(Kerkennah) Off the flat coast of the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia, Sara Souissi rows out to sea in her small fishing boat. A rare woman in a male-dominated profession, she fights gender stereotypes and environmental problems that threaten her livelihood.
“I love the sea and I love fishing, that’s why I persisted, even though society doesn’t really accept women fishing,” says M.me Souissi, 43, who has been pursuing this passion since adolescence.
In this essential sector in Tunisia, around 13% of the GDP including aquaculture, women play “an active and varied role throughout” the sector, but little recognized, according to a recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Although there are no statistics on their exact weight out of 44,000 fishermen in total in 2023 according to the National Observatory of Agriculture, 60% of those working in the country’s informal economy are women.
Female fishers “are often not seen as real workers” by their male counterparts and have less access to support, training and banks that classify them as “high-risk borrowers,” according to the FAO.
Those who work alongside male relatives, partly because of legislation that disadvantages them in terms of property rights, are “perceived as unpaid family workers,” the study said.
In Raoued, north of Tunis, the sustainable fishing association TSSF ran a training course for women in fishing professions in June. “The idea is to create additional resources [pour les familles] while adapting to the context of climate change, diminishing marine resources and poor fishing practices,” explains Ryma Moussaoui, workshop coordinator.
But on this day, the majority of women are mainly interested in helping the men around them. “My husband and my father are fishermen,” explains Safa Ben Khalifa, a participant, for whom her main contribution will be “making fishing nets.”
Climate change
Conversely, Sara Souissi values her independence and is proud of her contribution to the household she runs with her husband, also a fisherman, and their child.
In addition to gender bias, she also faces challenges such as the warming of the oceans that is hitting her archipelago, 300 km south of Tunis, hard. In August, the Mediterranean broke record temperatures with a daily average of 28.9 degrees, making its waters uninhabitable for some species.
PHOTO MOHAMED KHALIL, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Sara Souissi is in her small fishing boat, off the flat coast of the Kerkennah Islands, in Tunisia.
Along Tunisia’s 1,300 km of coastline, the pressure on wildlife is aggravated by overfishing and unsustainable methods such as plastic pots used to trap fish or pelagic trawls which rake the seabed and tear up seagrass beds, the fish’s nests and breeding grounds.
“They don’t respect the rules, they catch everything they can, even outside the authorized fishing periods,” laments M, wearing a white cap.me Souissi, about some of his colleagues.
Another major problem is pollution.
In the south of Kerkennah, clam pickers created an association in 2017 to develop this activity in Skhira, in the Gulf of Gabès, 350 km south of Tunis.
“No other jobs”
The association had enabled around forty women “to free themselves from the intermediaries” through whom they used to export to Europe, only receiving a tenth of the final sale price, explains Houda Mansour, its president.
But in 2020, faced with a decline in the populations of this seafood, decimated by pollution and global warming, the government banned collection and the association closed its doors.
“They don’t have a degree and can’t find other jobs,” says M.me Mansour, herself converted to pastry making.
Clams are not the only species to suffer from the polluted and overheated waters of the Gulf of Gabes, which have “become unfavorable to fish life,” according to Emna Benkahla, a researcher at El Manar University in Tunis. For the researcher, it is necessary to work towards more sustainable fishing, because the general decline in fish resources will “undoubtedly worsen unemployment.”
With his boat without a motor and his small nets, Mme Souissi is a pioneer and has no plans to give up her job: “To stay at home and do the housework? No way, I want to continue fishing.”