At the landing centre the auction is by basket. A boat comes in, the catch goes into standard baskets, and the bidding is per basket, called fast, settled in cash before the ice runs down. Nobody weighs anything.
By the time the same fish reaches a shop in Kochi it is priced per kilogram to two decimal places.
Somewhere between those two facts a conversion happens, and the conversion is not a measurement. It is an estimate made by the buyer, who is also the person who will carry the fish to where the scales are.
I have stood at that auction perhaps thirty times over the years I have been writing about the coast, and for a long time I thought the basket was tradition — the sort of thing that persists because it always has. It is not tradition. It is a functioning arrangement that allocates a specific risk, and once I understood which risk, the whole thing made sense and became harder to argue about.
The risk is spoilage and it belongs to whoever holds the fish next. A basket price is agreed in fifteen seconds, in the open, with the catch in front of everybody, and the boat is paid and gone. Weighing four hundred baskets would take an hour the ice does not have, and it would move the loss from the buyer to the seller, because during that hour the fish is still the fisherman's.
So the fisherman gets speed and certainty and takes a discount for it. That is a real trade and he knows he is making it.
What the arrangement also does, and this is the part nobody at the auction has any reason to raise, is make the fisherman's price permanently unverifiable. He cannot know what he was paid per kilo. He therefore cannot compare this buyer to that one on anything except the basket price, and a basket is not a fixed quantity — it is a volume, and a volume of sardines and a volume of anchovy are different masses, and a heaped basket and a level one are different again.
Every buyer knows the conversion. No seller does. That is not a market with an information problem in it. That is an information difference which is the entire margin.
The state has tried the obvious thing, which is scales at the landing centre, and I have seen them, and at two of the three centres I know they are not used. The reason is not resistance to measurement, which is what the reports say. It is that a scale is only useful if the auction is conducted in weight, and one boat cannot switch alone: a fisherman who insists on weighing sells after everyone else has sold, into a market where the buyers have already filled their vehicles.
Which makes it the same shape as every other thing I write about here. The technology is not the constraint and was never the constraint. The constraint is that the change has to happen to all the boats on one morning, and there is nobody at that landing centre whose job it is to make a morning happen.
