One man’s b’day gifts offer reprieve to Lankan fishing families

Saturday, 25 October 2014 00:32 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

When retired Dutch businessman R.A.J. (Rob) Goes turned 70 recently, friends asked him what he wanted for his birthday. He figured he had enough socks, neckties and whisky bottles (the usual fare he was used to receiving), and so put his friends to a higher target: contributions to help Sri Lankan fishermen overcome debt to exploitative middlemen. In 2008, he had sold his company, one of the biggest in Holland dealing with access equipment (ladders, scaffolding, and the like) very profitably – and providentially, just before the global economic crisis brought on by the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008. “A matter of a few months would have made a huge difference – instead of selling at a profit, I would have incurred massive losses,” says Rob. The propitious timing which decided his fortunes startled him into a decision to share his windfall, by giving back a share to the world at large. “I setup a foundation to invest in commercially-viable social enterprises in developing countries,” he says. Thus far, the foundation has invested in everything from hospitals to water purification projects across Asia and Africa.

Awareness programs for fisher folk

In the course of his scouting for worthwhile projects, he came in contact with ZOA in the Netherlands, an international relief and rehabilitation organisation working in Sri Lanka, amongst other war-affected countries. A tour of northern Sri Lanka with ZOA convinced him that there was much potential to develop the fisheries sector here. However, ZOA being a humanitarian, relief and rehabilitation organisation, their main projects are not with fishermen and women working at an entrepreneurial level. Rather, their main beneficiaries are at the bottom of that trade chain – those who risk life and limb to catch fish but barely eke out an existence day-to-day, as they are so heavily exploited by the middle-level traders. “I watched local ZOA staff carrying out awareness programs for the fisher folk along the northern coast about the prices the middlemen were getting in the market as opposed to the prices the fishermen themselves were being offered,” says Rob. “It was enlightening to watch. They had no idea what the actual market prices of their catch were or of how much they were being exploited.”

Exploitation by loan sharks

The problem was that most of these fishermen, even after becoming aware of the price exploitation, could do little about it as they had little to no bargaining power with the middlemen. This is because, in Sri Lanka, the middlemen are not just traders. They are also loan sharks. Most of the fishermen have gone into debt to the middlemen to buy their boats and nets and the middlemen treat their produce as part-repayments of these loans. The way these loan systems work however, ensures that the fishermen are bonded in perpetuity. When they attempt to pay back the loans to redeem themselves, the low prices their fish, crabs and prawns were taken at are often not taken into account by the middlemen. “The fishermen’s debts to these middlemen range from a Rs. 100,000 to Rs. 1 million per family. The interest charged on these loans though works out to about 400%, which they will never surmount. The fishermen do not understand or realise the alternatives as they have been traditionally ingrained in this system from childhood,” says ZOA Sri Lanka’s Country Director Guido de Vries. Sri Lankan banks by contrast offer commercial loans of 15-20% interest rates, and on some development projects, as low as 7-8% interest rates.

Birthday pledge

Helping such causes, worthy as they might be however, was not part of Goes’ foundation mandate. “We were looking for social yet entrepreneurial ventures to help develop and this didn’t fit the bill,” says Goes. “But I was deeply impressed with what ZOA Sri Lanka was trying to do and wanted to help – so when my birthday came round and people started asking me what I wanted, I said I wanted donations to this cause.” He also pledged to double the amount raised, via his foundation, in order to motivate his friends. The reactions he says were mostly positive. “I did get a few ribbings on whether I had gotten delirious with mosquito bites from tropical climes, but on the whole, people responded really well. I received 5,350 which is more than I have ever received (in-kind) for any birthday. Birthday gifts here are usually a bottle of wine, a book or a necktie and won’t go beyond 25 apiece but this time, people contributed much more, as it was for a worthy cause. It was the best birthday party I ever had.” As promised, Goes’s foundation then matched the donations, thus bringing it up to 11,000. Rob’s friend and fellow Board member at his foundation, Ruud Stiekema says: “We were also impressed with the 85% payback rates of the fishing families given such loans to help them overcome the middlemen’s loans.”

Regaining self-respect and survival mechanisms

The idea is to help individual families overcome their debts to the middlemen by giving fresh loans at 8% interest; this would bail them out of the loans to the middlemen with the untenable 400% interest rates, thus enabling them to bargain a fair price for their fishing produce. Once the loan is recovered from one fishing family, it would then be used to bail out another fishing family. Thus the money donated would go on perpetuating its usefulness amongst various families affected by poverty, instead of being confined to only a select few – something else that had attracted Rob to this cause. The ceremony in which he handed over the cheque to ZOA Sri Lanka was attended by the Deputy Head of Mission of the Embassy of the Netherlands, Lianne Houben. She applauded her countryman’s efforts to bring some measure of stability back to the Sri Lankan northern fishermen’s life. “All people of Sri Lanka were affected by the war, but the northern ones more so. The people of the north are still in the process of rehabilitation. This project will hopefully go some way towards making them regain their self-respect and survival mechanisms,” she said.