Artisanal Fishing
by Timothy J. H. Adams and Paul J. Dalzell
Paper presented at the East-West Center Workshop on Marine Biodiversity
Issues in the Pacific Islands
University of Hawaii, November 1994
Introduction
Artisanal fishing is the main type of fishing carried out in the
tropical Pacific Islands coastal zone. The boundaries between
different types of fisheries are not distinct, so the term "artisanal
fishing" is used here to label any small-scale fishing that
is not sport-fishing. It includes both subsistence and small-scale
commercial fishing. In other words, it is fishing primarily to
put food directly on the community table.
The coastal zone considered here will include not just the lagoons,
shores and shallow reefs of the Pacific Islands, but also the
outer slopes of the reefs to abyssal depths. Deep slopes are relevant
in this consideration of coastal zone biodiversity because the
shelf areas of the Pacific islands are limited, and abyssal depths
are often found within one kilometre of high water mark, particularly
around atolls, and around high islands of geologically recent
origin.
Although it is inevitable that fishing be perceived to contain
a large recreational component (particularly by spouses), few
Pacific Islanders indulge in pure sport-fishing, and only tourists
throw edible fish back in the water. Despite intensive national
development programmes and investment incentives, industrial-level
fishing, using larger boats with professional crew for a narrow
range of target species, is still overwhelmingly the domain of
Pacific-rim fishing vessels.
There is, in addition, a special class of Pacific Island artisanal
fishing that is not designed to put food directly on the community
table but to provide high value species (usually non-perishable
invertebrate products) for export, and thus the cash that is necessary
even in rural areas for some basic necessities and obligations,
particularly child education and church tithes. This is carried
out by the same individuals involved in domestic food-fishing
but follows a different ethos. It is a sporadic, sometimes a "boom
and bust", fishery.
Because the Pacific Islands are diverse it is difficult to generalize.
However, Pacific Island artisanal fisheries tend to have the following
characteristics:
- most of the species taken are associated with coral reefs,
although oceanic and pelagic species are important in parts of
Polynesia and Micronesia. The coastal zone is far more important
in artisanal fishing than the exclusive economic zone;
- the coastal zone available to artisanal fishing is limited
in extent, compared to most other global regions, because the
islands under consideration (excepting Papua New Guinea) lack
appreciable shelf areas. Outer reef slopes plunge steeply to the
abyss, with consequences both for species availability and overall
productivity;
- a wide diversity of species is taken. A creel sampler working
in a typical Pacific Island would need to be able to recognize
at least one hundred species of finfish and as many as ninety
species of invertebrates, almost an order of magnitude greater
than even the by-catch of the typical temperate industrial fishery.
- In terms of volume, invertebrates are usually as important
as fish for subsistence purposes, less important in domestic small-scale
commerce and usually far more important in artisanal export fisheries.
In terms of value, finfish tend to hold the middle ground between
shellfish and crustaceans, with a narrower range of prices;
- in rural areas, almost everyone takes part in the fishery
at some level. Whilst some individuals or clans specialise in
fishing, almost everyone is interested in, has some knowledge
of, and is affected by changes in, the status of coastal fishery
resources;
- typically, men do most of the finfishing that involves boats,
and women do most of the reef-gleaning for invertebrates and routine
shore-fishing, although this is not a firm principle;
- typically, most of the catch is directly consumed by the family,
clan, or community, with only the excess going for sale. Catches
are landed directly at the village or household.
These fisheries are, on the whole, comparatively non target-specific,
carried out part-time, and involve a multitude of landing points.
They are thus impossible to routinely monitor and assess by the
conventional methods used in industrial fisheries. The effect
of artisanal fishing on natural populations has to be assessed
indirectly, through the sample surveys that occasionally occur,
and by extrapolating the limited monitoring that takes place in
some countries on the commercial fraction of the catch. The need
for the development of "management under uncertainty"
techniques (IPFC, 1990) or even "data-less management"
(Johannes, 1994) is acute, although the adaptation of fixed exploitation
strategy methods as suggested by Walters (1995) provides some
hope for the future.
