MARGAO: The National Fishworkers Forum (NFF) along with the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) has organised a two-day online ‘Conference of the Ocean People’.
The global conference is being attended not just by fishermen from India, including Goa but also by people from other countries like Africa, South America, and Caribbean Islands and from South Asia.
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Olencio Simoes, NFF General Secretary stated that the conference was organised to alert the United Nations Ocean Conference that will begin on July 1 in Lisbon, Portugal about the issues that need urgent attention.
“Around 50 major coastal cities in the globe and 6 cities in India are likely to go under water due to the steep rise in the temperature of the ocean because of exploitation of our coastal areas,” Simoes stated.
The conference had speakers from all over the world throwing light upon the implications of the Blue Economy and ocean grab policies on the historical customary rights of the ocean people.
Jones Spartegus of NFF said “We are facing a ‘Blue Apartheid’. In India, there is corporate loot of the ocean resources through the ‘Blue Economy Policy’ and the leasing out of the ocean through ‘Marine Spatial Planning. In the process, the ocean people have been dispossessed of their homeland, their identities erased, their historical customary rights subjugated.”
