If production and the living standards of fishing communities are to rise without adversely affecting fish stocks, new management strategies must be designed, implemented and evaluated as to effectiveness that involve not just government agencies and local fishing communities but also fish traders and private voluntary organizations. Though the relationship between traders and fishermen is much less well known for inland fisheries than for coastal fisheries, the same type of “symbiotic relationship” (Lawson, 1983:10) appears to be involved. In some cases, the inland fisherman processes and sells his own catch or different members of the family may be the traders (indeed, the fish trade is one way in which the wives of fishermen can participate in the fisheries, raising their living standards, and those of their children in the process). In other cases, fishermen may become full-time traders or traders may constitute a completely separate population.
Regardless the situation, throughout the tropics small scale traders, where left alone, have shown an ability to deliver fish to major market centers that is at least as efficient as most government marketing parastatals and cooperatives. Not only does the fish trade provide employment for a relatively large number of people who might otherwise be unemployed or underemployed but various types of mutually supportive collaboration between fishermen and traders has been documented.
Though much more research is needed, the provision of credit from traders to fishermen is fairly common, at least in regard to small-scale coastal fisheries in West Africa. Since the absence of credit is a major constraint to the development of inland fisheries granted the escalating costs of equipment. planners should think twice before attempting to alter the fish trade. After analyzing an indigenous marketing system among the Fante of Ghana's Cape Coast, Gladwin widens reliance on local participants to include traders and fishermen when he concludes, “existing indigenous institutions can be utilized as vehicles for development which would not disrupt the traditional social fabric nor negatively impact the role of women within society” (1980:131). Referring to inland fisheries, Hayward documents how Kafue Flats fishermen and traders cooperate in supporting an economic price for both. “One might expect that particular fishermen or traders might undersell the going price in order to corner the market. This is prevented by the cooperative action of both traders and fishermen present, who negotiate with the ‘offender’ in order to bring prices into line with the prevailing standard. … This cartelization of prices prevents much sharp practice on either side" (1982:19).
Private voluntary organizations, or groups of donor-supported volunteers, also have an important role to play both as intermediaries and as sources of scarce personnel, funds and equipment. So bad is the relationship between some government departments, including fisheries, and local communities, that some experts believe their involvement to guarantee the failure of whatever program is implemented. Referring to reforestation efforts in Haiti, Murray (quoted in Cernea, 1985) states “if a planner were intent on killing a tree-planting project from the outset, on ensuring that it didn't work, there would be no more effective sabotage mechanism than to place this project under the control of some government ministry.” Such viewpoints are not just restricted to Haiti or to forestry projects. In listing factors facilitating success in their many small-scale fishery projects throughout the tropics, a fishery adviser to the U.S. Peace Corps placed at the top of his list “independence from government and from international donors” (1984 oral communication).
While such extreme views may have merit for certain small-scale projects, government involvement is crucial for the formulation and enforcement of national management strategies, especially in regard to political, technical and financial support. On the other hand, a wide range of private voluntary organizations (PVO) can play vital roles both as intermediaries between governments and suspicious fishing communities and as executing agencies in their own right. An example of the latter function is Family Farms in Zambia, a PVO which recently has broadened its highly successful activities with the planning, implementation and handing over of new lands settlement schemes to include fishing communities on the Kafue Flats, a longer term goal being to help such communities protect themselves against the inroads of outsiders.
To combine limited access with local participation and control, local organizations are needed which command the loyalty of the fishing communities in which they exist, which make economic sense, and which are capable, with proper assistance from without, of managing a multispecies riverine fishery over the longer term. The order of the functions of such organizations -- sociocultural congruence, economic viability and conservation orientation -- is intentional. Unless such organizations give fishing communities a major economic stake in managing fish stocks in a socially congruent way they will fail as a management mechanism.
While “Putting People First” is a relatively new approach to rural development, it has received strong endorsement in recent World Bank Reports and Evaluations (Emmerson, 1980; Pollnac 1981 and Cernea, 1985). In his Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts. Asian Experiences, Emmerson argues the need for a bioanthropological approach which combines sensitivity to both fishery resources and fishing communities (though dealing primarily with marine communities Emmerson's emphasis is no less applicable to inland fisheries). Dealing more specifically with fishermen's cooperatives, Pollnac stresses the need for “adaptive research in the many and varied small-scale fishing communities of the world…. Regional variability with respect to social and cultural variables must be taken into consideration, and the cooperative developed to fit regional and local needs” (p. iii). Generalizing about a much wider range of World Bank projects, Kottak (in Cernea, 1985) states that perhaps his most significant finding was “ that attention to social issues pays off in concrete economic terms” as measured by significantly improved economic rates of return.