Artisanal fishing can have profound effects on the balance of
coral reef ecosystems, including their biodiversity, when carried
out at the sort of intensity experienced in highly populated islands
like the Philippines, western Indonesia and parts of the Caribbean,
or if the use of non-specific fishing methods is widespread. On
average, however, the Pacific Islands are subject to moderate
levels of fishing pressure, and the artisanal fishing community
is usually on the downstream side of most coastal processes rather
than being the cause of biodiversity problems.
Fishing, as a process, may even increase the species diversity
in a given area. Artisanal fishing success is usually dependent
on fish population density and if fishing disproportionately reduces
the numbers of common species, more niche space will become available
for other, perhaps less competitive, species to increase in biomass.
Species replacement is a well-known fisheries effect that makes
the estimation of maximum sustainable yield almost meaningless
for a multispecies tropical fishery (Pauly 1994a:23). Even sustainable
fishing on a single target species affects the age-structure of
populations, reducing the proportion of older individuals, leading
to a higher population turnover rate and perhaps more opportunities
for genotype diversity.
The main biodiversity problems that can result from artisanal
fishing are caused by destructive fishing practices, and by the
ease with which low natural mortality, erratically-recruited,
slow-growing species can be overfished. Destructive fishing practises
are those which obtain a large short-term catch but reduce the
carrying capacity of the environment, such as explosives or poisons.
They are generally resorted to as a response to growth - either
in human populations beyond the capacity of a sustainable subsistence
fishery to supply, or in fishing businesses as a response to private-sector
enterprise economics. Neither of these, however, is yet a major
factor in the Pacific Islands. Overfishing slow-growing species
is a greater preoccupation for administrations, both because it
is more readily evident in certain species, and because it is
easy to direct opprobrium against the export markets that demand
increasing volumes of these species. There is considerable awareness
of the vulnerable status of the larger species of giant clam and
turtle populations, but some other export-market target species,
such as green snail (Turbo marmoratus) and the higher-value
holothurians (eg. Microthele spp.), plus some sharks and
certain of the larger groupers, may now fall into this category.
This review is confined mainly to the work-area of the South Pacific
Commission (SPC), which includes the marine spaces of Cook Islands,
Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands,
Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga,
Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, New Caledonia (Fr), French Polynesia
(Fr), Wallis & Futuna (Fr), American Samoa (US), Guam (US),
Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas (US), Pitcairn (UK), and
Tokelau (NZ).
This review is limited because very little, still, is known to
the scientific community about the artisanal fisheries of the
Pacific Islands. The majority of SPC members did not even have
fisheries services until twenty years ago since, according to
Smith (1972) "(fishing was) either a subsistence activity
or one which occupied a relatively small number of commercial
fishermen. Unlike agriculture, it was not an activity in which
governments took a close interest ...". Consequently, little
had been documented that was not either taxonomic or anthropological.
Quantification of Pacific Island artisanal fisheries is particularly
difficult. For example, Table 1 and Table 2, however
sketchy and inaccurate they may be, appear to be the first time
that a comprehensive overview of the volume and value of Pacific
Island coastal (overwhelmingly artisanal) fisheries has been attempted.
Status and changes in coastal artisanal fisheries in the region
Artisanal fisheries are still extremely important throughout the
SPC region, and will probably continue to be so as long as the
islands remain "under-developed" by global standards.
The main changes that have taken place over the past forty years
are: better storage facilities and transportation enabling a larger
proportion of the catch to be sold commercially to satisfy increasing
needs for cash; larger urbanisations containing communities unable
to fish regularly and thus constituting a commercial demand for
fish; and the development of tourism in certain rural locations
providing a climate for the diversion of artisanal fishing pressure
into sport-fishery development.
Overall, the supply generated by artisanal fisheries would still
appear to be equal to demand, and most of the population increases
of recent years have been in urban areas where increased protein
demands are being met mainly from non-fishery or imported fish
sources, rather than placing a proportionately increased pressure
on local reef resources. Local reef fish are an expensive commodity - virtually
an urban luxury - in most of the Pacific Islands. Where access to
the sea is limited and families can not go fishing for themselves,
it is cheaper to buy imported temperate fish than to buy local
reef-fish. However, the total Pacific island human population
doubled in the last thirty years and is projected to double again
in the next thirty years (G. Haberkorn, SPC Demography Section,
pers. comm.), so artisanal fishing pressure will inevitably increase
overall.
