Hamour | Redux

It's been too long since I've posted here ... and, sadly, this post is going to be fairly quick. (There will be more soon though, I promise; I was recently given a gold mine of statistical data which I plan to dig into). 

ICYMI: yesterday's Peninsula, an English language daily in Qatar, had a front page story on the declining hamour stocks. The piece makes no mention of the amount of hamour catches in tonnage (for that, see my piece here). It does, however, discuss the prices for both wholesale and retail hamour catches. Interestingly, the retail markup for hamour is much lower than it is for fish which are actually much less threatened: wholesale to retail for Kanaad, the local kingfish, is QAR 40 to 70, or 75%; for hamour, this is QAR 80 to 100, or 20%. Clearly, traders are beginning to understand that there are upper limits to how much they can charge for hamour, and are giving in to the fact that it is very much in demand.  

So, like I said, this is kind of a very quick revisit of my earlier post on the hamour dying out ... since I have the 2008 Qatar Labour Force Survey however, it shouldn't be much longer until my next, more data-rich post! 

Population Bursts and the Consumption of Hamour (Better late than never ...)

I'm sure the scores of you who started visiting this blog over the past two weeks started to worry that I might never post again. Fear not. There is a lot to say about Qatari fish stocks, and other things; and so, while I have a lot of pressing things to take care of at the moment--other fish to fry, if you will--I did want to share a few charts I cooked up to elaborate on something I'd mentioned earlier. 

As is well documented, Qatar's dramatic population surge over the past decade or so has been driven largely by the burgeoning growth of inward migration to the country. While the data from the Ministry of Environment (see previous posts) show no major increase in the numbers of fishermen or fishing boats over the last decade, what they do show is a huge rise in the amount of fish caught. 

To give a very crude visualisation of how these two are related, see below: 

The catch per fisherman of fish, overall, rose in tandem with the rapidly expanding expatriate population. 

To put this more simply, we have: 

Amount of fish caught per fisherman in Qatari waters.

What the figures show is more than just the obvious "more people eat more fish", but rather that the amount of fish caught by individual fishermen, on average, shot up at around the same time that the population was growing. Although this does not show statistical correlation, it does demonstrate a fairly intuitive idea: that large numbers of protein-hungry foreigners are moving here and, landing on a fish which tastes a bit like a cod, find it irresistible. One more plot for today can be found below.