Not only are communities that participate in inland fisheries highly diversified, but the same community is apt to change rapidly through time as its fishery is commercialized. Though a decreasing minority, some communities remain very small scale, relatively isolated and relatively self-sufficient. Others may be part of very complex, hierarchically organized societies which bind communities to them through a wide range of economic, socio-political and ideological linkages. In most, fishing is a part-time, seasonal activity, although there are major exceptions. Though part-time fishermen usually are also farmers, fishing may be combined with a range of other productive activities including livestock management and fish trading. Under such circumstances, there is no one organization that can be merely superimposed upon fishing communities and expected to succeed. As Pollnac points out, the fisherman's cooperative is the organization most frequently used to deliver services to small-scale fishing communities. Yet its failure rate in the tropics is very high in part, Pollnac argues, because “little or no attention was paid in … project appraisals to sociocultural factors associated with their potential success or failure” (p. i). In other words there is no substitute for adaptive research.
While local forms of organization for management purposes should be culturally congruent, nonetheless some general comments are appropriate for small-scale inland fisheries regardless of their degree of commercialization. In discussing local organizations for the poor. van Heck (1979) distinguishes between standard and participatory organizations. The former tend to be the result of government or outside initiative and include such local institutions as district and community councils, and cooperatives. Though they can and do play an important role in rural development, rarely are they based on local institutions at the community level rather being superimposed from above. Hence in South Asia the village panchayat rarely corresponds to actual village communities but rather is a larger government mandated unit that aggregates a number of existing communities. The same can be said for the ward (and ward development committees) in Central Africa. In both cases such organizations have been designed by outsiders for both voting and development purposes. And in both cases almost universally they are dominated by a small but powerful rural elite who “show an almost universal lack of interest … towards the poor in their midst” (van Heck, 1979: 2; see also Chambers, 1983).
Since fishing communities are often among the poorest of the poor, and, in South Asia as elsewhere, often considered to be of very low status, standard organizations rarely represent their interests. Under such circumstances, van Heck concludes, and we concur, that separate participatory organizations need be set up and run by the poor themselves. In some cases, their establishment may be initiated from within; in other cases external assistance may be essential. But in either case external support of some sort is needed either in terms of legally sanctioned and upheld policies, or in terms of more direct assistance in establishing and running an effective organizational structure.
Combining limited access and local participation and control at the community level, a particularly attractive organizational mode is Reynolds' (1981) “Community Land Company” which we have relabeled “Local Participatory Shareholders Organization” (LPSO) to make it more applicable to water management and to remove the easily misunderstood word “company.” Reynolds' concept evolved out of his work in community forestry with the Ford Foundation in Central India, and currently is being implemented on an experimental basis by the Zimbabwe Government in the Sebungwe Region. It is not presented here as a panacea but rather as illustrative of the type of local organization which might be an effective mechanism for combing local control with effective resource management. Potentially participatory in regard to all adult members at the community level, the LPSO is also designed to give all members an economic stake in a community's fish resources.
While applicable to both relatively uncommercialized and highly commercialized but formerly traditional fishing communities, the structure of LPSOs in specific cases should be based on adaptive research. While a community focus might make sense in many societies, in others (such as Nilotic fishing communities in the Sudan's Sudd), the appropriate unit for organization might be a lineage, with a series of lineages (or clans, etc) responsible for adjacent areas. In other cases, the Haya of Lake Victoria, for example, fishing guilds might be the most appropriate unit, and so on. Though it is important initially not to overload local organizations with too many functions, in time it would be desirable for them to be federated up to the district or fishery level. They could also be articulated in various ways to consumers and marketing cooperatives and to fishery community centers although again it is crucial that their participatory nature and primary function (to give community members an economic stake in a resource without degrading it) not be qualified in any way.
As conceptualized by Reynolds (1981 and GOZ, 1983), each Local Participatory Shareholders Organization is officially established as a legal entity (which can receive loans) in which each household preferably has two equal shareholders -- that is both spouses, although adaptive research might suggest other bases on which shares should be allotted. Defined by specific boundaries (to be fixed by local communities in cooperation with local government and departments of fisheries and/or other government agencies), the resource under management would be divided according to the number of shareholders.
The concept of sharing is a common characteristic of traditional fishing communities, with Emmerson's sampling of the anthropological literature on Asian coastal fishing communities showing “how important are the social norms of sharing and exchange that typically govern the distribution of the catch in a subsistence fishery” (1980:28). Our sampling of the literature on inland fisheries suggests the same conclusion, with fish landings widely circulated among kin and other community members. Though commercialization undercuts norms for sharing, the concept of shares in a LPSO should nonetheless be a culturally congruent one in many fishing communities. Among the Haya, for example, each member of a fishing guild of six to twelve members owns a share in the communally owned equipment of the guild. Shares are heritable (including to women) and yields are divided in accordance with the size of one's share provided the shareholder or his/her substitute participates in the day's activities (Cory and Hartnoll, 1970:185–186). Though shares can be sold, guild members have right of first refusal.
The Haya example is outlined in some detail because it corresponds to Reynolds' concept of a LPSO where shares can be auctioned off among community members. The auctioning of shares within the LPSO has two major benefits. First, it enables elderly shareholders and others not actively fishing to obtain some financial benefit from their membership in the LPSO. Second, it sets a “market price” for shares which can be used as a basis for taxation, one mechanism for obtaining the support of local government agencies at the ward and district levels being an improvement of their tax base. On the other hand, some constraints need be set to keep the wealthier members of the organization from accumulating a disproportionate number of shares either on their own behalf or as “fronts” to, or partners with, outsiders who provide the capital.
