The Contribution of Small-Scale Fisheries to Food Security and Family Income in Chile, Colombia, and Peru

Raising awareness about opportunities for transdisciplinary work and ethical grounding to meet the global challenges to the professions is paramount. Issues of justice and living within the planetary boundaries become also more prominent in the life, social sciences and humanities questioning disciplinary silos. Institutionalising alternatives that create and sustain broader knowledge ecologies for sustainable living is yet to be systematically enabled through new learning and educational pathways. We argue, that there are considerable mutual learning opportunities between artisanal, small-scale mining and small-scale fisheries. The global employment in the artisanal gold mining sector is estimated at some 10 to 15 million people, of whom 4.5 million are women and 0.6 million children. Some 40 million people are estimated along value chains in the artisanal fishing of whom 50% are estimated to be women. In both sectors informality is high, production very incompletely recorded and relations with governments and local administrations tend to be difficult as perceptions about the negative sides of the artisanal operations are pervasive in a policy context modelled on industrial exploitation and value chains. Where attempts have been made to quantify production and role in employment, food security or even in contribution to GDP and international trade, the numbers almost always justify policy change in favour of the small-scale sectors. In the face of disruptive technologies liable to make many industrial jobs redundant, opportunities for a new brand of artisanal operators in higher value added segments would be possible with suitable investment in people and institutions. This could go well beyond the poverty discourse into which artisanal miners and fishers are often confined, a notion vigorously rejected by many fishers e.g. in West Africa. The 2018 &#8220;Mosi-oa-Tunya Declaration on Artisanal and Small-scale Mining, Quarrying and Development&#8221; and the &#8220;Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the context of food security and poverty eradication&#8221; with its grounding in human rights and adopted in 2014 by the FAO Committee of Fisheries are starting points for demarginalising artisanal operators. The small-scale fisheries academy (SSF academy) in Senegal offer an example of how this could be enabled. Some 600,000 people are estimated to work along artisanal value chains in the country. The SSF academy explores the possibilities to use bottom-up training of trainer approaches to empower individuals (men and women) and communities to improve their livelihoods. Inclusive, participatory methods of active learning based on &#8220;Gender Actions Learninig System&#8221; (GALS) are being tested to enable experiencing positive local change in relation to global policy goals like the SSF Guidelines in the context of Agenda 2030. The SSF academy offers a safe space where diverse actors can meet, confront their different knowledges and experiences and develop social and technological innovations. Wider sharing builds capabilities and practice of advocacy and collective action thus also paving the way for forms of more participatory governance. Demonstrating feasibility may entice policy reform that would benefit from long-term societal views to counter wide-spread short-termism, for fishers and miners.

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Improving our knowledge on small-scale fisheries: data needs and methodologies

10.31230/osf.io/vnwc2 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Keyword(s):

Sustainable Development ◽

Food Security ◽

Poverty Reduction ◽

Three Dimensions ◽

Small Scale ◽

Essential Information ◽

The Sustainable Development ◽

Partnership Development ◽

Small Scale Fisheries ◽

Food Security And Nutrition

In 2012, the World Bank, FAO and WorldFish Center published a review of the economic importance of fisheries entitled Hidden Harvest: The Global Contribution of Capture Fisheries. While providing essential information and estimates that are still valid, the analyses would benefit from being refined and updated, and also by including additional dimensions of the contribution of small-scale fisheries to food security and nutrition, poverty reduction, and the three dimensions of sustainable development more broadly. The intention would be to draw the attention of policy- and decision-makers to the sector’s importance and to promote the required engagement and support to realize the potential of sustainable small-scale fisheries. Such an analysis would also be an important contribution towards monitoring the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines), and of the progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).As a first step towards a new Hidden Harvest study, the “Workshop on improving our knowledge on small-scale fisheries: data needs and methodologies” was held at FAO in Rome, Italy on 27–29 June 2017. This expert workshop discussed:• the scope and main contents of the new study, including type of data (indicators) to be collected and subsector coverage; and• the methodologies for data collection and analyses, including key partners and information sources.About 40 external experts, as well as FAO staff from the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department and other relevant FAO departments, participated in the workshop. The workshop agreed on the need for a comprehensive new study to illuminate the hidden contributions of small-scale fisheries to the three dimensions of sustainable development, as well as identifying the key threats to these contributions. The study would be a collaborative effort, and the next steps envisaged include the development of a study design based on the workshop outcomes, to be completed by the end of 2017; continuation of ongoing communications and partnership development; and launch of the research in early 2018, with a target for completion in the first half of 2019.

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