Claudionor da Silva

As a teenager Claudionor Alexandre Barbosa da Silva became a fisherman out of necessity when his family's fortunes took a turn for the worse. After years dedicated to helping his fellow fishers gain greater civil and political rights, he is now introducing a cooperative system that extends their participation through the chain of processing and marketing their catch.

In the last 20 years, the men and women who fish the coastal waters of northeastern Brazil have won several battles for fairer organizations to represent them and better status in the eyes of the state. Despite the real and important benefits that have accrued to them, however, their overall lot in life is far from enviable. In short, they remain poor. Their bare survival may be ensured, but there are few, if any, opportunities for them to develop and prosper as professionals and citizens.
Claudionor is introducing the small-scale fishing sector to its second era of citizen action, extending the small producer's role into the processing and retailing of fish. The cooperative system pools small fishing families' resources in order to transport the fish to port, maintain and prepare fish for sale at special depots, and sell them at "sanitary" fish markets opened and operated in cooperation with government. Claudionor's strategy is not to compete with commercial fish traders on price–the traders deal in such high volume that market competition is unlikely to work–but on quality. Drawing on the producers' expertise, as well as on municipal governments' interest in public health, Claudionor sees that cooperatives can guarantee a much better quality of fish for roughly the same price. The cooperatives will capture a small portion of the retail fish market, perhaps 5 to 10 percent. But Claudionor's purpose is not to take over the industry or displace merchants from their own source of livelihood. Instead, he wants to shift consumer demand for a better product and position small fishers to take on more lucrative roles in serving the industry.
By transporting and selling their own fish, producers pocket more of the profits–this is the nature of a cooperative. But Claudionor is just as interested in opening up the world-view of the fishers, particularly in encouraging their children to take up professional careers that will improve the fishing economy for everyone. Young people are being trained to manage and expand the cooperatives and their transport, storage, and marketing systems. Claudionor sees the cooperatives as a source of scholarships for higher education in related fields like fishing, engineering, and small enterprise development.

The importance of fish resources, both in the rivers and along the coast, to the economy of the Amazon region is often overlooked. In the state of Pará, for instance, fishing is responsible for 65 percent of the production of the entire region. The city of Belém has the principal port for handling small-scale fish production, but the atravessadores (middlemen) hold a monopoly on distribution. Today, there are an estimated 200,000 small-scale fishers in Pará for whom fishing provides the primary means of subsistence.
The great distances involved, the scarcity and poor condition of roads, and the isolation of rural areas usually mean that there is little contact with the outside world. Because the atravessadores are often the only contact that rural fishing communities have with the larger centers and markets, the communities become economically dependent on these merchants. Their isolation also makes it difficult for fishing families to obtain information about their rights as citizens.
In fact, credit is available to these small-scale producers, along with other government benefits. But there are no structures in place to facilitate universal access to these services, and little in the way of programs to help people make effective use of the money they might borrow or the legal status they stand to enjoy.

Restructuring of unions, gaining access to credit, and being recognized in the eyes of the state are all preconditions that allow one to ask the question: Now that fishers are organized, what are they going to do? Claudionor's answer is to help fishing people build their capacity to innovate the way society shops for and buys fish.
The cooperative itself–the Cooperative of Mixed Small-scale Fishermen and Fisherwomen of Pará–is fairly straightforward. It requires members of the organization to pool the best of their catch, charter the transport they need to carry it from their small villages to the main port, and then sell it. Claudionor has been seeking capital investment for the construction of a fish depot, owned and operated by the cooperative, that can keep fish cool and covered while awaiting distribution to the market. About two-thirds of these costs will be covered by a favorable loan from the Bank of Amazon, which lends to fishermen at fairly low rates over long repayment schedules. A partnership with the Ministry of the Environment for the Amazon also provides resources.
Operating a high-quality fish depot is also necessary to Claudinonor's marketing strategy. Consumers are wary of fish–they want a clean, fresh catch that they can serve to their families without fear of illness. The ports where fish come in are notoriously filthy–an issue of such concern that local governments are searching for ways to improve the food supply. This is where Claudionor sees an opportunity for the fishers to enter the market. He has already contracted with the municipality of Belém to supply clean fish to 22 markets under a program to promote clean fish. Moreover, fishers have secured their own retail spaces at street fairs, where along with selling fish, the cooperative disseminates pamphlets in partnership with the public health office designed to educate consumers about buying clean fish.
Clean fish are important, but Claudionor's abiding allegiance is to the citizens whose role it is to provide these fish. Their development, their prosperity, their dignity, their enjoyment of full rights and opportunities as Brazilian citizens are what motivate him. Therefore, the cooperative is concerned with fishing families' ability to prosper in the long term. This means building skills in areas of the industry to which the "class" of fishers traditionally lacked access. Some of these skills are demanded by the very existence of the cooperative: managing the supply and delivery of a perishable product and marketing and running the technical aspects of a fish depot. Claudionor develops and expands the cooperative through capacity-building workshops. Other skills, requiring mastery of some aspects of environmental studies, small enterprise development, and aquatic resource management, need to be integrated into the education of young fishers. Thus, Claudionor works with colleges and universities in Pará to offer such training.
The cooperative will facilitate access for fishing families to key programs like lines of credit to purchase boats and equipment, unemployment insurance in the period of fish reproduction, and retirement pensions. As well, it will ensure that successful efforts to change legislation will result in benefits at the community level, helping fishing families to demand their rights, thereby creating the conditions for an effective change in the fish production process in Amazonia.
With Claudionor's help, 65 fishing families producing a total of six tons of fish per day provide about 5 percent of the fish handled in Belém. The plan is to replicate this model in coming years in the 26 municipalities that already have "fishing associations" organized, thus enabling them to bring their fish to the Belém depot and expand the impact to 1,800 families. In future phases, Claudionor intends to concentrate on developing processing capacity–with refrigerated fish for the Belém market and frozen fish for distribution throughout Brazil. At a later phase, the objective is to export to the international market.