Leasing of shares for a fixed time period might be one mechanism for protecting share holders' rights, with shares reverting back to the owner or the owners' heirs after a number of years. Or members of the leasee's kin-group, household or other subgroup might have prior rights of acquisition. Shareholders, for example, might be aggregated in subgroups which become the actual shareholders with every effort made to maintain an appropriate balance between the shares of the different subgroups. Determination of the type of gear used ideally should be the responsibility of the LPSO's “governing council,” with government staff acting in strictly an advisory role; otherwise LPSOs might be inflicted with the same type of inefficient gear restrictions which are part of the current problem, especially where poorer fishermen are involved. This is where closed seasons or closed areas might come in as a management technique.
As noted earlier the Local Participatory Shareholders Organization is no panacea. Nonetheless it has potential simply because, on the one hand, it makes sense theoretically (by combining limited access with local participation and such mechanisms as shareholding, auctioning and leasing), while, on the other hand, it would appear to be congruent with the sociocultural systems of local fishing communities. Its implementation in any one case presents many potential problems (coping with increased membership, for example, and outsiders including migratory fishermen) which must be worked out on the spot. What is needed is a pilot approach in a small number of carefully selected areas, where prototypical organizations are designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated with strong local participation throughout. Private Voluntary Organizations might play a particularly important role here, especially in cases where there are longstanding suspicions between fishing communities and departments of fisheries. A most delicate issue is the degree of residual government control, if any, over the resource base during the period of initial implementation. In the long run, Reynolds foresees a Federation of LPSOs at the national level (with government representation but run by elected members) dealing with “infractions.”
Though commercialization of traditional fishing populations is accelerating throughout the tropics, some noncommercialized (stage one) fisheries remain, especially along tributaries in the Amazon Basin, elsewhere in the humid lowlands of South America, and in tropical Africa and Asia. Almost inevitably they are isolated, small-scale and vulnerable -- unable, alone, to resist the future encroachment of outsiders. If they are to have the option of surviving in their present state or of commercializing their operations, they must organize and they must receive external support. Because of their limited distribution and their small scale a particularly attractive option is incorporating them within such restricted access areas as national parks, natural resource management areas and ethnic parks.
The idea here is to allow participants of still traditional fisheries access, on a subsistence and limited exchange basis, to the fishery resources of national parks or to wildlife management areas created to incorporate local communities. In exchange for government permission to fish and for government protection from outsiders, those allowed access must help government protect the resource base by using only accepted techniques and by helping to control outside poaching of game, fish, flora, mineral and other natural resources. If they do not uphold their end of the “compact,” they lose their fishing rights.
Though the concept of incorporating local communities of fishermen within the ecology of national parks tends to be immediately rejected when first broached to park and other authorities (the senior author has had that experience in Zambia, Nigeria and Sri Lanka), it appears to have worked in a number of cases both in temperate zones and in the tropics. In more densely populated temperate zones it is easy to forget that some parks were actually built around peasant communities which had prior rights of occupancy. Today these same communities constitute an attractive feature of such parks as Snowdonia in Wales and Duke d'Abruzzi in Italy.
A very different situation prevailed in the tropics. With little understanding of local cultures, there colonial authorities usually forcibly removed local populations when national parks were established in their midst. In a few cases, however, local populations have either been allowed to fish on a subsistence basis within park boundaries or plans for allowing access are currently under consideration. Examples where local communities have been allowed to fish within parks include Rwanda's Akagera National Park, Zaire's Virunga National Park, Zambia's Lockinvar National Park, parks and game management areas along the edge of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, and the park and sanctuary areas surrounding Sri Lanka's Senanayake Samudra reservoir.
Unfortunately in none of the above five cases have we been able to obtain up-to-date material on the current status of fishing within the parks and management areas concerned. In all cases except Zambia (and there fishing was stopped for unrelated reasons), however, limited access is apparently still allowed suggesting that the experiment has been reasonably successful, although in Sri Lanka the authorities were considering seriously in 1981 eliminating night fishing because of increased poaching and illegal gemming. If implemented, such an approach would worsen the current adversary relationship between fishermen and resource managers by eliminating the most efficient fishing techniques without any guarantee of reducing poaching and illegal entry. An alternative approach, we believe, would be Emmerson's bioanthropological approach in which park managers and fishermen see if they can work together as partners.
Clearly evaluation of these cases is desirable, so that strengths and weaknesses can be evaluated and other experiments attempted. The common belief that incorporation of fishermen will automatically lead to additional poaching is not necessarily the case provided the fishermen are given an economic stake in the fishing resources on the understanding that permission to fish will be withdrawn if poaching increases. Theoretically, they should be willing to protect their access by actually stopping the illegal entry of outsiders. Although the experiment lasted too short a time for evaluation to occur, Scudder's impressions from conversations in Zambia was that fishing by an adjacent, multiethnic community of fishermen (including the indigenous Batwa) actually led to a reduction in poaching of lechwe antelope in Lockinvar before the decision to allow fishing was reversed; however, those impressions need checking.
