YEMAYA RECOMMENDS
Film
Seguridad Alimentaria (Food Security) – A short film on food Security and small-scale fisheries in Costa Rica
Produced by Poró Studio, directed by CoopeSoliDar R.L, 187 seconds, Spanish with English subtitles
By Vishakha Gupta (icsf@icsf.net), Programe Associate, ICSF
“From the sea to the plate, remarks Cintia Vega in Seguridad Alimentaria’ (Food Security’), a short film directed by CoopeSoliDar. She is talking about fresh seafood in Cabuya, a small fishing village on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, and her words capture the significance that fish as food holds for the coastal Costa Rican community.
In Costa Rica, 14,800 artisanal fishers were identified on both coastlines and inland waters in the period 2009-11. When we consider their families and communities, the number increases nearly fourfold with almost 50,000 people depending upon marine and inland resources for their food security and livelihoods.
Food security depends on a wide range of factors, including availability, stability of supply, access and utilization or absorption leading to improved nutrition. For an artisanal fishworker both in Costa Rica and in other parts of the world, these are addressed to a certain extent by their tenure rights and capacity to fish and gather marine resources in coastal waters. Women from different parts of the country reiterate that fish is not only for the market but first of all, for their families, providing an essential part of their staple diet.
Through the film, the cultural significance of fishing, gathering and eating seafood is highlighted in kaleidoscopic ways. From families working together and community members supporting one another to experiences connecting generations. Hellen Serracín from Cabuya talks about how activities such as fishing and clam gathering, in particular, are experiences through which the community connects and continues to pass their heritage forward.
Alejandra Matarrita from Cabuya shares how community members offer support to one another in small but meaningful ways. This is part of the film’s larger effort to show the balance of relationships and support structures that exist within the fishworker community which accrue in benefits such as reduced costs of operation and enhanced food security.
The work and contributions of women in the fishing sector often go unrecognised and unacknowledged. This film challenges that invisibility with almost every frame. Women play an integral role in several steps of the value chain. The film highlights this work, not by drawing special attention to their contributions, but by simply naturalising it.
The film also draws attention to coastal communities’ inherent drive to protect and manage an ecological balance which supports the continued productivity of their marine resources, for example, through the targeted fishing of the invasive Lion Fish.
Peppered with mouth-watering scenes of preparing and cooking fresh seafood with local produce, the film undeniably reinforces the importance of fish as food. Especially for a community whose lives and histories are intertwined with the seafood they produce. The diversity of food shown also provides an indication of the nutritionally diverse diet which coastal communities, given their livelihoods, can access.
For coastal communities, fishing is a way of life, not simply a means to an end. It is the shared bedrock upon which the well-being of small scale fishworkers thrives. The film reasserts this fact and impresses upon the viewer the need to protect and support small scale fishworkers.
Supported by ICSF, this film has been created by CoopeSoliDar R.L and Poró Studio. The film can be viewed on CoopeSoliDar R.L’s YouTube channel along with the other films in this series, which are on climate change, governance, blue economy, and diversity in Costa Rica’s small-scale fisheries sector.
The film may be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yw5y8qRVfw&t=1s
