Filipino Migrant Fisher’s Negotiations with Risks at Home and in the Deep Seas

Every year thousands of Filipinos, many of whom hailing from poor coastal communities in the Philippine archipelago, choose to migrate and work aboard foreign commercial fishing vessels. Despite the widespread discourse of labor abuses in fishing vessels, workplace hazards in the deep seas, and fraudulent contract arrangements, many Filipinos continue to seek this migration prospect. The usual trope is that coastal poverty forces them to migrate in spite the risks and uncertainties of migration. I endeavour to provide more nuance and complicate this explanation by unravelling how migrants understand, compare, and balance risks and uncertainties manifest in their lived realities at home and their work lives aboard foreign fishing vessels in the deep seas. Building on the literature on the sociology of risk and the political ecology of coastal lives, while drawing from my ethnographic research in coastal communities in the province of Capiz, I examine how migrant fishers negotiate the risks and uncertainties associated with labouring in commercial fishing vessels vis-a-vis the combined effects of climate precarity, market instability, and fish stock decline in coastal communities. The risks and uncertainties emanating from these coastal pressures have created and reinforced neoliberal risk-taking subjectivities in which coastal dwellers learn to “gamble” their lives in the hope of assuaging coastal precarity and poverty. Part of this emergent gambling behaviour is their willingness to migrate—even with the fear of maltreatment, injury, and death—because of the perceived promises of high gains. With the intention to improve their life situation, migrants and their families then utilise economic gains to either temper risks and uncertainties at home by investing in everyday fishing assets or engage in riskier livelihoods that entail high capital requirements and greater susceptibility to failures and debt traps.