In some island groups, human populations were drastically reduced
after contact with western seafarers and may only now be recovering
to pre-contact levels. Although there is understandable concern
that increasing populations will lead to unsustainable demands
on artisanal fishery resources, it is possible that similar demands
were made in the past in some areas. Whether or not these historical
demands were sustainable we have little way of knowing at the
present time (although it has been postulated, more than once,
that the formerly widespread occurrence of anthropophagy in the
islands may have had some correlation with protein supply crises).
There is some information relevant to the subject arising from
the archFological examination of prehistoric shell middens in
Papua New Guinea, where size-frequency composition can be compared
to present-day harvests (see Munro, this volume), and it would
be interesting to look at middens in small-island countries where,
apparently, human populations fluctuated more radically than in
Papua New Guinea.
Another development that has historical parallels is the recent
expansion of the artisanal fishery for export of non-perishable
seafood products. beche-de-mer (dried holothurians or trepang)
and mother-of-pearl shell (Trochus niloticus, Pinctada
margaritifera, Turbo marmoratus) fisheries are a major
source of worry to many Pacific Island governments at the moment,
but these fisheries also reached similar proportions in the last
century. From historical accounts of resulting scarcities (for
exampleCin the eighteenth century the High Chief of Fiji had to
send warriors to Vanuatu to collect enough beche-de-mer to pay
for one of two sloops ordered from the USA), it is clear that
these non-subsistence food, opportunistic, fisheries were not
sustainably managed in most (but not all) areas.
Several potential problem areas with respect to "Malthusian
overfishing" (unsustainable demands on fishery resources
resulting from the nutritional needs of increasing local populations;
Pauly, 1994b) were mentioned by the first SPC fisheries officer,
Hubertus van Pel, during his visits to SPC member countries in
the 1950s. These included Rarotonga (Cook Islands), Tarawa (Kiribati),
Upolu (Western Samoa) and Saipan (Northern Marianas), but the
list is by no means exhaustive, and problems were not quantifiable.
Some of these same areas have noticeably depleted reef-fisheries
nowadays compared to less densely-populated islands (personal
observation), but still, the information does not exist to permit
comprehensive quantifiable comparisons.
Unfortunately, the technique of visual assessment of reef-fishes
has not yet developed far enough to provide convincing statistically
significant assessments for anything less than a huge investment
in survey effort (and is only effective for certain taxa anyway),
whilst artisanal fisheries statistics and surveys are few and
far between. However, there might be considerable value in making
a concerted effort to compare species densities and community
structures, using identical methodologies, across the whole region.
Although the quantification of absolute species abundances
is unlikely to be significant, it is likely that rankings and
relative comparisons between areas could be made statistically
meaningful, and could help to prioritise problem areas.
One of the more effective ways of obtaining an indication of the
relative biodiversity and degree of depletion of an area is to
ask visiting Pacific islanders to make comparisons with their
home fishing grounds. Micronesian, and South Pacific Games spear-fishing
competitions provide an excellent opportunity for information
gathering on finfish biodiversity, since they bring together spear-fishermen
from several different islands and countries to compare notes.
Some of their comments are extremely unequivocal, and the catch/effort
record provides useful quantitative information on the relative
abundance of different species.
One of the main changes in artisanal fisheries in the Pacific
in recent years has been in rural expectations. With recent independence,
the pace of change has been so fast that uneducated, subsistence-sector,
rural parents can reasonably expect that their children will obtain
a formal education and spend most of their working lives in the
city, or even in another country. In such circumstances, some
members of the traditional rural fishing community see no point
in training their children in a subsistence lifestyle. Indeed,
most outer-island children now spend their teens at residential
schools far from their homes. Such education requires money, and
the main source of disposable income in rural areas is marine
resources. Artisanal beche-de-mer harvesters have been known to
become exasperated with the exhortation to "conserve these
resources for the benefit of your children" when the main
reason they are harvesting is to pay for their children's school
fees, and their children will not be around the island to harvest
these conserved resources anyway.
