A short report on India’s fisheries published by the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) awakened me to the disproportionately small share of information and discussion in most fisheries press, and the relatively little research effort focusing on small-scale/artisanal fisheries (SSF).
This is even though worldwide SSF produce some two thirds of the fish that go for direct human consumption. According to the FAO, SSF with its is over 90% of the world’s 28 million capture fishermen, produce over half the world’s marine and inland catch, while supporting 84 million people employed in fish processing, distribution and marketing. Since at least 95 per cent of the world’s fisherfolk are in Asia, Africa, Latin America and oceanic islands, and over three quarters of them are in the artisanal and small-scale sub-sector, SSF and small-scale fish farming are economically and socially vital in coastal communities where fish provide the bulk of animal protein.
In contrast to larger-scale fisheries, SSF are less likely to overfish finfish stocks and affect habitats. They use more indigenous resources and demand less energy, equipment, infrastructure, and foreign currencies, not only per worker, but also per ton of fish produced and, much more so, per their market value. Employing multiple fishing technologies and targeting multiple species, their catch goes for direct, human consumption, in fresh, smoked, dried, or frozen form and very few for reduction. While SSF are the employer of last resort in many countries, throughout the developed and developing industrialised world it is often economically more attractive for coastal people than some of its alternatives.
The artisanal and small-scale fisherfolk and their boats and houses are the first to be hit by hurricanes, tsunamis and floods in coastal areas. SSF are also vulnerable to coastal and marine pollution, to indiscriminate longshore development causing devastation of essential habitats, such as coastal wetlands and mangrove forests, to damming of rivers, and upstream deforestation, and to coastal oil exploration and exploitation.
India
India, with its 1.2bn population, is a good example to illustrate the social and economic magnitude of SSF. Its coastline exceeds 8,000km, and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is 2m km2. In 2007, India’s marine yield was 3.15m metric tonnes, while its inland fishery exploiting some 200,000km of rivers and canals and more than 235m hectares produced almost 782,000 metric tonnes of food fish. The average annual value of fish production during 2002-2007 was over US$14.6bn (by January 2010 exchange rate).
The bulk of this yield was produced by the more than 3.5m people in 3,300 fishing villages with almost 1m active fishing people and over three quarters of a million of other fishworkers and fish traders. They operate from 1,332 landing centres almost a quarter of a million of fishing craft, almost a half of which is non-motorised. SSF and aquaculture also provide employment to large numbers of women in fishery-associated trades.
Research and management
Studying inshore and other coastal fish stocks, which in tropical and sub-tropical waters are quite multifarious and co-existing in complex feeding inter-relations and within wide behavioural and hydrological ranges, is expensive, scientifically difficult, and requires huge amounts of work on the beach and at sea on board small craft, as well as lots of laboratory space, staff and equipment. Therefore, apart from studies in social sciences, much less research efforts have been directed at SSF than at industrial fisheries.
In industrialised countries we witness dwindling and marginalisation of SSF, due to its part conversion into semi-industrial and recreational activities, or as it has happened in Iceland, following the introduction of the ITQ system. In developing countries many traditional systems of managing artisanal fisheries have broken down under the pressure of commercial market demand and “nationalisation” of the traditional, locally managed community and tribal fishing rights. For examples, see ‘Folks Managements in the World’s Fisheries’, C.L. Dyer and J.R. McGoodwin (Editors), Univ. Press of Colorado. 1994.
Management of SSF hardly exists, and if it does, is often unfavourable through outright discrimination in favour of medium and large-scale commercial fisheries, or inappropriate ‘modernisation’. In some countries, however, some allocation of exclusive (and rarely enforced) inshore fishing grounds are favouring direct or indirect SSF operations, while in some industrial countries, perverted taxation rules may goad fishermen into equipping their boats with expensive, but not always absolutely necessary, electronics.
Conventional management, with its catch restrictions targeting single species, while hotly disputed among the northern fishery science and industry, is inappropriate and useless for SSF everywhere, above all in developing countries where fishermen employ diverse fishing methods and target diverse species and where SSF are spread over a multitude of small landing sites and beaches.
Attempts to restore or introduce SSF-specific management methods were described in Berkes et al. ‘Managing Small-scale Fisheries: Alternative Directions and Methods’ IDRC, Ottawa, 2001, http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-8574-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html and in ‘The Community Development Quota Program in Alaska’, Natl.Res.Counc.199, (www.nap.edu). I’m afraid that the jury is still out as tohow appropriate they proved to be, and how positive the results have been.
Some decades ago, a self-regulatory mechanism had sufficed for effective and sustainable SSF operations, because with catches dropping beyond a certain minimum, fishing activity was becoming economically unrewarding, if not prohibitively costly. Since small-scale fishermen as a rule cannot continue fishing and lose money for long, lower catches eventually resulted in reduced fishing effort. More recently, however, increasing population pressures and, hence, growing demand, rising prices, and fishing becoming the employment of last resort for many newcomers, have messed up this self-regulatory system. With the resource cake divided among growing numbers of fishermen and, in particular, with rising fuel prices, incomes dropped and, in many places, overfishing has come about.
In the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and South America, SSF may be facing increasing difficulties, which in view of their socio-economic importance justifies special treatment with respect to subsidies, taxation, research needs, and access to infrastructure, safety-at-sea, services, markets and credit.