As for other examples, in Ecuador the Office of Forest Development (which includes national parks under its jurisdiction) has designated at least one Faunal Production Reserve which could benefit adjacent communities of Amerindians in two ways. First, some would be recruited to serve as rangers to protect the resource base. Second, local communities might be allowed to continue their traditional hunting and fishing activities within the boundaries of the reserve (Vickers, 1983 written communication). Implementation of these plans has been delayed, however. and we have been unable to obtain information more recent that 1980.
Ethnic parks are natural resource management areas under the jurisdiction of tribal populations, which allow members limited access to the resource base. While there are a number of examples in the United States (of which the largest is Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park), we have information on only one case in the tropics. This is the current attempt of the Cuna Indians of Panama to establish with outside technical and financial assistance a forest park reserve along the southern border of their reservation (Chapin, 1984). Designed to stop encroachment of shifting cultivation by outsiders by converting an area of cloud forest to a scientific reserve for international research and tourism, this park is not designed for local resource use. The concept of an ethnic park is, however, especially in buffer zones surrounding national parks elsewhere in Latin America, or in Africa and Asia. Such might be the case, for example, in the Ituri Forest of Zaire or along the Semliki River bordering that country and Uganda, or in the tribal areas surrounding Chitwan National Park in Nepal.
If the local people so desire, there is also the possibility of national governments allowing them, or indeed, encouraging them, to have their whole territory designated as an ethnic park in certain special situations. The Peruvian Cocamilla are a case in point. According to Stocks, they formed a Cocamilla Federation of from 4000 to 7000 people in 1979. Since that time “the Cocamilla have made a concerted attempt to obtain titles for their lands, still communally held, and to secure guarantees for their lake as a subsistence resource” (1983:244). Militant toward protecting their fishing grounds, the Cocamilla present an exceptional opportunity for the Peruvian government to work with a local population in developing new approaches to fishery management.
The concept of allowing traditional communities of fisherfolk limited access to the fishery resources of national parks and other natural resource management areas is an attractive one for several reasons. First, it enables at least some community members to pursue a traditional life style if they so desire. Second, although largely untested, it provides park authorities with another mechanism to protect parklands by giving local populations an economic stake in resource management.
Though the situation varies from park to park, frequently the most efficient poachers are outsiders - urban based entrepreneurs who manage major attacks on game and forest resources within restricted areas. Where they use local populations as hunters, guides and scouts, the economic returns to the latter probably are not particularly great. If so, it should be possible to obtain local cooperation by giving adjacent communities a direct economic benefit in park management not just through cropping of surplus fish within the park and of fish and game in surrounding areas, but also by revenue sharing, and by encouraging community members to seek employment within the park service, to develop tourist facilities, and to better manage their own resource base by forming Local Participatory Shareholding Organizations. Such an approach is just now being initiated as a collaborative effort between a number of government agencies and the University of Zimbabwe in the Sebungwe Region (GOZ, 1983).
Another way to combine limited access with local control would be to encourage, or allow, certain ethnic populations to form parks within their traditional territories, or to declare their entire area a restricted fishing territory. Although the latter case has similarities to national parks for people, as in Brazil, it differs in that management responsibilities start with the communities involved (as in the Cuna and Cocamilla examples) rather than with the government.
While we have advocated a decentralization of control to local communities throughout this paper, it is necessary to start this section with the government role since it is up to governments to implement general policies which benefit artisanal fisheries and, more specifically, to formulate, institutionalize, encourage and support new management policies that link limited access to local participation at the community and district levels. Though general policies are beyond our scope of work, it is nonetheless important to mention that pricing policies, in particular, can do much to undercut or strengthen local fisheries.
In a number of countries, for example, consumer subsidies actually favor imported frozen fish over local supplies caught by artisanal fishermen or dried and smoked fish imported from artisanal fisheries in adjacent countries (Lawson, 1974). Lawson (1983:9) also describes cases in West Africa where subsidized frozen imports appear to be having an adverse effect on local fishing effort. In Benin, for example, “it is said that brush-park fisheries … are now being affected since owners cannot afford to reinvest at previous levels because cost are not covered by current selling prices of fish” (p. 9). In this regard, pricing policies are undercutting the very types of local intensification which warrant increased support (see 9.4.1 [7]).
While the need for new management policies is receiving increasing attention from international fisheries experts, little support is evident yet within departments of fisheries. Part of the reason is due to the holdover of fishing regulations from previous colonial regimes where emphasis was placed on inefficient and unenforceable gear restrictions which penalized the poorer fishing folk. In India. for example, the outdated Indian Fisheries Act of 1897 is still the framework within which regulations are formulated at both national and state levels (Jhingran and Tripathi, 1977:49).
Aside from a few comments dealing with government induced cooperatives, only one of the letters and reports that we received from fisheries departments emphasized the importance of local participatory organizations as a management strategy. Nor did limiting access to riverine communities receive any mention. It would appear that the dominant interest as in the past is largely restricted to production (that was, for example, almost exclusively the theme of the 19 Symposium on the Development and Utilization of Inland Fisheries Resources in the Indo-Pacific Region). If true, then there is a major need for FAO and other international donors to stress, especially through training programs and pilot projects, the need to pay more attention to management strategies that link limited access and local participation.
