Impact evaluation of the fishers’ unemployment insurance in Brazil

Regarded as one of the main Brazilian public policies aimed at artisanal fishers, the Unemployment Insurance for Artisanal Fishers (Seguro-Desemprego do Pescador Artesanal), also known as Seguro-Defeso, acts both as a social protection and an environmental protection policy. The Seguro-Defeso is a benefit directed at professional small-scale (artisanal) fishers, whose purpose is to offer compensation for the income lost during the closed fishing season (known in Brazil as Defeso). For each month of the Defeso (up to five months per year), the fisher is entitled to receive an amount equivalent to the official minimum wage. By compensating the fishers for the income loss generated by the Defeso regulation (which can be considered as involuntary unemployment), the programme aims to prevent overfishing during the period of paramount regeneration of fish stocks. Because of its design, the unemployment insurance is logically and legally intertwined with the regulation of the closed seasons.

After almost 30 years, the first impact evaluation of the programme on the socio-economic conditions of beneficiaries was conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in partnership with the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) and with the support from the Brazilian Department of Aquaculture and Fisheries. This evaluation looked at the programme's design, implementation, and management, with the goal of determining whether benefit payments are linked to improvements in beneficiaries' socio-economic indicators, such as household conditions and educational levels of children and adolescents, among others.  

The evaluation concludes that the greater the exposure to the program's benefits, the higher the percentage of children enrolled in school and the lower the percentage of youth out of school or out of work. The results also indicate that the program avoids the need to seek alternative employment for adult family members. With regard to housing quality, the effects found tend to be medium-term and are more prominent in the components related to improvements in housing floor and sanitary conditions (FAO-UNDP). 

Future research on the effectiveness of these fisheries policies, namely closed seasons and the unemployment insurance, in the preservation of species and fishing activity, call for improved and comprehensive statistics on fishing activity, as currently this is one of the main impediments to such an analysis.