Claudionor has spent his adult life as a fisherman working on behalf of fishermen. His efforts have brought numerous structural improvements to the lives of poor fishers: he democratized their labor unions and made women eligible to join; he changed union membership rules so that only real fishermen, not distant boat owners or marketeers, could belong and hold office; he ushered in the national election of the first head of fishermen's unions; he convinced banks to change their lending policies so that fishers could use their assets as collateral; he lobbied for and drafted the inclusion of specific language in the Brazilian constitution recognizing artisanal fishers as legitimate, productive members of the rural working class, entitled to benefits from the state. But Claudionor's achievements were preceded by a tale of hardship and recovery through which he developed appreciation for the labors and struggles of poor fishermen.
Before Claudionor was born, his mother, already a single mother with one daughter, moved from the Marajó Island to the city of Belém where she became a maid and met Claudionor's father, a navy officer who was paralyzed as the result of an illness. They married and went to live in a small community of eight families, back on Marajó Island. Claudionor was born there, and his father became the leading merchant for several communities in the region.
Claudionor and his brothers and sisters had to row two hours each day to reach the closest school, one that only went to fourth grade. Coming from a religious family, he went to study at the high school level with priests in Belém. Meanwhile, his father's health deteriorated, and the family's savings were spent on his father's treatment. They lost their savings, their business, their assets, and their land. He died when Claudionor was 19, leaving the family deeply in debt.
Returning to Marajó Island at the age of 20, Claudionor and his brother turned to fishing–a traditional and expanding activity in his community–as an option to earn some money quickly and to try to retire the family's debt. They borrowed money, bought a boat, and joined forces with other fishermen. Claudionor soon became recognized as a local leader. The Catholic Church, which was then beginning a "Pastoral of Fishers," soon identified him as a leader and invited him to participate in a course in Liberation Theology. For three weeks at a time, he would study as an organizer and travel around to fishing communities and then return to captain his family's boat while his brother stayed on land.
One of the first issues Claudionor took on was the structure of the fishing "colonies"–the traditional name for fishing unions. Fishing was technically under the control of the navy, and the colonies started out more as civil defense organizations than anything else. Eventually, the colonies came to be dominated by fishing merchants, owners of fleets, and outfitters. They were trade associations operated under the rubric of labor unions, yet were officially recognized as the latter. The simple fisherman, whether he paddled his own boat or worked on a larger vessel, had no representative body. Claudionor founded an alternate union whose membership was restricted to the workers.
At this point, Claudionor created the Pará State Fishers Movement and in conjunction with movements in other states, held the first National Fishers Meeting, attracting 800 participants with the objective of submitting proposals to the upcoming Constitutional Constituent Assembly. Claudionor moved to Brasilia where he was involved in following up on the proposals for amendments. It was in this phase that great progress was achieved advancing public policies for fishers: unemployment insurance during the spawning period; benefits even without paying taxes; funds to finance fishing activities; and the right to organize freely. In addition, six "extractivist" reserves were created that required management of particular fish species.
In 1992 Claudionor led an important initiative with 13 other leaders from the Amazon, including Ashoka Fellow Mary Allegretti. This group was preparing to participate in the UNCED-92 conference and to monitor the Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest. It formed the GTA, the Amazon Working Group, which today is the leading umbrella group of 513 citizen organizations from the Amazon. Claudionor was elected president of GTA for two terms and was able to expand his work to other groups, including rubber-tappers, rural workers, indigenous peoples, and women working as collectors of cocoa and babaçu palm.Claudionor's return to his home region had two purposes: to ensure that the advances obtained in public policies result in real benefits at the community level for fishing families who are often unaware of their rights, and to guide the implementation of a pilot project for elimination of atravessadores, thereby giving fishers control over the entire fish production process through partnerships with governments. Given Claudionor's successes in changing public policies, the mobilization of the cooperative, and the partnerships envisaged for it, there is little doubt that he will be as instrumental in the second phase of citizen-sector action for fishing peoples as he was in the first.