In his forward to a 1979 FAO publication on Participation of the Poor in Rural Organizations, Moreno (then Director of the Human Resources, Institutions and Agrarian Reform Division) wrote that “development analysts and planners have been reluctant to provide for more than a minimum of rural people's participation, and governments and intergovernmental organizations have been loath to consider structural and process changes required in existing socio-economic systems for effective participation to be possible” (iv). At a more specific level this statement is equally applicable to riverine fisheries, indeed, perhaps especially applicable to them granted the relatively small number of people involved, their relatively low status, and, with the exception of some fish traders' associations, their lack of political clout.
What is needed to correct the situation is a national policy that encourages the formation for development and management purposes of culturally congruent rural organizations that meet the needs of, and are run by, the members of local communities. Government support of cooperatives and of such organizations as ward and village development committees is not sufficient since often these are what van Heck (1979) labels standard organizations as opposed to participatory organizations. Dominated by rural elites, seldom do they represent community wide interests with the result that they are usually ineffective for management purposes.
In recent years many national governments, especially in Africa and Asia have been stressing political decentralization to regional governments and to district, ward and village councils. This is a very important step toward increasing local participation. Recognizing that fiscal decentralization is equally necessary for development purposes, some governments are experimenting with new ways to share revenue with. and generate revenue for, district and even ward councils. Examples include Nepal where the Ministry of Finance is currently establishing district treasures and Zimbabwe where the Department of Wildlife and National Parks has carried out an experimental program (“operation windfall”) of sharing revenue from game culling operations with adjacent district councils. Even more to the point, in Nepal, a law has been passed at the national level (though still to be implemented) to hand over many nationally managed forests to local control at the district council (panchayat) level. Though we have no similar examples for inland fisheries, in the Philippines control of fish corrals, oyster beds and the harvesting of milkfish fry is sometimes vested in municipalities (Smith and Panayotou, forthcoming).
If broadened further to include more decentralization for development and management purposes, this trend toward political decentralization could lead directly to a policy for the establishment of what we have called "local participatory shareholding organizations."
Applied at the national level to marine fisheries, and in Japan (Asada and Hirasawa, forthcoming) and the Philippines (Smith and Panayotou) to certain coastal fisheries, it is still uncommon for governments to apply limited access concepts to communities utilizing riverine inland fisheries. The main exceptions are leasing and auctioning of sections of rivers to local cooperatives as in South India (Srinivasan and Sreenivasan, 1977). Clearly major educational efforts by FAO are needed here.
Leasing of spacially bounded fisheries has a long history in the civilizations of South and South East Asia, with national governments learning from earlier states. Through leasing usually has been to individuals as opposed to communities, in South India most of the Cauvery River “(including tributaries and distributaries) is leased out annually to fish cooperatives” (Srinivasan and Sreenivasan, 1977:170).
Though less common in regard to riverine fisheries and not so embedded in the practices of older civilizations, auctioning is also praticed by national governments in the Indo-Pacific Region. Though more common in regard to coastal fisheries, and more apt to involve individuals and outside companies, there is also some auctioning of fishing reaches along the Cauvery in Tamilnadu to fishing cooperatives (p.167).
Generally speaking we believe that the balance between leasing and auctioning should favor the former. Though fixed-time auctions may be the more efficient mechanism. by widening the pool of potential bidders auctioning tends to favor outsiders over insiders, and within a community, the wealthier elite over "commoners." Its spread effects are less, accordingly, in regard to employment generation and income distribution. And because it is more exclusionary, it may encourage poaching by discontented community members. These comments aside, however, the balance between the two techniques need be carefully assessed not only in different fisheries but also through time in regard to the same fishery. In order to set a market price for leasing purposes, auctioning might be allowed on certain riverine stretches with or without exclusionary provisions (e.g. to any national, to any resident within the district, or to any cooperative or LPSO along the river. etc.). As LPSOs or the equivalent develop, in time an increasing proportion of riverine systems might be opened up to auctioning, the intention being to weed out the less efficient LPSOs since limited access should not become a guarantee of local utilization where that utilization is comparatively inefficient economically and ecologically.
While the length of leases need be adapted to circumstances, the general tendency in South and Southeast Asia is toward shorter leases, often of no more than a single year (as in the Tamilnadu cases noted above). Even where local organizations are reasonably certain that annual leases will be renewed, short-term leases do not make much sense ecologically even though they may supply an annual source of revenue to the leasor. To reduce the risk of shortterm overfishing and to encourage a longer term conservation orientation, multiyear leases are more desirable. As for the problem of computing the money value of a lease there are a number of ways that can be assessed. If leases restricted to local communities are combined with auctions, auctions can set the price. Where auctions are not held, the cost of the lease can be computed on the basis of previous leases corrected for inflation or for such special circumstances as local hardship due to drought, higher rates of unemployment etc.
