Friday 12 June was a hot day in the south-western Pakistani city of Gwadar. Shamsul Haq Kalmati went to the beach for his usual morning walk but was shocked by something new.
“My friend noticed something wrong and told me to look at the bottom of my shoes. They were covered in oil,” he says. “Looking around, we realised it was not just my shoes.”
The city’s entire coast was coated with dark oil.
Local officials warned the 20 kilometre-long slick posed threats to the local fishing industry and marine life. The threats did not take long to manifest: a sea turtle was soon found dead, half-buried in oily sand.
Government authorities are still trying to ascertain the causes of last month’s spill. Abdul Rahim Baloch, the Gwadar Development Authority’s deputy environment director, says fighting in the Gulf may have caused it. Tankers carrying crude oil are being attacked in the conflict between Iran, the US and Israel. Others suspect the smuggling that carries oil from Iran to Pakistan.
Gwadar, in the province of Balochistan, is situated near the strait of Hormuz. Around a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil was shipped through this passage prior to February, when the US and Israel began attacking Iran. But it is not just this proximity to oil that makes waters around the port – and local fishers – extremely vulnerable to ecological emergencies.
Local people say years of rapid development, designed to turn Gwadar into a major port, have brought displacement, flooding and environmental destruction. Fishers who once thrived on the bounties of the sea have resorted to smuggling Iranian oil through a sea route near the border.
How Gwadar boomed
In 2015 China and Pakistan agreed to cooperate on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), an ambitious energy-import infrastructure project that would connect western China to the Indian Ocean. The aim was to bypass the potential maritime chokepoint of the strait of Malacca; Gwadar is planned as the corridor’s ocean terminus and its crown jewel.
The first phase of the port was developed by the governments of Pakistan and China, at a cost of USD 248 million. It was inaugurated in March 2007 and handed over to the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA), which was supposed to run it for 40 years. But in 2013, the PSA gave up Gwadar. The rights to the facility were transferred to the China Overseas Ports Holding Company Ltd, which has been operating it ever since.
The second phase, underway since 2007, focuses on developing infrastructure surrounding the port. This includes various megaprojects, such as a now-completed coastal highway and airport.
Earlier this year the two governments announced a renewed push on the CPEC, with more development for Gwadar.
The chairperson of the Gwadar Port Authority, Noor ul Haq Baloch, told Dialogue Earth the authority is looking at reviving plans for a vast “Oil City” project in the district. It would store, refine and process petroleum products.
But ever since the CPEC was announced, there have been major environmental concerns about the construction of a deep-sea port and related infrastructure at Gwadar. The city is susceptible to drought, climate change, groundwater depletion and rising sea levels, and has been experiencing unpredictable and extreme weather events.
In addition, development has reshaped the local marine environment. Previously, a natural harbour created by a hammer-shaped peninsula served as the heart of Gwadar’s fishing community. Here, fishers could cast their nets year-round, bringing in plentiful catches.
The waters were so bountiful that locals proudly referred to this bay as their own Saindak and Reko Diq, equating the rich marine life to Balochistan’s two famous gold and copper mines. With the deep-sea port and rapid development in and around the port town, that era is over.
“Environmental impact is always present whenever there are mega-development projects such as ports, railways, dams,” says Hasan H Karrar, a China expert and associate professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences. “This is irrespective of which country is financing them and where they were being built.”
The key questions to ask, Karrar notes, are how those environmental impacts are assessed, how they can be mitigated, and who will be a part of the conversations about developments. Today, he says, local people have little role in these conversations.
“Ultimately, we hope for a situation in which the lot of the local people is better off than it was previously and to engage them in the development process,” Karrar adds.
In Gwadar this has not been the case, he says. Many of the local people Dialogue Earth spoke to agree.
Fishers blocked from the sea
In Gwadar, fishers socialise every day at a dhoria along the coast – a Balochi word for a raised, open platform.
Nearby, loading and unloading takes place at the port’s three multipurpose berths for ocean-going ships, where the central fishing spot used to be.
