We have estimated that SSF provide at least 40% (37.3 million tonnes) of global fisheries catches and 2.3 billion people with, on average, 20% of their dietary intake across 6 key micronutrients essential for human health. Globally, the livelihood of one in every twelve people, nearly half of them women, depends at least partially on small-scale fishing, altogether generating 44% (USD 77.2 billion) of total fisheries landed economic value. Maintaining and increasing these multi-dimensional SSF contributions to sustainable development requires targeted and effective actions, especially increasing engagement of fisherfolk in shared management and governance. Without management and governance focused on SSF’s multi-dimensional contributions, the marginalization of millions of fishers and fishworkers will worsen. In this presentation we report on the above findings and analyze emerging patterns of self-governance strategies small-scale fishers from around the world have developed in an attempt to capture the multi-dimensional benefits produced by their fishing activities. We review cases form around the world to inform what might be the blind spots and promising pathways for small-scale producers to best confront looming governance and sustainability challenges in the context of food security, poverty alleviation, inequality, and climate change.
With increasing industrialization in marine sectors driven by a Blue Economy agenda, many regions are transitioning from reliance on small-scale fisheries (SSFs) to reliance on large-scale fisheries (LSFs), a shift that carries significant socioeconomic implications. As common pool resources, SSFs can deliver broad social benefits, including livelihoods, food security, and economic resilience in coastal communities. However, as LSFs often concentrate economic gains among fewer, more powerful, and more vertically integrated stakeholders, this transition can restrict SSF-reliant communities’ access to fishing rights and marine resources, thereby reducing food security by limiting access to wild food sources. This study compiles documented impacts of prioritizing LSFs over SSFs on previously SSF-reliant coastal communities. Using case study examples from a synthetic review of the literature and drawing on data from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests data, which provides comprehensive SSF catch and livelihood data across different countries, we describe and compare SSF indicators in countries with varying degrees of SSF and LSF reliance, as well as in focal fisheries which have experienced some degree of transition from SSF to LSF. We develop a conceptual model to assess how shifts from SSFs to LSFs can impact food security, particularly in lower-income communities that are highly reliant on SSFs. The findings underscore the need for governance models that recognize the collective nutritional benefits and social safety net that SSFs provide, suggesting that policies fostering equitable access to marine resources can help mitigate the food security risks inherent in LSF-dominated fishery settings.
Small-scale fisheries (SSF) play a big role as drivers of employment, economic growth, social development and environmental recovery. They produce 40% of the total global capture fisheries and prove employment to 60.2 million people (~90 % of the total employed in fisheries globally). However, these fisheries are complex given the range of targeted species and ecosystems, economic value of different species, harvesting methods, labor organization, management strategies and governance dynamics. Global studies like the “Illuminating Hidden Harvests: The Contributions of Small-scale Fisheries to Sustainable Development” (IHH) have highlighted a wide diversity of institutional arrangements across formal policies and institutional arrangements in 52 countries, including local-level specific policies to small-scale fisheries and national-level general fisheries policies that affect both small- and large-scale fisheries, as well as formal co-management provisions with varying levels of fisher participation. The IHH study also introduced a novel way to compile SSF data within fishery units that offer the potential to allow connections among species-specific catches, landed values, fleet characteristics (including harvesting methods and labor organization), and institutional arrangements governing these fisheries. The fishery units were most prominently related to four main groups of attributes: a) biological/ecosystem-related, b) operational (e.g. gear and vessel types, motorization level), c) spatial, and d) catch utilization (e.g. subsistence or commercial). This paper uses these IHH dataset to analyze how connecting SSF environmental, economic, and governance data via these fishery units produces unique insights into the specific benefits of SSF beyond volume of catch for revenue, whether current formal institutional arrangements reflect or enable these benefits, and whether these assessment units corresponded with existing management units in the country.
Cooperative organizations are internationally promoted as a means of achieving conservation and governance objectives in small-scale fisheries (SSFs), but global trends in coastal development and population growth may be disincentivizing fishers from joining or remaining in cooperatives. This idea has potentially important implications for SSF governance and conservation but has not been tested on a national scale. To fill this gap, we use data from Mexico to establish the relationship between fishing cooperatives’ rate of dissolution and their proximity to urban areas. Results show substantial evidence of a negative association between the odds that a cooperative is defunct and its travel time to the nearest urban center. Specifically, a cooperative that is less than half an hour from an urban center is about twice as likely to go defunct compared to a similar cooperative that is farther away. This result suggests that challenges such as lower transaction costs, ecosystem degradation, and the availability of alternative livelihood opportunities may be decreasing the viability of SSF cooperatives in or near urban areas. Policymakers, development practitioners, and conservation organizations that rely upon long-term collaboration with fishing cooperatives in Mexico and beyond should be aware of the possibility that the urban context is more conducive to alternative organizational models, such as patron-client arrangements, that may be less conducive to sustainable resource use and participatory governance.
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