Living off the Sea, They Found Another Business Playbook

We who have spent our whole lives on land could hardly believe, at first, that fishers gathered shellfish by simply walking straight into the mangroves. Even from a boat at sea, gazing at the mangroves in the distance, those arching roots plunging into the seawater made me feel the whole place was impassable. We kept asking, really: did they “walk” into the mangroves to collect crabs and shellfish?

The muddy path underfoot, if you bent down to look closely, was full of tiny holes—crab burrows. Get even closer, face nearly touching the ground, and you could see rows of neatly stacked little balls: pellets crabs regurgitate after a meal. A fisher would casually point to some tree and tell you what this part or that part could be used for, while I was still getting used to the uneven roots underfoot, trying not to fall.

This is perhaps the most fundamental reason a local community must be “developed” by its own people. In their eyes the mangroves are orderly—a natural food pantry with inexhaustible supplies. In mine, they are a jumble of chaos and mud. The “ATM machine” they speak of is so plentiful, but I do not have the PIN. It would take a long time of deliberate training before my eyes could adapt to all of this.

Beside the community centre stood a brand-new blue signboard: a community charter. It sets out clearly what community members can and cannot do within the area—for example, a strict ban on felling trees, blocking waterways, and using destructive gear such as trawls, push nets, foldable cages, or mechanical propulsion. Local residents, with the permission of the community-protected area committee, may use legal, non-mechanical traditional tools to catch fish and shellfish of legal size within the area. In addition, income is generated through nipa palm cultivation and demonstration aquaculture, and the area provides learning and research opportunities for students and interested visitors.

II. How Fishers Are Rebuilding Their Own Food Systems

In October 2013, in response to the Landbridge project in southern Thailand, civic leader Tab, as head of the Thai Sea Watch Association (hereafter “Sea Watch”), led protesters in a week-long march covering 200 kilometres. Sea Watch also played a key role in helping several fishing communities establish community-protected areas within national parks (For an introduction to Tab, see Part 1).

The project aimed to build a logistics corridor connecting the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. This would allow cargo to cross the southern Thai peninsula by land, bypassing the busy and lengthy route through the Strait of Malacca, thereby shortening transit time. The project’s two ancillary ports, east and west, were to be located in Songkhla and Satun respectively.

This sparked fierce social conflict within Thailand and was met with strong resistance from local communities, fisher organisations, and environmental groups. Opponents pointed out that the project would cause massive and irreversible damage to the marine ecosystems of both seas (the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand), thereby threatening the livelihoods of small-scale coastal fishers.

Satun Province is Tab’s hometown. To protest the project, he moved back more than a decade ago. He says the project would affect over 200 villages, forcing many people to be relocated.

Nine of the protesters were arrested at one point. For a variety of reasons, the government ultimately suspended the mega-project.

On large-scale development projects, there are also divisions within the fisher community itself. One NGO leader’s words captured the sentiment of many fishers: “We have a good climate, a beautiful sea, beautiful beaches. We own these resources and we can manage them well. We don’t need any other development plans.”

But after the project was shelved, some fishers posed a question to Tab and his team: The big project has stalled—so what other development plans do we have?

This is when Tab realised just how important the sea they had been protecting all along truly was. How exactly could they make use of this sea so that fishers could live well?

As an NGO, Sea Watch holds that small-scale fishers have the strongest incentive to protect marine resources, because they depend most on a healthy ocean to provide a sustainable catch. By contrast, industrial fishing means a destructive sweep-all approach.

Sea Watch therefore hopes to support conservation by building consumer markets that sustain the dignified livelihoods of small-scale fishers. Listening to him say this, I was reminded that it is in the same spirit as the ecological agriculture value chain that Foodthink champions. The two are mirror images of each other—agriculture and fishing: when we choose to support one particular path of conservation, we are also supporting the food producers who work along that path.

Ecological smallholders, too, need healthy soils and agricultural biodiversity to maintain a well-functioning farm cycle, while decades of industrial farming practice have proven to be a short-sighted, extractive approach that overdraws the soil—taking more than it gives. This is rather like the conflict between small-scale fishers and industrial fishing.

While in terms of volume and efficiency, small fishers’ hand methods cannot match large fishing vessels, they have their own advantages: mature fish, freshness, and—when supply chains are short—no chemical preservatives. Food connoisseurs are willing to pay a fair price for this kind of quality seafood. But how do fishers actually earn that money?

So the key lies in creating new retail markets and giving fishers a voice in the supply chain.

III. A Healthier Ocean, Healthier Seafood

Sea Watch has tried encouraging fishers to form cooperatives and establish community fishing harbours, thereby gaining pricing power, and linking community fishing harbours with nearby seafood markets to increase fishers’ profits.

“Sustainable fishing using traditional gear, with an identifiable place of origin. Consumers know which bay their food comes from, and fishers feel proud of their trade.” This is from the award citation when Tab was named an Ashoka Fellow. He has also collaborated with organic certification experts to design a quality certification system for sustainably caught seafood. The certification committee includes small-scale fishers, consumer representatives, academics, and civil society organisations working in coastal communities.

As mentioned at the start of the first field note, when we visited in late January 2026, we got to experience a restaurant run by the fishers themselves. When it comes to getting fishers into business, Tab seems to have many painful realisations. He spoke at length, a long litany of hardships—

Fishers wear a double hat as “food producers and businesspeople.” While this is an avenue they hope to explore, you do not know how hard it is until you try. After years of stumbles, they have discovered that fishers are not strong at sales, and because the margins are so thin, cooperative members have eventually all drifted away.

