local fish is much better, but what should I do with shrinking amounts [of local fish] because of all the problems the boats face?” he asks.

“I have to keep my business running. I admit that the fish import business is corrupt; all that the ports authorities care about is paper work. They know nothing about good or bad fish. They don’t even have a functioning quarantine,” he claims.

And while regulations regarding the quality and origins of fish do exist, Zaher alleges that these are regularly flouted to keep prices down.

“Consumers are poor, they only care about the fish size and price, they don’t know that this imported fish is brought from fisheries abroad, where we don’t know what they really feed them.”

Security issues are also a relatively new factor in the equation, with new regulations imposed by authorities in relation to drug trafficking and terrorism. The town has a historical reputation as Egypt’s northern gate for hashish, however statistics on arrests suggest such fame may be undeserved.

Anti-terrorism regulations have also become a burden. Following stories circulating more than five years ago about a boat caught smuggling weapons to the Palestinian Territories, time-consuming inspections of boats have increased, say boat owners.

Government intrusion is not limited to regulation and lack thereof, though. Another challenge facing the Ezbet El-Burg fleet is what locals call a “build now, fix later” mentality when it comes to government developments.

Over the past five years a massive renovation project has been carried out on the Ras El-Barr Corniche. The government brought in huge amounts of rock from the desert to reinforce the old corniche, but a lot of the material settled along the sides of the harbor’s passageway.

“After the government left behind the rocks they brought, it became impossible to sail two boats next to each other along the new corniche. It is a real challenge for any captain to sail safely through it, and the government never came back to fix what they did,” says Sameer.

Like fishing industries all over the world, the Damiettan industry also faces the problem of diminishing fish stocks as a result of pollution and over fishing. The government’s response was to ban the fleet from fishing in May and June of the last couple of years, a pointless move according to residents, when boats from other areas can continue to fish.

Khalil is also frustrated by a lack of investment by authorities and growing competition from fish farming. “God provided Egypt with water: two seas, five lakes and a great river. As a reaction to this gift, we pollute them with sewage, industrial waste and even our waste from our boats,” he says.

“Big investments in the fisheries located in Manzala Lake and other places, which are licensed and encouraged by the government, are the biggest threat to fish stocks. They are the reason behind the phenomenon of overfishing especially in the spawning season,” he argues. “For each 1,000 baby fish brought to the lake fisheries, 100 survive in the best of circumstances.”

The town’s industries are all affected in one way or another by the fishing industry’s difficulties. “We do get affected but not that much, as the boats have to keep sailing and we have to keep fixing them,” says Mohamed Shabka, a maritime mechanic. “Recently, however, we have done more temporary repairs because boat owners cannot afford proper maintenance.”

“My father was the first to build a steel boat in Damietta in 1987, when the business was going very well and owner could totally renovate their boats every year,” says Haitham Abu Ataya, manager of a family boat building business. “Now they barely fix a little bit and only paint the body every other year.”

Amm Said, owner of a grocery store that provides supplies to the boats for their trips, says that “quantities of food can never be less than before as the crew has to eat enough to work, but the variety [of food they purchase] has moved to cheaper options and boat owners buy on credit.”

Most of the community of Ezbet El-Burg are in mourning for the past. Even the young have a longing tone as they speak of a past they have never seen.

“Young people are miserable. They’ve seen nothing, they know nothing and they have no chance to do anything. I built my apartment building when I was 22, and furnished it with up-to-date appliances from Europe. Later, I was able to send all my daughters to university,” says Hajj Ahmad El-Kahkany.

In his sixties El-Kahkany, is a living reminder of a past more glorious than the present. Speaking Greek, English and Japanese, like almost every older man in town he has toured the world more than once as a seaman on a cargo ship or a Greek fishing boat.

“With my black [sailor’s] passport I was able to go anywhere in the world and my international union in London would help me if I had a problem. Now, my son, who only has a vocational degree, cannot leave because his black passport is not worth the ink it’s written with anymore,” says El-Kahkany.

It is a feat in itself that the Damiettan fishing fleet has survived for hundreds of years against the challenges of nature. Whether it can survive government neglect and competition from imports or simply continues its quiet deterioration, remains to be seen.  bt