In some other Pacific islands, particularly the more affluent
countries and those with a significant proportion of the population
living abroad, there is growing an environmental ethic that is
more familiar to westerners. This is fuelled by nostalgia for
traditional ways, and the desire by many island expatriates to
return to an unspoiled homeland for their retirement.
Changes in fishing methods and gear, whilst they can be more obvious
than social changes, probably have less profound consequences
for artisanal fisheries. In more affluent countries the horsepower
of boats used for fishing has increased. An extreme example is
Palau, where the average boat used for fishing in 1992 had an
outboard engine of 103 horsepower (Anon, 1993:19). However, the
increased income that has made this horsepower possible has also
made fishing more of a spare-time activity and less of a necessity,
thus artisanal fishing effort has not necessarily greatly increased.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Solomon Islands has the
lowest gross national product per capita in the SPC region (Anon.
1995), and the predominant artisanal fishing craft is still the
dugout canoe.
In fishing gear, there have been few significant changes since
the advent of the monofilament gill-net, except for recent advances
in small-scale pelagic longlining technology, and this has little
significance for purely coastal fisheries except to hold out the
hope, to Pacific island fisheries administrators, that entrepreneurial
attention may thus be diverted offshore away from reef fisheries.
For a review of current Pacific Island artisanal fishing methods,
see Dalzell and Adams (in press a).
The use of explosives for fishing appears to have declined markedly
since World War II, except in areas close to mining activities
where explosives continue to be available. Although usage is impossible
to quantify accurately, being everywhere illegal, dynamite is
used nowadays in Melanesia mainly to catch seasonal schools of
coastal small pelagics, like chub mackerel, on short fuses to
create surface blasts. The use of natural fish stupefacients is
still widespread in many countries. Although it is generally banned
by law, the traditional use of Derris and Barringtonia
derivatives is preferable to the modern poisonous substitutes
of bleach and lime, which are easier to deploy clandestinely.
There is perhaps even a case for de-criminalising the traditional
use of stupefacients, or at least making the penalties less than
the penalties for using poisons.
The status of Pacific Island coastal fishery catches, by country
and by broad category, is summarised in Table 1 and Table 2.
We have not yet compiled all of the information necessary to provide
preliminary detail on the exploitation of individual species on
a Pacific-wide basis. Although better national statistical systems
are needed if such information is ever going to be useful for
real-time national resource management, a surprising amount of
basic information is already in existence, informally published.
Table 3a, Table 3b,
Table 4, and Table 5
provide example species
breakdowns for artisanal fisheries catches in Melanesia (Fiji),
Micronesia (Palau) and Polynesia (American Samoa). These tables
are not strictly comparable with each other, since they were derived
from different types of sources, and with different degrees of
survey coverage (as reflected by the number of species included),
but are a broad guide to the aquatic species that are most significant
in different sub-regional artisanal fisheries.
Different "sectors" of the artisanal fishery, in different
island groups, utilise a different mixture of species. For example,
pelagic species are generally less important in Melanesia (since
high-island peoples have less need to venture further out to sea
to satisfy their nutritional needs), and amongst the reef-fishes
the genus Acanthurus becomes increasingly common in catches
towards the eastern Pacific (since it is an increasingly dominant
component in species-poor eastern communities). Where the artisanal
fishing community both sells and consumes a portion of the catch,
different fishes are put to either use, depending on their status
in that country and the size of the fish.
The desirability of different food-fishes varies markedly between
island groups. Scomberomorus commerson (Spanish mackerel)
is a prime commercial species on the local domestic market in
Fiji, whilst tuna could hardly be given away until recently. Coryphaena
hippurus (mahimahi) is derided in the Marianas Islands, but
is highly sought after further south. Most Papua New Guineans
would find the prospect of eating Terapon jarbua (crescent
perch) revolting, but many Polynesians take it home quite happily.
Cook Islanders have a particular penchant for Caranx lugubris
(black trevally) and parrotfish, whilst their near neighbours
in Niue appear to avoid parrotfish when they can help it. A large
proportion of the Solomon Islands population, being Seventh Day
Adventist, will not eat fish without scales or shellfish (which
is one reason why the Solomon Islands retained comparatively dense
giant clam populations later than other countries).
