By Loretta B Manele
Improving management is vital for commercial fisheries in the villages of Pacific Island countries.
Jeffrey Kinch, Fisheries and Aquaculture officer from FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) talked about this at a side event called “Sustainable fisheries development initiatives” at the Honiara Summit-“Umi Tugeda Delivering on SDG 14.14: Achieving Sustainable Fisheries” at the Friendship Hall yesterday.
In early remarks, he said while village people have experience with dry marine products and are relatively successful, partly because of their storability only few Pacifica fisheries have constantly supplied fresh, chilled or frozen fish to markets.
Kinch said experience shows that in many places, commercial fisheries based on village fishing are usually not profitable without high external inputs.
He pointed out that unlike high-value, easy-to-store and transport dry marine products, fresh, chilled and frozen fish are low-value to weight and are tricky or difficult to store and transport in good condition.
Kinch added that costs and difficulties involved in transporting fish from rural areas to markets and getting fuel and mechanical repairs in often outweigh the value obtained from the sale of the fish.
He said part of this problem is that when these projects are being developed, consultants come in and assume more of a western sense of working things out.
“So, there is assumptions made about calculating profitability of village fishing efforts and these are often unrealistic.”
He mentioned that weather conditions become increasingly variable across the Pacific thus the reality is that fishers do not fish full time, nor do they sell their whole catch as people make choices concerning where to put their time and labour.
“This has significant impacts, especially where lines are and in my experience, it just resulted in a process of defaulting, repossession, redistribution, defaulting, repossession, redistribution and the cycle continues.”
He stressed that without sound resource management systems in place, enabling commercial levels of fishing in rural areas may actually spread over-fishing problems.
Kinch noted that village capacity in managing resources also varies across the Pacific Islands region.
He emphasized that the role of government is therefore vital and key to improving management.
Kinch voiced that this is in terms of regulating environmental impacts, collecting data so sound decisions are made about a certain resource and working within a range of legislative requirements for management.
He furthered that there is a real need to support fisheries development for Pacifica peoples but also the need to understand the culture of fishing at the local level.
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