Social Dimensions of Fisheries and Ecosystem Management

Overview

In the past 25 years fisheries policies South Africa was framed with expectations, hopes, and dreams of a better life for all – the political freedoms carefully crafted in the Bill of Rights and Constitution were supposed to protect the rights to access marine resources for those who eke out an existence to sustain their livelihoods and food security. Soon the development path for South African policies was strongly influenced by economic growth and trickle down thinking. In fisheries this has meant a continuation of an Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ) system to broaden resource access and to transform and reform the fisheries. Politics and economic interests determined the future of small-scale fisheries (SSF) through de-concentration and resulted in the concentration of the new entrants into the large fishing companies. A class action court case was launched to challenge this ITQ system and a new place for small scale fishers was created through Interim Relief (IR)permits and a participatory process in developing a new small-scale fisheries policy. Since the IR is situated in the ITQ system and community leaders were appointed as caretakers the small-scale sector is currently facing elite capture, rights grabbers, overfishing, and decreased allocations. Human rights narratives co-exist awkwardly with neoliberal policies – and research, policy and advocacy is needed to find the alternatives from within these narratives – even if it means compromising on key issues.

PLAAS Fisheries Research

PLAAS’s research in the area for the next five years will focus on the following questions:

1. Why do allocation and fisheries policies tend to fail the most vulnerable and poor fishers? Is it the macro-economic framework of growth that also leads to elite capture of resources and information at community level?
2. Social justice for Small Scale Fishers (SSF) narrative was popular for civil society movements and academics to garner support for the adoption and implementation of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) SSF voluntary guidelines. Through the Civil Society Mechanism(CSM), SSF aligned with land, tenure, and food movements. In the seascapes, the SSF guidelines are competing and even marginalised with the adoption of Blue Growth/Economy policies, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Rights-based fisheries. Critical scholarship used the ‘grabbing’ narrative to raise awareness of the tenure and access rights issues of SSF in coastal, lakes and marine zones. But what about Blue Justice (rooted in social justice) for SSF? Since, changes in the marine ecosystem are largely influenced by political positions or decisions, and it is difficult to divorce some of the environmental decisions from the broader political and economic space – clarity on how and where we situate the blue justice narrative as a concept and advocacy tool is crucial.
3. Fish is the most traded commodity in the world and fraud, corruption, poaching, illicit trade, piracy, and slavery are all part of this sector. The notion of Illegal Unregulated and Unreported fisheries gained traction from many international agencies, regional bodies, governments as management and compliance tools. However, there is an awkward fit with small-scale fisheries – as the sector is often described as illegal and unregulated and does not  report their catches.  In recent years a fisheries crime paradigm has argued for a parallel approach with a stronger focus on the higher levels of fisheries crime (money laundering, corruption, fraud, illicit trade) while approaching  small-scale fisheries with more of a human rights lens.