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Introduction
Welcome to the 11th issue of the Women in Fisheries bulletin.
Beginning with this issue, the bulletin will be taking a somewhat
different approach to keeping its readers informed about women and
community fishing matters. Rather than a geographical orientation,
the articles here touch on three primary themes of continuing relevance
to women and communities everywhere: community-based management
and conservation of marine resources, the socioeconomic status of
fisherwomen, and the documentation of fishing practices. To be effective,
community-based management needs to take into account a wide range
of factors, from fundamentals such as documenting which organisms
are being harvested, and the types of gear and techniques that are
used, to understanding the impacts of globalisation on both coastal
communities and resources themselves. Although the themes themselves
are not new, the fact they are recurrent topics of fieldwork, papers
and discussions says something about their continued significance
and relevance. There is interesting and important work being done
in each of these areas, and the articles here include examples drawn
from within the Pacific region and beyond.
The demand for fresh seafood remains high in many areas despite
modernization and changing lifestyles. This demand is typically
met, at least in part, through the harvest of nearshore marine organisms
by women and children, and women continue to contribute significantly
to the subsistence and artisinal fisheries sectors in much of the
Pacific. Mecki Kronen suggests that children contribute significantly
to the household portion of a women’s fish catch. In one village
in Tonga she estimates that children regularly fish two days a week.
Children’s contribution to their mother’s catch is rarely
looked at by fisheries personnel or scientists, yet Kronen’s
results suggest that this is an area that should be examined closer.
Changing lifestyles and food preferences and consumption patterns
also affect reef fisheries stocks, but how much? Kronen’s research
is looking into this in Tonga and Fiji Islands, and in the future
she will be examining food consumption patterns in other countries.
Given their important role in supplying household food needs, community
members, researchers, fisheries scientists and resource managers
have advocated for many years that women and communities should
play a more active and significant role in managing marine resources,
and have recommended that they be included in consultations and
decisions regarding nearshore coastal resources. Fortunately, this
is now happening in many places, as is discussed in the ‘News
from the Community Fisheries Section’. But as Liz Matthews
suggests in her article, it may be time to go further, and do more
to educate women and communities about the dangers of overfishing,
the need for sound conservation practices, and the importance of
all species to the health of the marine ecosystem. Subsistence and
artisinal fishing is often neither monitored or regulated by local
fisheries departments, and unless the species has a commercial value
(such as trochus), very little information is likely to be available.
Matthews, in a second article, illustrates this point with regard
to the collection of land crabs. Although an important and popular
food item, land crabs are completely unmonitored in Palau; the same
applies in many Pacific Island countries, and probably outside the
region as well. This is also true for other organisms, especially
marine invertebrate species.
In addition to a lack of information about many subsistence species,
there’s still much we don’t know about how those species
are being harvested. Although it has been done for decades, there
is still a need to document traditional knowledge about fishing.
As Mark Merlin’s article points out, in Micronesia alone there
are numerous plants used to make fish traps, baskets, nets, poles
and poisons for catching fish. For community-based management of
marine resources to be effective, we need to better understand such
traditional methods.
The article by Mohammad Ali Shah, under the socioeconomic theme,
brings to light the problems of women from fishing communities who
become marginalised when cheap labour and modern fishing gear nudges
them out of their traditional role of net weavers and fish cleaners.
On a more positive note, Denise Cardoso’s article discusses
how access to paid labour greatly improved the socioeconomic status
of women in some parts of Brazil.
I hope you'll find the articles in this issue of the Women in
Fisheries bulletin interesting. I welcome any feedback on them
and encourage you to submit articles about women and community fishing
matters from your country.
Kim Des Rochers
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Contents
News
from the Community Fisheries Section (pdf:
51 k)
- Staff changes - New
SPC Community Fisheries Officer
- Community-based fisheries
management initiatives, by Aliti Vunisea
- Fisheries training
workshop in Fiji Islands: The I Qoliqoli Management Project, by
Aliti Vunisea
Community-based management
and conservation (pdf 95 k)
- Community-based marine
resource management in Fiji, by Aliti Vunisea
- Community valued in
Pacific conservation, by Scott Radway
- Integrating women’s
fishing into fisheries and conservation programmes
- Pacific Community
Reef restoration Project lauded in Washington, D.C.
- Population and gender
dynamics in coastal conservation in East Africa, by Bronwen
Golder
- Integrating women's
subsistence fishing into Pacific fisheries and conservation programmes,
by Elizabeth Matthews
- Learning about land
crabs in Palau, by Elizabeth Matthews
Socioeconomic status
of fisherwomen (pdf: 89 k)
- Women’s fishing
in Tonga: Case studies from Ha'apai and Vava'u islands, by
Mecki Kronen
- A bleak future: Fisherwomen
in Pakistan face marginalization, by Mohammad Ali Shah
- As world fish stocks
decline, researchers turn to an untapped resource — Women
- Changing women's lives:
Income women earn from processing crabmeat is leading to socioeconomic
and cultural changes in some parts of Parà State in Brazil,
by Denise Machado
- Proceedings of the
Global Symposium on Women in fisheries now available
Documenting fishing
practices (pdf: 132 k)
- Traditional uses of
plants for fishing in Micronesia, by Mark Merlin
- Maka feke – Octopus
fishing Tongan style,
by Mecki Kronen
- Tongkah — unique
gear for catching octopus, by P. Balan
- The Lakemba art of
vono, by Mecki Kronen
- The life of a commercial
fisherwoman, by Lyn Lambeth
To download the complete
publication in PDF format (332 k), click on:
Women
in Fisheries # 11 (pdf)
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