The importance of invertebrates is often overlooked when fisheries
are under consideration. On Viti Levu, Fiji, invertebrates form
over fifty percent of the artisanal catch (Rawlinson et al.,
1994). In many Pacific Island countries, marine invertebrates
are the main fisheries export and in some, the main commodity
export. For example, trochus shell is Wallis and Futuna's only
significant visible export. Black pearls, derived from seeding
wild-caught Pinctada margaritifera, are now the most valuable
export from both French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, taking
over from the export of P. margaritifera shells for mother-of-pearl
in the past.
Two other "fisheries" that need mention, because they
are carried out in a largely artisanal manner in several countries,
are the export fisheries for ornamental coral and aquarium fish.
These generally involve foreign expertise and capital, but the
collection is usually done by small-scale fishermen. These fisheries,
because they are non-traditional, because they depend on the goodwill
of coastal villagers and fishing-rights owners, and because all
production must pass through a few central points, can be (and
are) kept under fairly tight control by governments. Export packing
lists from aquarium fish exporters, coupled with the catch area
returns that are mandatory for live fish exporters in some countries,
can make interesting reading for biogeographers.
Resources used by artisanal fishing affecting the coastal
environment, and influences on biodiversity
As mentioned earlier, artisanal fisheries tend to be impacted
by, rather than to cause, most the of environmental problems of
the coastal zone in the Pacific Islands. The livelihood of the
artisanal fishing community is usually far more at risk from the
unconsidered actions of other coastal resource users than the
converse. Thankfully, problems caused by overfishingCby directly
reducing natural populations below sustainable levelsCare comparatively
rare in the region, and it is possible to be optimistic about
the prospects for sustainable management in most areas. In many
other regions of the world, the task facing fisheries managers
has become rehabilitation rather than maintenance.
Where overfishing does occur, it tends to be in fisheries that
are not significant to the traditional livelihood of Pacific Island
coastal communities, and where externalities are not involved.
Fisheries such as trochus shell and deep slope serranidae for
export have proven to be more likely to rapidly escalate and exceed
their assessed sustainable yield than local food-fisheries (Adams
and Dalzell, 1995), and by far the major number of requests for
advice from Pacific Island fisheries departments to the South
Pacific Commission Fisheries Programme concern export fisheries.
Apart from the obvious direct influence of fishing on coastal
community species composition and balance, there are also indirect
effects of varying degrees of significance. For example, the drying
of beche-de-mer in humid climates requires fire, and the cutting
of wood for large-scale beche-de-mer processing can have considerable
effect on mangrove stands. The activities of spear-fishermen,
whether traditional or modern, target many of the same fish that
are most visible to tourist divers and may, even at sustainable
levels of fishing effort, have considerable effects on tourism
prospects (although, ironically, tourists have been blamed by
village leaders for frightening away food-fishes with the bubbles
from their SCUBA tanks, and dive-shop operators tend to blame
aquarium fish collectors for any tendency to "shyness"
in reef-fish).
The use of extremely non-target specific fishing methods, like
explosives and poisons, is not considered to be a major problem
facing coastal ecosystems in most areas, but can be locally significant.
Gill-nets can not be considered a non target specific fishing
method in the context of multi-species artisanal fisheries, since
all of the fish caught are normally either consumed or sold. Gill-nets
may be used to target certain fish where single-species schools
are expected (for example bonefish (albulidae) in Kiribati and
the Cook Islands, or the salala (Rastrelliger spp)
fishery in Fiji) but the Aby-catch@ is a bonus, not a burden as
in industrial fisheries.
One of the more significant detrimental effects of artisanal fisheries
on coastal biodiversity is due to the vulnerability of certain
long-lived, slow growing species. For example, there is a real
danger of extinction facing some of the larger species of giant
clam (Tridacnidae) which, despite releasing massive numbers of
propagules, appear to be subject to a very erratic juvenile recruitment
process (Adams, Lewis and Ledua, 1988; Pearson and Munro, 1991).
