Hokkaido farms and fisheries hit as campus closure robs them of workers

The agriculture and fisheries industry in the northeastern Hokkaido region of Okhotsk is facing a serious labor shortage.

Tokyo University of Agriculture’s Okhotsk campus, in the city of Abashiri, was closed as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, leading to a sharp decline in the number of students living in the city and working part-time in the sector.

The university plans to hold online lectures until the end of July, followed by summer vacation, meaning the impact is likely to continue for an extended period.

Among the 1,473 students enrolled at the Okhotsk campus, roughly 60 percent — and only half of first-year students — remained in the city after the campus was shut down, according to the university.

Because more than 90 percent of the students come from outside Hokkaido, the university has asked agriculture and fisheries cooperatives in the region to refrain from hiring students who have not been in the city for two weeks or longer, to prevent them from becoming a source of infection.

Tokyo University of Agriculture’s Okhotsk campus, in the city of Abashiri, was closed amid the COVID-19 outbreak, leading to a sharp decline in the number of students living in the city and working part-time in the sector. | HOKKAIDO SHIMBUN

The Abashiri Fisheries Cooperative, which was set to begin releasing scallop spats at the end of May, needs to hire some 750 part-time workers to sort them and for other tasks.

Usually, the university’s students make up about 70 percent of workers. However, in late April, since it can’t depend on students this year, the city’s Fisheries Promotion Council advertised part-time positions in newspapers and the city’s public relations magazine for the first time.

Officials from the fisheries cooperative spoke with acquaintances and dealers, and barely managed to secure enough workers. 

Takashi Tamura, head of the cooperative’s scallop aquaculture group, said, “We always have a hard time securing part-time workers every year, so we were really worried what would happen this year.”

“We will make sure that infection prevention measures will be taken during work, including body temperature checks, the use of face masks and alcohol disinfectants,” Tamura said.

The agriculture sector is facing a similar problem. The town office of Ozora in the region, which dispatches a total of some 200 students from the university each year to farms as part-timers, has stopped its service this year in response to the university’s policy amid the spread of novel coronavirus infections.

“I was expecting to have around 10 students work for me to sow pumpkin seeds, but since they are not coming I’m at a loss about what to do,” said a farmer in the town.

An agricultural cooperative in the town of Memanbetsu in the region is also worried that farms planting Chinese yams and pumpkins manually will be hit hard by the labor shortage.

According to estimates by Sapporo-based Hokkaido Research Institute for the Twenty-first Century, students of the university who work part-time have the effect of expanding the region’s production by some ¥9.02 billion for agriculture and some ¥4.48 billion for fisheries.

On that basis, part-time student workers make up roughly 5.1 percent of agricultural production and 6.8 percent of fisheries production in the region in terms of value.

(Source: JT)

My documentary will expose govt's total failure in cyclone Ockhi: Divya Bharathi

'Orutharum Varela', filmed over a month, is a documentary on how the government failed the fishing community.

Kakkoos filmmaker Divya Bharathi will soon be releasing her next documentary. Titled Orutharum Varela (Nobody Came), the film is a look at the devastation left behind by cyclone Ockhi.

Speaking to TNM, Divya said, "I mainly stayed in Kanyakumari which saw the greatest damage. I was there from December 9 to 27. In that period, I also travelled to Kerala and visited places like Poonthura which were affected by the cyclone. After this, I went to Nagapattinam and Cuddalore because a lot of fishermen who had died in Kanyakumari were from these places. Then I went to Thoothukudi - there were fishermen from there too who had gone on the Kumari boats. I shot for two days there. I also went to Pudhukottai."

Divya adds that the fishing community is a much marginalised section and that nobody is interested in representing their interests.

"We only look at the beach as a place for entertainment. It's only when I went there and stayed with those people that I understood how much politics is involved in this. Whether it's the BJP or the Congress, they don't want these people on the land or in the sea," she alleges.

More than the death toll (Divya says the cyclone itself could have killed only 10-15 people directly), it is the government's indifference towards rescue operations that will be the focus of Orutharum Varela.

"I wish to highlight the total failure of the IMD. Why wasn't a warning issued?" she asks, pointing out that an individual like the Tamil Nadu Weatherman is able to give weather forecasts in the morning but not a government body.

"Not a single MNC ship was affected by the cyclone. How did those ships go to the safe zone? Who informed them? Why weren't the fishermen told?" she questions.

Divya further comments on the interview given by Defence Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, and levels allegations against the government's response: "She was so arrogant. I find it difficult to say this about a woman. I met everyone who'd gone on the rescue operations and I found out how fake much of it was. The people lost faith on the rescue ops and they took their own boats and went in search. That's when they recovered a number of corpses. On December 16, they towed two boats full of rescued fishermen via Kochi. The Navy didn't even help them to tow the boats - didn't they see the boats at all? That's impossible."

Divya also says that she had to be careful about shooting for the documentary as the police had allegedly arrested and harassed activists who had put up posters blaming the government for the tragedy.

"Though I was careful, I was called to the police station once and asked to show my ID card. They also asked me why I had a camera. I told them that I had come for my friend's wedding. They noted down the date of the 'wedding' and told me I had to leave after that and that I'd get into trouble if they saw me there," she claims.

Divya says that the shoot for the documentary was completed by January 8. She is currently editing the film and also working on a song that they can incorporate in the documentary.