Closed seasons and closed areas suggest themselves as management strategies for a number of reasons. First both have a wide distribution among tropical cultures as both inadvertent and intentional management strategies, with closed seasons commonly associated with communally owned pools in Africa and closed areas often associated with religious sanctuaries (Awachie, 1979:40). Second, they have been shown to have at least some acceptability among fishing people during the later stages of commercialization as a perceived mechanism for reducing pressures on certain valued species. Third, they have been practiced by a number of governments with apparent success, especially in Asia (but also in Africa to an extent; see Lawson, 1983:7, for an interesting Ivorien example which involved cooperation between fishermen, a credit giving bank and the Fisheries Department). Fourth, as a substitute for various gear restrictions, they impose less of a penalty on poor fishing people. And Fifth, they are comparatively easy to enforce by either fisheries officials or representatives of fishing organizations since anyone fishing during the closed season is apt to be highly visible to someone in a position to report the infraction.
Once again, however, it is important to emphasize that the timing and duration of closed seasons must take under consideration both the needs of fish stocks and of fishing people. Where part time fishermen concentrate on farming during the rainy season a simultaneous ban on fishing to protect spawning populations would not present a major hardship (which is presumably one reason why many Kariba fishermen are well-disposed toward the re-establishment of a three month closed season). On the other hand, closed seasons may have very different implications for full-time fishermen, especially if they are non-migratory.
As a government enforced mechanism, licensing of gear (especially boats and/or nets) has proved to be a reasonably effective mechanism only in inland fisheries which are relatively accessible (small lakes such as Lake Kyle in Zimbabwe) or within or along the boundaries of closely patrolled national parks (Matusadona, for example, where it fronts on Lake Kariba). Its effectiveness can be increased, however, if credit, and other benefits, are restricted to license holders (Lawson, 1983:5).
While the effectiveness of licensing decreases in swamplands and where thousands of part time fishing folk utilize floodwater rivers, in such areas it could be utilized as a mechanism for defining shares within a Local Participatory Shareholding Organization or Cooperative, especially where membership has increased to the extent that there is a “common property” problem within the restricted fishery. Under those circumstances, shareholders might be defined not as individuals or as households but as lineages, guilds, residential units etc. In such cases, each unit would be licensed to utilize a periodically reviewed quota of gear in which boats, for example, would be less than the total number of people actively fishing. Fish caught or income from sales would then be shared among “members” according to locally acceptable procedures.
On both economic and sociocultural grounds, gear restrictions are the most inefficient and unequitable of conventional management practices. Frequently proscribing the more efficient gears, they not only penalize the more efficient operators but they also tend to place the poorer fishing folk at a comparative disadvantage since they are the ones most apt to use small mesh nets, poisons and other locally affordable/available gear. In terms of their scientific justification (Simpson, for example, showed back in the 1930s that local vegetable poisons did not pose a management problem under the circumstances used among the Kamarakoto), their enforceability, and their impact on the poor. they should be periodically reevaluated by all departments of fisheries.
Some restrictions, of course, are essential including those that have a highly destructive impact on the entire ecosystem such as indiscriminate use of modern insecticides and dynamite. But even here enforceability by government agencies is often ineffective, pointing up again the importance for strong local participatory organizations which, backed up by governmental support, can play an enforcement role. Another type of essential restriction is deciding, on lakes and larger bodies of water, where the boundaries are between inshore fisheries and trawlers using offshore areas. While setting the boundaries will require government assistance, enforcing compliance should start with local organizations.
Because of the severe pressures on both marine and inland capture fisheries, aquaculture is being increasingly stressed by both experts and fisheries departures alike as a mechanism for meeting increasing demand for a relatively low priced source of animal protein. Most progress to date has been in Asia. An ancient practice, aquaculture in Indonesia was providing approximately 40 percent of inland fish harvests in the mid-1970s, with government supported development work accelerating in the 1980s. Profits may be sufficiently high to cause some farmers to decrease the size of their paddy fields by enlarging the ditches that surround their bunds (1984 written communication from K. Meecham). In India, aquaculture provided over 50 percent of yields from inland fisheries by the mid-1970s, with plans underway to double production by the mid-1980s (Jhingran and Tripathi, 1977:42). In both Malaysia and the Philippines, aquaculture has become the main inland fisheries priority (Ji, 1977 and Datingaling, 1977, respectively).
When natural resource management is intensified, economic benefits to the participants can be competitive with crop agriculture as the Indonesian (Javanese) example shows. In India (Gujarat) social forestry has shown the same potential, with some farmers actually switching from food crop production to growing trees for industrial uses. Clearly it is important to gauge the implications of this trend for other types of rural production (especially food crop production) and to assess who the principal beneficiaries are. In the Gujarat case richer peasants rather than communities are apt to benefit disproportionately from social forestry efforts and Henderson (1984 written communication) notes that projects for small-scale fish farmers often “end up in the hands of entrepreneurs or other wealthy members of the community.” Since this trend also commonly characterizes stage four riverine fisheries as well, ways for increasing the proportion of beneficiaries at the community level need much more government attention.