The prospect of losing the largest mollusc ever extant, not to
mention a large phototrophic food-animal, excited a great deal
of basic and applied research over the last decade, although the
interest of funding sources has died down somewhat with the lack
of demonstrated sustainability (immediate commercial success)
in most of these research projects. For the most recently described
giant clam species, Tridacna tevoroa, there are only a
handful of specimens in existence, known only from Tonga, and
from two islands in Fiji. This deeper-water species was discovered
during the course of artisanal giant clam harvesting in 1986,
via a specimen brought to the Fiji Fisheries Division for identification,
and it is quite possible that this species could have been wiped
out before it had even been recognised. A mariculture programme
at the Tonga Ministry of Fisheries has now succeeded in breeding
the species in culture.
As most ecological campaigners have learned to their cost, the
abstract concept of biodiversity conservation does not mean a
great deal to the average rural Pacific islander. Traditional
fishing communities care passionately about protecting the integrity
of their fishing grounds from outsiders, but many of them consider
that the resources under their control are a source of food and
disposable income rather than a sacred trust, and make decisions
accordingly. It may occasionally be considered necessary to sacrifice
a few years of sustainable production for the sake of meeting
an immediate cash need, particularly when a new (and probably
limited) commodity market becomes available, and the risk of local
extinction is a risk that has to be taken. However, mismanagement
and misjudgement also occurs with increasing frequency, either
due to the attrition of traditional systems of authority and the
loss of traditional expertise leading to a failure of feedback
mechanisms and a consequent loss of ability to discern or respond
to crises, or due to simple corruption by influential individuals.
The biodiversity of the shallower parts of the coastal zones of
the Pacific Islands is probably less susceptible to the influence
of artisanal fishing than the deeper slopes of the outer reef.
This is because deep-water demersal species tend to be slower
growing than their shallow coral reef and lagoon relatives, and
because traditional controls are generally not operative in relation
to these speciesCwhich were not previously fished, being too deep
for traditional gear. With improvements in lines and ropes, and
the realisation of potentially lucrative markets for deep-water
(eteline) snappers, (geryonid) crabs and (caridean) shrimps, this
vulnerability is coming into focus.
The development of the deep-water snapper fishery in certain Pacific
islands is an interesting case-study (eg. Dalzell and Preston,
1992) of a fishery that is promoted, develops, and declines following
a reduction in catchability of the target species below economically
competitive levels. Although this was developed as a semi-industrial
fishery in some countries, in others, such as Tonga, the fishery
is carried out entirely by local small-scale fishing boats (although
this is nowhere a subsistence fishery). The latest revision of
the Tongan Government's deep-water snapper management plan calls
for a drastic reduction in effort by the fishing fleet. In other
countries, the deep-water snapper fleet has "voluntarily"
diverted effort into the pelagic longline fishery for bigeye,
yellowfin and albacore tuna. Fisheries for deep-water crustaceans
have not yet proven economically viable in the Pacific islands
but, when they do, it is to be hoped that mechanisms are in place
to manage likely subsequent escalation.
Although the deep slopes are one of the more vulnerable ecosystems
to the influence of small-scale commercial fishing on biodiversity,
they are also one of the areas most subject to governmental attempts
to control potential problems. This may be coincidental, perhaps
due to the desire to protect the local artisanal community from
foreign competition in developing this new fishery, but fisheries
administrations are also very aware of the vulnerability of these
resources. The Fiji Government, for example, set up a new licencing
system in 1990 specifically to control exploitation of deep slope
fishes and, for the first time, provided a legal mechanism for
the quota management of local commercial fishing boats.
Legal administrative basis of artisanal fisheries regulation
and management
A major characteristic of artisanal fisheries is that they are
not subject to a great deal of formal legislative regulation.
There are very few "bottlenecks" in small-scale fisheries,
particularly subsistence fisheries, where enforcement can be concentrated.
An extremely diverse mix of species is taken and landed at a multitude
of sites and, as with any such a heterogeneous activity, management
must be fine-grained to be effective.
Pacific Island artisanal fishery management regulations, where
they exist, tend to be passive, low-cost measures (Adams, in press)
such as minimum size limits, which are mainly enforced at the
point of sale. These are only potentially effective on the commercial
component of the artisanal catch, and the majority subsistence
fisheries are, legally, effectively unregulated. Effective
governmental management of a fishery consisting of over 100 species
would cost more than the potential value of the fishery itself.
As a consequence there is little hope of resource-users, even
if they were fully commercial, ever contributing substantially
to the cost of centralised management as is the trend in industrial
single-species fisheries.
