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PHONE:
+27 (0)21 959 3733
FAX:
+27 (0)21 959 3732
EMAIL: info@plaas.org.za
POSTAL ADDRESS:
PLAAS, UWC
Private Bag X17
Bellville
7535
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Fishing Rights & Marine Resources
Researchers: Dr Mafiniso Hara Dr Moenieba Isaacs | The POVFISH project aims to map out the effects of environmental insecurity and degradation on poverty and food security and vice versa in small-scale fisheries. The project interrogates how poverty can be alleviated while maintaining a healthy ecosystem at the same time. The project aims to study how poor communities cope, individually and collectively, with maintaining sustainable livelihoods through periods of resources crisis. |
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Researchers:
Dr Mafiniso Hara
Dr Moenieba Isaacs
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This research aims to investigate the root causes as to why fishing and coastal communities continue to be poor even after 1994. While macro-economic policy changes have had a huge bearing on reform of the industry and access rights continue to be a key issue, some of the key issues this research aims to interrogate are; what have been the implications of macro-policy change on sectoral policy on poverty alleviation in fishing communities? Why is it that the SMMEs have not created the jobs that they were supposed to? Why are permanent jobs being lost in the established sector? What are the implications of long-term rights poverty alleviation? What key governance structures are needed to improve the poverty alleviation function of fishing and coastal resources? |
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Researchers: Dr Mafiniso Hara Dr Moenieba Isaacs | “HIV/AIDS is increasingly being recognised as not merely a medical problem, but a social problem as well. The latter requires and understanding of the determinants of risk behaviour and factors influencing behaviour changes… (Mawar et al 2005:471).” Freudenthal (2001) argues that though much is known, there are research gaps and motivates for the need to research on specific socio-economic contexts. Although HIV/AIDS was first described from a Ugandan fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria in 1982 (Serwardda et al. 1985), the social, cultural and economic understandings of it had been absent from fisheries. Research conducted by Allison and Seeley (2004), and Seeley and Allison (2005) attempts to understand the vulnerability of fishing communities to HIV/AIDS. They attribute the fishing communities’ vulnerabilities to their mobility – migration, time away from home, access to cash income, commercial sex at landing ports, and hyper-masculinity. In addition, the subordinate economic and social position of women (gender) adds to their vulnerability in fishing communities (Allison and Seeley, 2004). In HIV/AIDS research the primacy is given to quantitative over qualitative methods. The main shortcoming of quantitative research methods, such as questionnaires and surveys, is that it is unable to elicit in deep understandings about the beliefs, norms and practices of HIV/AIDS, the social, cultural and economic context in which the transmission takes place. There is an urgent need to investigate alternative methods of socioeconomic and cultural conditions increasing the vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. Such conditions include the inequality of gender and the lack of power of poor groups, isolated persons, migrant males, female sexual workers, men engaging in sexual relations with other men, among others. |
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WORKSHOP: Can land and agrarian reform in South Africa create opportunities for smallholder farmers and help reduce rural poverty?