The role of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture in improving food security and nutrition is a complex issue. The need to tackle it on many fronts and levels simultaneously is well highlighted in the HLPE document “The Role of Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture for Food Security and Nutrition” and relative comments. Recognizing this and addressing it is necessary, an enormous challenge, but also an opportunity.
In most cases, we can see sectorized, compartmented and fractioned management and use of the resources, and this is perhaps the first thing we must learn to avoid. The lack of a broad common vision of coastal development has certainly had a large role in creating the current situation and is a deterrent to finding adequate solutions. This vision cannot be of a technical nature but must first and foremost be based around the following set of values:
Commons
- Oceans are a common resource which must be shared for the benefit and well being of the population at large and in particular of coastal communities. This means that, among other topics, priority must be given to:
- Food access by local populations;
- Promotion of localized fleet diversity - policy designs that ensure that fishers can continue their livelihoods by sharing resources in a fair way that is also ecologically sound, while private ownership, concentration and speculations are heavily discouraged;
- Investing a large part of the financial return gained from selling national resources to a foreign fleet in local infrastructure that benefits local fishing fleets and markets and in training programs, especially where communities are largely dependent on fisheries.
Collective stewardship
As all common resources, oceans, lakes and waterways must be stewarded, on all fronts. It is a collective responsibility which largely begins on land. Stewardship does not mean preserving ecosystems in the state they would be in the absence of human activities, but using land and aquatic ecosystems to the maximum possible level they can support without compromising their capacity to renew themselves. A fisheries management plan cannot make sense without a corresponding environmental management plan that addresses the impact of all human action on the whole ecosystem, from vegetal life to plankton (which incidentally produces half the oxygen in our atmosphere) to top predators, also considering acidification, which is an even bigger threat than overfishing. This also means making sure that any aquatic exploitation matches environmental measures to scale (this is hard to achieve without maintaining flexible and diverse fleets, or without reasoning in terms of vital cycles).
Value of fish and aquatic food
Food in general and fish in particular cannot be regarded as any other commodity. Fish is unique and our last abundant wild source of some of the best proteins and nutrients there are, hence priority must be given to direct human consumption over animal feed. We must also address distorted market situations that concentrate the economic value on a few species (consumers pay more than 60 dollars for a kilogram of some species, while other valuable and nutritious species fetch as little as $US150 a ton). Bycatch, in particular, must be resolved by addressing its causes (lack of selectiveness of fishing gear, unbalanced market value, quotas, ineffective size limit measures), and not by landing the catches for a secondary market.
Strengthening local institutions, transparency and dialogue
Cultural and biological diversity is such that we cannot reasonably expect top down, generalized measures to solve our problems. Again, solutions need to focus on scale matching scale. Considering the prohibitive overall costs of fine-scale assessment, policy design, implementation and enforcement, solutions must be adapted to every ecosystem and culture and bottom-up solutions and management must absolutely be promoted by giving local institutions as much space and legitimacy as possible. We need to create or strengthen the conditions that allow this instead of continuously degrading them. This starts with participative, open dialogue and transparency at all levels, from policy lobbying to bilateral agreements markets and price fixation mechanisms.
Protection of cultural, as well as biological, diversity
Some traditions, fishing arts, ways of life and institutions have lasted for centuries. They are part of our identities, testimonies of our past and still have value and potential to contribute to a changing, much unknown future environment, especially at times where societies at large must prioritize job creation.
Michèle Mesmain