The Arabian Sea was unusually choppy on a recent day, but fishermen here on the outskirts of Karachi needed money. So they packed into wobbly 20-foot boats stacked with nets, bait and enough food to last up to two weeks at sea.
If they are lucky, they will return late this month with enough lobster, tuna and mackerel to earn each of them $30. These days, however, luck seems to be running out for the fishermen and other residents of this 100-year-old village who are struggling to withstand the sickening pollution of Pakistan’s largest city.
There are no fish at the shore, and all the fish are at the deep sea, said Ali Muhammad, who, like many villagers, said he does not know his exact age; he guessed about 40. Earlier we got fish even in this area, but now we have to travel five, six, seven hours continuously, and maybe there will be lobster or bigger fish.
Located just 15 miles from downtown Karachi, Abdul Rehman Goth is a hardscrabble community that feels a world apart from the urban chaos nearby. But as Karachi’s population continues to swell, that sense of distance is fading, and villagers find it increasingly hard to escape reminders of the encroaching city squalor.
When Muhammad’s ancestors settled here after leaving the southeastern province of Baluchistan, the shoreline was dotted with remote fishing colonies and shaded by dense mangrove forests.
But those features eroded as Karachi’s population exploded from about 2 million in 1960 to an estimated 22 million today. Much of the waste generated by all of those people as well as by thousands of textile, plastics, leather and chemical factories flows directly into the Arabian Sea. The mangroves that used to serve as a filter, protecting fish and crustaceans, are disappearing because of sprawl and illegal cutting.
Karachi has just two functional wastewater treatment plants, and it is largely up to individual business owners to determine whether industrial waste is stored or dumped into canals, officials say. As a result, each day, 350 million gallons of raw sewage or untreated industrial waste enough to fill 530 Olympic-size swimming pools from the city flows into the harbor, according to Fayyaz Rasool, manager of the Marine Pollution Control Department at Karachi Port Trust.
In addition, about 8,000 tons of solid waste is dumped or washes into the harbor each day. Even more pollution enters the Arabian Sea from the Indus River, which travels the length of Pakistan’s sugar cane and industrial belt before emptying near the Pakistan-India border.
The Karachi port really is a worst-case scenario for pollution, said Mohammad Moazzam Khan, a leading Pakistani marine biologist and the former head of the country’s Marine Fisheries Department. This is the worst pollution I have seen anywhere in the world, and I have seen many places.
In a country where clean water and trash collection are unavailable to most, the polluted sea hasn’t dramatically changed daily life for most Karachi residents. During the sweltering summer, tens of thousands of people still flock to beaches to picnic or dip their feet in the water. The wealthy still build beachfront villas, and restaurants that advertise locally caught seafood thrive.
But the pollution threatens a way of life that the fishermen have passed down through generations. Not only are there fewer fish, but villagers also suffer from ailments that they attribute to pollution, including stomach pain, hearing loss, and respiratory and skin infections. Some even say pollution is causing their hair to go gray sooner.
All that I know, three years ago my hair started to change from black to white, said Waqar Baloch, 16, who wears a Hang Loose Hawaii hat to cover up his salt-and-pepper hair.
Located on an inlet known as Hawk’s Bay, Abdul Rehman Goth is a few miles from a small nuclear reactor that Canada built for Pakistan in the 1970s. Some residents blame the plant for their health problems, but officials say repeated testing has shown normal radiation levels around the plant.
Instead, health experts say, it appears the fishermen are being exposed to the same harmful chemicals poisoning the marine life they are trying to catch. Several recent studies have shown that fish near Karachi contain elevated levels of chromium, cadmium, lead and iron.
We are seeing a lot of skin problems in communities that live in the harbor area and are directly exposed to the water, Rasool said. The good thing is, twice a day, the tide comes in and flushes all the pollution out.
Rasool said that Karachi officials hope to build several new wastewater treatment plants but that they will cost a total of $170 million and take years to complete. In Abdul Rehman Goth, villagers wonder how much time they have.