Though more research is needed, our impression is that aquaculture to date has not only disproportionately benefited wealthier members of the community, but also has benefited farmers as opposed to farmer/fishermen and fishing folk. If so, more attention need be paid to how to involve fishing communities more actively in aquaculture and other intensification efforts. While various reports refer to hostilities between aquaculturalists and capture fishermen (Kapetsky, 1981:34), there is little evidence to support the belief of some experts that fishing folk are indisposed toward aquaculture, and other forms of intensification. Quite to the contrary, a number of fishing communities have spread and intensified their fishing effort by building mounds to gain access to underutilized areas, by enlarging floodplain pools and building new ones, and by constructing brush parks. The problem is more one of selecting appropriate fishing communities for projects dealing with intensification and adapting those projects to local conditions in culturally appropriate ways. Noting that such floodplain intensification as fish parks and canals represent for Zambia's Kafue and the Upper Zambezi fisheries “the logical next step in using the nation's existing water resources more efficiently to increase and stabalise the fish yield for a higher population”, Hayward nonetheless warns that “such scheme typically fail unless they are sensitively adapted to local conditions” (1983b: 162).
What is needed then are broader government policies toward intensification which have two goals in mind. The first would be to incorporate existing fishing communities into intensification programs, a procedure which could be done through some form of local participatory organization or through such standard organizations as cooperatives. The other goal would be to expand the current emphasis on aquaculture to include mound construction in underutilized swamp and shallow flood water fisheries (Scudder, 1970 and 1978), fish parks and fish cages, and construction and upgrading of floodwater fish ponds. In a series of papers (19 and 1979 especially), Awachie has presented a number of procedures for managing what he refers to as “natural floodplain fish culture.” His examples are from Nigeria, where “because of the low cost of their establishment, natural floodplain lakes and ponds have recently been attracting the attention of local fishing communities” (1974:41). His procedures for their evolution into fish ponds and for their management have, however, global implications. So do Kapetsky's suggestions for utilizing the brush-park fishery method for “enhancing the management of lagoon and estuarine fisheries” (1981:40).
Not so revolutionary as certain forms of aquaculture, the above approaches are far more liable to gain acceptance from fishing communities. As Kapetsky points out (p. 40), “they would be more akin to the step-by-step process of technological change advocated by Lawson (1977) than would be the introduction of other fish culture techniques requiring higher-level technological training backed up by readily available technical assistance through extension services and applied research facilities which may financially strain developing countries.” In other words they make sense not just from the local point of view but also in terms of resources available to government agencies.
Lawson and Robinson in an article on problems of management implemention for artisanal fisheries in West Africa include a number of other management techniques which have relevance for riverine fisheries (1983a:285–89). Though doubting that national policies toward food imports can be manipulated to the benefit of fisheries management, they suggest that those responsible for trade policies assess more carefully impacts on local producers. As means for reducing fishing effort indirectly, they note restriction of credit for fishing gear, control of such imported imputs as outboard engines and spare parts, and “raising the price of inputs.” While utilization of such measures certainly warrant consideration, their effect on different categories of fishermen need be carefully assessed. Credit restrictions and higher prices for inputs, for example, impact most seriously on the poorer members of the fishing community who are most in need of assistance.
Other management techniques may be directed at fish traders as opposed to fishing folk, the most extreme being prohibition of formal marketing structures. Seen as a measure to force a fishery back to the subsistence level, not only are such restrictions hard to enforce, but they also discriminate against low income urban consumers for whom fish is apt to be the cheapest source of animal protein, not to mention the traders themselves.
In the case of certain stage four fisheries, or over-running of traditional fisheries by outsiders even before major commercialization has occurred within the community, the situation may have so deteriorated that the use of security forces may be required before new management initiatives can be attempted. By security forces, we refer more to the armed services than to the police. Their use is an indication of the failure of existing management strategies. It is a final method of desperation that might allow a new approach to be subsequently initiated.
Though seldom used for development purposes, periodically the military have been called upon to perform urgent tasks. A case in point is the apparently efficient evacuation by the Ghanaian Army of residents from the Volta Lake Basin when inundation behind the Volta Dam threatened the lives of the relocatees. Though not involving the military, personnel in departments of wildlife and national parks often behave like security personnel when they combine the use of planes with armed sweeps on the ground as a tactic against poachers. Granted the numbers of fishermen involved and the remoteness and difficulty of the terrain, only the security forces have the resources to undertake similar operations in connection with fisheries.
The use of security forces can be imagined as an initial management tactic in two types of situations. One is where local fisheries are literally inundated by expatriate fishermen whose presence precludes local and immigrant fishing folk from utilizing the fish stocks of their own country. A case in point is the migration of Voltaics to Lac Kossou in the Ivory Coast. The other situation is where conflict or the potential for conflict arises between local fishing folk and outsiders who are co-nationals, or where too many fishermen are using too effective techniques (including illegal techniques) to the detriment of the majority of fishermen and of the fishery. Example of this situation include conflicts between highly capitalized outsiders and traditional fishing communities along certain stretches of the Amazon, and the breakdown in social control among the many thousands fishing the Kafue Flats as illustrated by the frequency of theft of gillnets and the use of illegal techniques.