After the 2000s, fishers were forced to leave the area they fished from as it fell within the port’s precincts, says Rahim. The former local fisher, who did not want his real name to be published, says locals do not talk about the port publicly as they fear the ire of local authorities.
Now, fishers are not allowed near the port or where they used to fish.
Rahim remembers going to sea to fish with his father. He says there used to be a lot to catch but that this is no longer the case. Now in his late 30s, Rahim ventures to sea to smuggle Iranian oil.
It has disturbed our mobility – it is challenging to go to the sea and fish. It is like an open jail.Rauf Baloch, fisher
But displacement is not the only impact to local fishers following Gwadar port’s development.
Another concern relates to the 2017 construction of the USD 168 million Eastbay expressway, which connects Gwadar port to the Makran coastal highway, and thus to on Karachi.
Gwadar’s fisherfolk protested this construction for weeks in 2018. The expressway cut off their routes to the Arabian Sea, according to Haji Khudad Wajo, a fisher and leader of the protests.
Authorities eventually built a concrete passageway under the road for fishers to access the sea. But some of them say it has been insufficient. “It has disturbed our mobility – it is challenging to go to the sea and fish. It is like an open jail,” says fisher Rauf Baloch. (Baloch is a common local surname; the people quoted in this story are not related.)
Rising waters, rising problems
Multiple roads have been constructed in Gwadar and its surrounding areas as part of ongoing development. Locals and some experts say they are exacerbating floods when it rains, posing problems even to those who do not need to access the sea for work.
A thoroughfare known locally as the Grand Trunk road, or the GT road, is causing particular concern to the residents of Gwadar. “Because of the GT road … water does not drain into the sea and neither does it get absorbed into the ground,” says Barkat Baloch, who lives in Gwadar district. “If you dig a little, water flows out. As a result, we can neither build a wall nor a house for ourselves.”
The situation has worsened as more development takes place in Gwadar, experts and residents told Dialogue Earth.
During heavy rains, water used to flow from the land to the sea, says hydrologist Pazeer Ahmad. This is no longer the case. The resulting floods have displaced multiple families.
“Paradoxically, Gwadar’s liveability depends on the absence of the rain. Each [rainy] spell threatens to sink the city further,” says Ahmad. “Any rainfall exceeding 40 mm, especially when it coincides with high tide, quickly raises the groundwater table and causes flooding from below the surface.”
Turning to smuggling to make ends meet
For Gwadar’s fishers, the development issues come on top of the longstanding problem of competition from trawlers.
Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman is a prominent political leader of local protests. He has complained for years against what he says is illegal trawling on the Gwadar coast that is in turn causing environmental destruction. Large commercial trawlers from neighbouring Sindh province are not supposed to fish within 12 nautical miles of the shore. He says they violate these territorial limits, bringing their destructive bottom-trawling methods into the zone. By contrast, local fishers use small boats and do not trawl.
Fishing rights remain a contentious issue in Gwadar and have triggered mass protests in the past.
Maasi Zainab, an elderly Baloch woman from Gwadar’s coastal neighbourhood of Mullah Band, agrees that development and disrupted coastal access have brought fishers much hardship. She adds that many of them are stopped from going to sea for several hours “when there is some Chinese or VIP movement around the port. By the time they reach the deep waters, trawlers have already caught so much fish, leaving the fishermen with nothing.”
The social activist and researcher KB Firaq recites a litany of problems that have driven local fishers to oil smuggling:
“CPEC projects’ benefits to the people of Gwadar are yet to be seen. But thanks to these projects, we get inundated during the rain. These trawlers since the 1990s have been using destructive nets to wipe out the fish and their eggs, posing a dangerous threat to the marine life. Projects around Gwadar town have stopped the natural flow of the water to the sea.”
On top of this, areas that were once rich breeding grounds for marine life are also being damaged by oil spills. Firaq blames the oil smuggling: “That has become the cause for the environmental disaster to the marine life in Gwadar.”