The Forum Fisheries Agency maintains an up-to-date collection
of legislation relating to Pacific island fisheries and their
management (see Campbell and Lodge, 1993, for the most recent
update), and Adams et al. (1995) describe and discuss the
institutional basis for Pacific islands coastal fisheries management
in some detail.
However, given the generally non-problematic nature of these fisheries,
rigorous legal regulation is hardly desirable, especially when
the history of community fishery resource management in the Pacific
Islands is taken into account. Traditional levels of administration
are strong in many islands, and resource management is implicit
in most of these. Fisheries management is not necessarily named
as such, and may have different goals to governmental fishery
management models, but most coastal communities have a profound
influence on the disposition of resources under their control,
whether that control is recognised by government or not.
Colonial administrators developed a deep suspicion of Pacific
Islanders' attitudes towards resource management after World War
II, when fishing using surplus munitions became a major problem.
Indeed, the report from the 1962 SPC regional technical meeting
on fisheries went so far as to state that "local peoples
have little interest in conservation schemes". Then,
as now, the subsistence practises of the majority were overshadowed
by the heedless entrepreneurial actions of a few, and it is only
recently that the concept of allowing communities a say in the
management of fisheries has regained any credibility in government
circles.
Programs addressing the biodiversity problems of artisanal
fisheries
National governmental fisheries or marine resources administrations
are the key organisations addressing the biodiversity problems
of artisanal fisheries, since they have direct and ultimate responsibility
for the control of exploitation of coastal living resources. Since,
by definition, all coastal fisheries fall within the limit of
territorial waters, regional and international organisations can
only advise and assist with the solution of problems. At the opposite
end of the spectrum, local community management of fisheries may
be operative and effective in some Pacific Islands, but legal
authority and co-ordinative responsibility generally rests at
the government level. However, in some Pacific island nations
much of the responsibility for coastal fisheries has been devolved
to the provincial or state level, with national government retaining
responsibility only for oceanic and EEZ fisheries (e.g. Federated
States of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands).
Generally, Pacific Island fisheries administrations lack the resources
to perform routine assessments of major fishery resources, let
alone investigate all of the interactions that would be necessary
to assess the effects of fishing activity on the biodiversity
of whole ecosystems. Many even lack the capability to undertake
routine monitoring of fisheries activity, which is why the estimates
of total production for each country presented in Tables 1
and 2 should be treated with caution. Most biodiversity-related
work is undertaken as a response to a crisis in one form or another,
and there is little opportunity to develop structured programmes
to address problems in advance or to develop in-depth research
investigations. Most work is structured around the need to provide
urgent advice to decision-makers on a high-profile problem, usually
after the problem has already occurred.
The resources and programmes of national fisheries administrations
are detailed at more length in Adams et al. (1995). Currently,
there are very few fisheries administrations that explicitly address
the concept of biodiversity, perhaps because the concept
has yet to be explained adequately in an appropriate forum. However,
the concepts of resource depletion, and even extinction
are day-to-day objects of concern. Although many fisheries administrations
are still promoting the commercial development of fisheries as
a primary aim, driven by central government economic plans to
increase exports, encourage investment, and develop rural potentials,
most have now recognised that, as Cornelia Nauen (1993) paraphrased
the Study on International Fisheries Research (World Bank et
al., 1992), "the era of expansion in fisheries is definitely
over. A radical shift in paradigm is called for: no more public
capital investment into the expansion of production, but efforts
into sustainable management or rather governance".
At the international level, some of the programmes which
are addressing aspects of the biodiversity problems of artisanal
fisheries in the region are:-
- FFA - Forum Fisheries Agency, Solomon Islands.The FFA specialises
in highly migratory oceanic species fisheries, particularly legal,
political and economic aspects. Between 1988 and 1994 the FFA
also maintained a Research Coordination Unit (RCU), funded by
the Government of Canada, and largely devoted to inshore artisanal
fisheries research in the Pacific Islands. Since the finalisation
of the RCU project the FFA is collaborating with FAO in the production
of practical taxonomic guides to South Pacific fishes, and maintains
a capability to assist member countries in economic and legislative
aspects of artisanal fisheries. FFA, like SPC and SPREP, is a
member-subscribed organisation, whose work-programme is guided
and subject to the approval of national government representatives.
