London based Jammu and Kashmir Council for Human Rights (JKCHR) has welcomed United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) decision to make greater efforts to lift fishermen out of poverty and reduce the overexploitation of threatened fish stocks.
Kashmiri fishermen remain at the bottom of the world's poorest communities and income that fishing provides these fisherfolk forces them still to live in poverty JKCHR has pointed out.
Therefore, it is important that UNFAO reaches out to Kashmiri fishermen community both directly and through aid programmes managed in partnership with India and Pakistan.
JKCHR Secretary General Dr Syed Nazir Gilani has written to Assistant Director-General of FAO's Fisheries and Aquaculture Department pointing out that over centuries a large fishermen community has continued to live on the Indian side of Kashmir.
As a common characteristic this community lives in overcrowded and sub-standard living conditions, with residents having low levels of education and lack of access to services, such as schools and health care, and infrastructure, such as roads and markets.
JKCHR has pointed out that UNFAO findings that "Stronger efforts to tackle the diverse factors underlying this reality are needed, or else these communities will simply continue to tread water, surviving from day to day, living in poverty, and not managing local fish stocks as well as they might," need to have an equitable spread to cover the fishermen communities as far as Kashmir.
Dr Gilani has said that the participation of 131 countries in FAO's Committee on Fisheries meeting last month on the question of poverty and social problems in small fishing communities offers a new hope to fishermen communities.
It is high time that the call for the 'adoption of human rights principles' in social development and a 'rights-based approach to managing small-scale fisheries is institutionalised in government and NGO programmes, the statement has said.
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