It must be repeated that the use of security forces in such cases is a drastic step. But it may be a necessary first step to reestablish government authority and to set the basis for handling over limited access rights to locally based participatory action organizations or otherwise locally sanctioned institutions.
If the current trend toward political decentralization to the district level continues, decentralization of control over such natural resources as forests, wildlife and fish may also occur. Though district councils frequently are expected to pass and enforce conservation ordinances dealing with agricultural land use. responsibility for natural resource management has usually remained with the national government, although some countries, like Nepal, have passed legislation to decentralize some forest management to the district level.
Because of the dispersed nature of the fishery resource coupled with inadequate government staff, transport and finance at the departmental level, it may make sense, on an experimental basis, to give district councils some management control over those fishery resources which the district has helped to develop and which contribute to the district's tax base. We hesitate to be more specific simply because our emphasis has been on decentralizing management to communities below the district and ward levels, and because of the ever present danger that the district council will become dominated by a small elite which will try to exploit the natural resource base for their own benefit.
The problem of elite control is a very real one, even in regard to so-called communal grazing and other lands at the community level (Cernea, 1981, for example, notes a Pakistani case where local elites encroached on the village commons, denying access to others in the process) which is why we have emphasized genuinely participatory shareholding organizations at the community level. On the other hand, district councils can make a genuine contribution to fisheries development (as in the case of the Kariba Lake fisheries). They are also supposedly the representative government of the constituent communities. As such they certainly should benefit financially from their territorial fish resources. Whether they should also play a major management role we leave as an open question for the moment.
Because local community organizations have already been dealt with in some detail (9.2), only a few further comments will be made at this point. Our main argument has been that fisheries management should be increasingly decentralized to organizations representing the interests of the most concerned fishing communities with backup support from governmental and nongovernmental agencies. What is important is not the actual form of the organization, or its designation, but the extent to which it is institutionalized among the intended beneficiaries. To facilitate institutionalization we have emphasized the need for such organizations to be culturally congruent, to be genuinely participatory and to be operationally efficient in an economic sense. As an ideal model, local participatory shareholding organizations meet the second and third criteria. In specific cases, however, they may not meet the first criterion. In the more stratified fisheries of West Africa, for example, at least initially it may make more sense to rely on traditional fishing leaders. Ghana is a case in point. According to Lawson (1983:11–13), the institutionalized role of chief fishermen and their elders is reemerging, with perhaps 200 chief fishermen organized into a national system. Though the fisheries involved are coastal, there were similar positions within certain West African inland fishing communities.
Where they still have a following, such leaders might be able to play a management role, although in the long run we suspect they do not pose a substitute for more participatory action organizations.
Such uncertainties as to the best way to proceed is why adaptive research is needed during the appraisal period for identifying the type of organization which makes sense under a given set of circumstances. Such research is especially important in regard to more recent multiethnic fisheries that combine local fishing folk with permanently established immigrants who are less apt to acknowledge the control of traditional leaders. And since we are dealing with dynamic situations, it follows that the research should be followed by monitoring and evaluation of subsequent developments.
Though only a small minority of the total population of fishing folk, migratory fishermen present a special problem which requires more attention. This problem has economic and political implications as well as management ones, since not infrequently migratory fishermen are not only better capitalized and more experienced than local ones but also come from other districts, regions and, in the case of tropical Africa, countries. In a number of West Africa countries there is strong pressure to evict expatriate fishermen, Voltaics in the Ivory Coast being a case in point. Hostility is also expressed against Ewe fishermen from Ghana when they migrate to Nigerian and other waters (Lawson, 1983:5). As for in-country hostilities, these often are ethnically based. In such cases, each country will have to work out specific policies to protect the interests of local fishing communities as well as those of migratory fishermen.
Since it is hard to see how migratory fishermen might be fitted into LPSOs, possible management techniques include auctioning off certain fishing rights to them at both district and community levels, as well as leasing and gear licensing. As an incentive to fish efficiently LPSOs might also be required, under certain circumstances, to auction off part or all of their limited access rights to migratory fishermen for a fixed period of time. More frequently, however, one would hope that certain areas might be set aside for migratory fishermen in which competition with local fishing communities was de-emphasized.
Bearing in mind the close relationship between many traders and small-scale fishermen, a number of authors have suggested that instead of trying to enforce mesh restrictions on fishermen, traders be penalized for selling endangered species below a fixed size. More easily enforced, this might be an attractive option in particular cases. Though it has been argued that such a procedure would not affect fingerlings consumed or sold locally, government regulators have little control over such markets regardless of the mix of management techniques utilized.
While Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) can not be expected to play an active role in fishery management, they can prove invaluable as extension and training agencies, especially in situations where strong suspicious characterize relationships between fishing communities and government agencies. Once a management strategy has been formulated, they can play a special role in first educating fishing people and second helping them organize themselves to carry out management functions. Though Family Farms is attempting just such an approach in Zambia, without strong government support it is unlikely that fishing communities and NGOs working alone can restore an effective management system in stage four fisheries.