"I'm hoping to finish everything by January 25. It should release hopefully in the first week of February," says Divya.

(Source: TNM)

Excerpts from The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

Excerpts from The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma:

My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives. His employer, the Central Bank of Nigeria, had transferred him to a branch of the bank in Yola —a town in the north that was a camel distance of more than one thousand kilometres away—in the first week of November of the previous year. I remember the night Father returned home with his transfer letter; it was on a Friday. From that Friday through that Saturday, Father and Mother held whispering consultations like shrine priests. By Sunday morning, Mother emerged a different being. She’d acquired the gait of a wet mouse, averting her eyes as she went about the house. She did not go to church that day, but stayed home and washed and ironed a stack of Father’s clothes, wearing an impenetrable gloom on her face.

Neither of them said a word to my brothers and me, and we did not ask. My brothers — Ikenna, Boja, Obembe — and I had come to understand that when the two ventricles of our home — our father and our mother — held silence as the ventricles of the heart retain blood, we could flood the house if we poked them. So, at times like these, we avoided the television in the eight-columned shelf in our sitting room. We sat in our rooms, studying or feigning to study, anxious but not asking questions. While there, we stuck out our antennae to gather whatever we could of the situation.

By nightfall on Sunday, crumbs of information began to fall from Mother’s soliloquy like tots of feathers from a richly-plumed bird: “What kind of job takes a man away from bringing up his growing sons? Even if I were born with seven hands, how would I be able to care for these children alone?”

Although these feverish questions were directed to no one in particular, they were certainly intended for Father’s ears. He was seated alone on a lounge chair in the sitting room, his face veiled with a copy of his favourite newspaper, the Guardian, half reading and half listening to Mother. And although he heard everything she said, Father always turned deaf ears to words not directly addressed to him, the kind he often referred to as “cowardly words.” He would simply read on, sometimes breaking off to loudly rebuke or applaud something he’d seen in the newspaper — “If there is any justice in this world, Abacha should soon be mourned by his witch of a wife.” “Wow, Fela is a god! Good gracious!” “Reuben Abati should be sacked!” — anything just to create the impression that Mother’s lamentations were futile; whimpers to which no one was paying attention.

Before we slept that night, Ikenna, who was nearly fifteen and on whom we relied for the interpretation of most things, had suggested Father was being transferred. Boja, a year his junior, who would have felt unwise if he didn’t appear to have any idea about the situation, had said it must be that Father was travelling abroad to a “Western world” just as we often feared he someday would. Obembe who, at eleven, was two years my senior, did not have an opinion. Me neither. But we did not have to wait much longer.

The answer came the following morning when Father suddenly appeared in the room I shared with Obembe. He was dressed in a brown T-shirt. He placed his spectacles on the table, a gesture requesting our attention. “I will start living in Yola from today onwards, and I don’t want you boys to give your mother any troubles.” His face contorted when he said this, the way it did whenever he wanted to drive the hounds of fear into us. He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every word tacked nine-inches deep into the beams of our minds. So that, if we went ahead and disobeyed, he would make us conjure the exact moment he gave us the instruction in its complete detail with the simple phrase “I told you.”

“I will call her regularly, and if I hear any bad news” — he struck his forefinger aloft to fortify his words — “I mean, any funny acts at all, I’ll give you the Guerdon for them.”

He’d said the word “Guerdon” — a word with which he emphasised a warning or highlighted the retribution for a wrong act — with so much vigour that veins bulged at both sides of his face. This word, once pronounced, often completed the message. He brought out two twenty-naira notes from the breast pocket of his coat and dropped them on our study table.

“For both of you,” he said, and left the room.

Obembe and I were still sitting in our bed trying to make sense of all that when we heard Mother speaking to him outside the house in a voice so loud it seemed he was already far away.

“Eme, remember you have growing boys back here,” she’d said. “I’m telling you, oh.”

She was still speaking when Father started his Peugeot 504. At the sound of it, Obembe and I hurried from our room, but Father was already driving out of the gate. He was gone.

Whenever I think of our story, how that morning would mark the last time we’d live together, all of us, as the family we’d always been, I begin — even these two decades later — to wish he hadn’t left, that he had never received that transfer letter. Before that letter came, everything was in place: Father went to work every morning and Mother, who ran a fresh food store in the open market, tended to my five siblings and me who, like the children of most families in Akure, went to school. Everything followed its natural course. We gave little thought to past events. Time meant nothing back then. The days came with clouds hanging in the sky filled with cupfuls of dust in the dry seasons, and the sun lasting into the night. It was as if a hand drew hazy pictures in the sky during the rainy seasons, when rain fell in deluges pulsating with spasms of thunderstorms for six uninterrupted months.

Because things followed this known and structured pattern, no day was worthy of remembrance. All that mattered was the present and the foreseeable future. Glimpses of it mostly came like a locomotive train treading tracks of hope, with black coal in its heart and a loud elephantine toot. Sometimes these glimpses came through dreams or flights of fanciful thoughts that whispered in your head — I will be a pilot, or the president of Nigeria, rich man, own helicopters —for the future was what we made of it. It was a blank canvas on which anything could be imagined. But Father’s move to Yola changed the equation of things: time and seasons and the past began to matter, and we started to yearn and crave for it even more than the present and the future.

(Source: The Punch Magazine)