- ICLARM - International Center for Living Aquatic Resources
Management South Pacific Office, Solomon Islands. ICLARM, based
in the Philippines, has a South Pacific Office at its Coastal
Aquaculture Centre (CAC) on Guadalcanal. The CAC specialises in
the development of practical mariculture methods, artificial enhancement
of reef fishery resource recruitment, and reef-ranching, but has
a number of other capabilities including testing the practical
feasibility of marine protected areas and performing reef-organism
surveys.
- SPC - South Pacific Commission Fisheries Programme, New Caledonia.
The Coastal Fisheries Programme, through its Resource Assessment
and Management, and Post-harvest Fisheries, Sections is implementing
an Integrated Coastal Fisheries Management Project (ICFMaP) which,
whilst not addressing biodiversity per se, considerably
overlaps these issues. Six coastal artisanal fishery management
plans will be developed in collaboration with SPC member governments
between 1995 and 1997. Other activities include further development
of the Regional Inshore Fisheries Database (currently specialising
in invertebrates) and an international workshop to benchmark the
current state of Pacific Islands coastal marine resource management,
held in June 1995 (Dalzell and Adams, in press b). The SPC Fisheries
Programme also maintains international special interest groups
and newsletters on those issues that are considered to be most
relevant by member countries (currently Pearl Oyster, Trochus,
Beche-de-mer, Ciguatera, Traditional Fisheries Management, and
Human Resources Development).
- USP - the University of the South Pacific Institute of Marine
Resources, Solomon Islands (formerly Fiji), is currently inactive
pending its move to the Solomon Islands. The USP Marine Studies
Programme in Suva, Fiji, of which IMR is a part, undertakes research
in support of its teaching programme, including coral reef studies
and atoll research. IMR in previous years has sponsored a considerable
amount of taxonomic work, and reference collections.
Conclusion & Recommendations
The basic conclusion of this review is that artisanal fisheries
in the Pacific Islands in general do not appear to lead to severe
biodiversity problems when compared with the problems caused by
terrestrial ecosystem users, particularly their impacts on avifauna
(see Flint, this volume). The impacts of the artisanal fishing
community on aquatic biodiversity and on other sectors are much
less than the converse impacts of these other sectors on artisanal
fishing. Pacific Island coastal fisheries are still in fairly
good shape, and there is still time for realistic, sustainable,
management arrangements to be incorporated into sectoral plans,
unlike most of the rest of the world's fisheries.
There are of course problem areas. The least sustainable artisanal
fisheries tend to be those that are newly commercialised, and
which circumvent longstanding customary and community restraints.
Systems need to be developed which adapt acceptable traditional
management practices to modern cash fisheries, and this may require
a different approach for each island group. There are promising
signs that such systems can be developed (e.g. Bertram, 1995;
Jimmy, 1995), and the widespread extension of this may require
more attention to the social and economic side of the fishery
equation than has hitherto been the case.
There are also localised subsistence overfishing problems caused
by the high population density of some Pacific Islands, particularly
around national capitals, although this is mitigated by the transport
of fish from outer islands and even other island countries to
supply the "luxury" end of the market, and the import
of cheap protein from overseas to address the "everyday"
end of the market. As mentioned previously, it may be possible
to rank problem areas in order of priority by rapidly comparing
species densities and community structures, using identical methodology,
across the whole region. This would have to be done by an independent,
external team, as experience has shown that national fisheries
departments have too many pressing national problems to use their
own resources on regional research of this nature.
However, one of the main problems in assessing the impact of artisanal
fisheries on marine biodiversity is the the fact that so little
is known about tropical fishery resources, particularly invertebrates.
It is not sufficient to compile checklists of speciesCsomething
that naturally appeals to the collector in all of usCbut it is
necessary to know the abundance of each species, and the inter-relationships
between the different populations within the species. The fact
that so little is known about Pacific Island fishery stocks, exacerbated
by the recent recognition that fisheries stock assessment is not,
after all, an exact science, means that the focus of research
must fall on the urgent development of methods for resource management
under conditions of uncertainty.
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