Book chapter
Between the Sea and a Hard Place: Fisheries Degradation and Livelihood Precarity in a West Bali Coastal Community
The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia, pp.221-248
NUS Press
2023
Abstract
This chapter examines the impact of environmental decline on local livelihoods in a west Balinese coastal community, as a case study of the precarity arising from resource degradation affecting many rural communities in Indonesia and beyond (Rigg et al. 2016). Alongside vulnerability to life cycle crises of illness, death and disability, precarity for the population of Perangkat (pseudonym), a fishing community in the district of Jembrana, west Bali, arises from a number of serious anthropogenically induced environmental challenges, leaving villagers with limited prospects of a “sustainable” future to support livelihoods in their home community. More broadly, this case study is a harbinger of longerterm vulnerabilities, exploring the under-recognised looming threats to food security and economic development posed by natural resource degradation. The new precarities are starkly evident in the fisheries sector, but represent a wider issue driven by unsustainable production practices in agriculture and other sectors of intensified natural resource extraction. The paradox in these cases is that the same market expansion and capitalist accumulation processes that underpin “development” trajectories are ultimately undermining them. The fishing village of Perangkat was officially classified as a desa tertinggal (left-behind village) during the Suharto Era. The progression out of poverty over the 1990s and early 2000s and the subsequent unravelling of the local economy as a consequence of the collapse of the Bali Strait fishery since 2010 do not fit neatly into conventional agrarian transition models or stages of poverty scenarios. The primary focus of this chapter is on the impact of resource decline and the complexity of interpreting questions of poverty, food security and social protection in settings where an ambiguous sense of “precarity” poses so many shades of grey in the measurement and assessment of community and household livelihood trajectories, presenting a scenario of reversal precipitated by resource degradation.
Details
- Title
- Between the Sea and a Hard Place: Fisheries Degradation and Livelihood Precarity in a West Bali Coastal Community
- Authors/Creators
- Carol A Warren - Murdoch University, Centre for Biosecurity and One Health
- Contributors
- John F McCarthy (Editor)A. McWilliam (Editor)G. Nooteboom (Editor)
- Publication Details
- The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia, pp.221-248
- Publisher
- NUS Press
- Identifiers
- 991005575869507891
- Copyright
- © 2022 John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam and Gerben Nooteboom
- Murdoch Affiliation
- Centre for Biosecurity and One Health
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
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