So Tab is emphatic: this is not volunteer work—it requires income to keep the business going. The fisher-run restaurant we dined at was seeded by the local fishers’ association with a small grant of just 3,000 baht (about 650 yuan). They issued 1,800 shares at 100 baht each; membership requires purchasing shares, but no more than 100 per person. There are currently 98 members (shareholders).

The restaurant only opened last year, but it already has 500,000 baht in the accounts—this includes both profits and the share capital of the 98 shareholders. They have decided to reinvest 50% of profits in restaurant operations, distribute 30% as shareholder dividends, and allocate the remaining 20% to the community’s marine ecological conservation and donations to temples.

I hope that next time I go to Satun, I can still dine at this restaurant that truly belongs to the local fishers.

To further diversify income, the women fishers of Lawai Nam village in Satun have also set up a processing group, making products such as chilli paste and dried crab to add value to their catch and solve the problem of seafood preservation. They registered as a social enterprise and received a 5,000 baht grant from Sea Watch (just over 1,000 yuan), along with solar panels donated by the government’s energy department to power their food-drying equipment—this is the only external support they have received. The group currently has 32 members but is still in its early stages and has not yet achieved stable profitability.

IV. From Volunteer Conservation to Sustainable Livelihoods

Looking back over the past few days, we met several charismatic conservation leaders along the southern Thai coastline. Beyond Tab—the head of Sea Watch in Satun Province, who was named an Ashoka Fellow—and P’Nok, leader of the Andaman Conservation Network in Trang Province, there is the younger Duck. His full name is Jakkrit Tingwang; he heads the ecotourism group in Hlom Peun village, Satun Province, and goes by the nickname Duck. He is a “second-generation conservationist”: thirty years ago, his father was among the first fishers in the area to throw himself into the marine protection movement.

Like Tab had long since realised, Duck and his generation of community activists all feel that conservation which does not benefit fishers’ livelihoods is unsustainable. This is different from the “talk only about protection, never about profit” kind of volunteer work. Over the past ten years, Duck and those around him have begun exploring ways to turn conservation into income.

Remember the Sisyphus-like effort we mentioned in the second field note—fishers releasing crab juveniles and restoring seagrass beds to protect dugongs? The story has another side: “living off the sea” through tourism revenue. In the well-known Mu Ko Phetra national park in Satun Province, fluffy seagrass beds surround the small islands. A boardwalk leads from the jetty to the island, where you can see fossils, unusual rock formations, and other geological wonders. The fishers are keen to point out that there are clownfish—”Nemo”—too; for locals, all of these are elements that draw in visitors.

Here, fishers from the ecotourism group can work as guides without paying any additional fees to the national park—effectively allowing them to use the park’s tourism resources for free. The national park has also approved ten fishers to run a ferry service, and the fishers’ own jetty is preserved.

Under Duck’s guidance, we experienced half a day of ecotourism in the national park.

Without him narrating beside us, we would never have known how much is going on beneath the surface. Take the cluster of plastic floats on the water, for instance, with brightly coloured flags stuck in them. Duck explains that under each float there is a fishing net, used to catch shrimp and crabs—all individual fishers’ operations. You can tell whose it is by the colour of the flag. And the reason fishers can fish so brazenly in the national park is precisely because they have successfully established a community-protected area here (see the second field note for details).

Moving further along, we spot another cluster of floating blue plastic buoys, their upper halves stained white by seagull droppings. These are the fish habitats the fishers built themselves, which they call “fish houses.” The boat’s engine cuts out, and the world falls silent all at once. Duck launches into his practiced narration: they have been making fish houses for ten years now. The idea originally came from the fishers themselves, because they noticed that underwater traps attract fish to live among them—so why not imitate that and create a protected habitat for fish? But it took a long time before the government departments and outsiders would accept the idea.

A fish house, in practice, is a structure in which bamboo poles are used to fix many coconut palm fronds to the seabed, serving as an artificial coral reef that provides shelter for fish. “They feel safe being among them,” Duck says. The coconut leaves rot after six or seven months of soaking in seawater and need to be replaced with fresh ones.

Some fishers did not understand at first; they were only thinking about how to catch more fish. But by the fifth year, with Sea Watch’s coordination, the fishers began monitoring and found that fish stocks were indeed increasing. The data not only helps fishers understand the progress and significance of what they are doing, but also aids their communication with the outside world. “Although the fishers feel that the fish houses help restore fishery resources, their testimony is not enough to convince outsiders—scientific research is needed to prove it,” Tab says. They have only recently begun collecting data; fishers dive to record species, aiming to create a fish catalogue. But the frequency of monitoring is still limited by budget.

He hopes to be able to bring in scientists to provide guidance and establish a baseline dataset. But all of this, too, means a higher demand for funding.

On the way back from this small island to the mainland, we come upon another fish house, marked by a small cluster of bamboo poles poking through the surface. If Duck had not pointed it out to us, we probably would not have noticed it amid the vast, strongly reflective waves.

Approaching the jetty, an elderly man appears on the water, piloting a small boat and fishing with a gillnet. The fishers burst into laughter and steer the boat over to greet him. It turns out to be none other than Duck’s father, who was still in his prime thirty years ago when he threw himself into the marine protection movement. His life has taken him through the rise of industrial fishing, the sharp decline in fishery resources, the national park’s expulsion of fishers, the fishers’ fightback against trawler companies, and the struggle to carve out a community-protected area from national park territory… Now, in his twilight years, seeing the fruits of his once-mighty deeds—and even a group of Chinese people who have travelled all this way to visit—what must be going through his mind?

Foodthink Author

Kong Lingyu

Foodthink Programme Director. Focuses on climate, environment, and food and agriculture issues.

 

 

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by the author

Editor: Pei Dan