Viability and resilience of small-scale fisheries through cooperative arrangements
Summary (3 min read)
1 Introduction
- Small-scale fisheries are facing increasing challenges induced by the amplitude and the pace of the changes that are taking place in both their economic and ecological ’worlds’.
- Most of the island countries in the region are still considered as poor countries and small-scale fisheries are an important (sometime the only) economic opportunity for many poor households, especially in the rural and remote parts of these islands (Kronen, 2004, 2007).
- The authors propose to explore whether the establishment of these types of collaborative mechanisms among groups of fishers exploiting the same resource can be a critical element that contributes to create, or to maintain, the overall viability of the small-scale fishery system in a challenging environment where shocks and sudden changes in resource abundance are frequent.
- Many recent definitions of resilience have been proposed in different disciplines (Manyena, 2006; Bahadur et al., 2010).
2 The Solomon Islands case study
- Within Solomon Islands, the Western province was used for their field work (see Figure (1)).
- There the small town of Gizo (on Gizo Island) where the fishing ground is shared by 4 communities of fishers was selected 1.
- The cooperation between the four community is considered as an ’extended’ wantok as in practice each community has its own constitutive wantok.
- The information and data on the socio-economical context of this case study are derived from field work conducted by the first author of this article from May to August 2011 in the Gizo area, supplemented by a thorough review of the existing literature on Gizo market (Alec, 2005; Schwarz et al., 2007).
3 The bio-economic model
- The dynamic bio-economic model is based on a renewable resource assumed to be exploited by heterogeneous agents who differ from each other by their operating costs 5 and catchability efficiency 2.
- These agents’ fishing strategies are assumed to be driven by cash optimality under subsistence constraints, following cooperative and non cooperative strategies.
- In their dynamic framework, both non cooperative and cooperative agents are assumed to be myopic with respect to the impact of their fishing effort on the stock dynamics.
- Hence cooperation is not considered as a way to internalize this stock dynamics but as a mean to concentrate the fishing effort into the hands of the most efficient agent(s) in order to ensure the fulfilment of the subsistence constraint for all agents.
3.2 Agents’ strategy: subsistence versus cash
- The different fishers are assumed to exploit the biomass B(t) to cover their household’s subsistence needs.
- Each agent is therefore characterized by a specific catchability efficiency qi that reflects his own community’s average catchability efficiency plus or minus a variation randomly assigned within a 20% range.
- Note that the way the cooperative strategy is defined implies that it can be optimal for the most efficient fishers in the group to fish on the behalf of the least efficient fishers, to ensure that the Hlim requirement is satisfied for all in the group.
3.3 The resilience index
- The modelling analysis is completed by the computation of a resilience index.
- Following Béné et al. (2001) and Martin (2005), this resilience index is based on the calculation of system’s ’time of crisis’, that is, the time it takes for a system to come back to a viable configuration after a shock.
- In their case, viable configurations correspond to situations where the subsistence constraint defined by the threshold Hlim is satisfied (i.e. food security is secured for all members of the community).
- Values close to 1 indicate systems with strong resilience (i.e. situations where a system can return to food security condition relatively rapidly), while values close to 0 indicate cases where a system has difficulties to return to a viable condition after a crisis.
3.4 Calibration of the model
- All simulations are based on a weekly time unit.
- In total the whole fishing community includes about 160 fishers who exploit the Gizo’s reefs on a weekly basis.
- The productivity expressed in kg/h/fisher is multiplied by the number of agents and divided by the biomass in kg to obtain the catchability parameters (in 1/h): 6. This is equivalent to 22.5 Kg/agent/week since the average number of fisher per agent is 5 and the number of people in a fisher’s household is 5.2 (National Statistic Office, 1999) 11.
4 Results
- Figure 2 displays the trajectories of the exploited resource B(t), the average fishing efforts of each community (or group) e(t)k/Nbk(t), the average subsistence level H(t)/Nb(t) and average cash-income derived from fishing π(t)/N(t) under the non-collaborative (Black curves) and collaborative (light blue curves) strategies.
- Without collaboration, the four groups of fishers are all fishing to ensure their individual subsistence (Fig.2, diagramme (b) black curves).
- In the last few months before the collapse, the fishers were just able to maintain their subsistence (diagramme (c) black curve) at the food security threshold level Hlim (shown in red on the figure).
- As the shock hits the resource, the level of biomass B(t) is reduced by 50 %.
- The curves confirm the great benefit of cooperative strategies.
5.1 Key-findings
- According to Oru (2011) or Russell (1948.), the local economy in Solomon Islands is an economy of social values rather than market ones.
- A series of initial key-points emerge: Cooperation helps maintaining ecological sustainability.
- This strategy (which can be considered as a coping strategy at the community level) is the evidence of the ability of the fishers to adjust and modify their fishing behaviour under the wantok system in an attempt to protect their food security.
- Finally it is interesting to note that two other recent studies also mentioned resilience in relation to the wantok system.
- In essence this illustrates the point now made by an increasing number of scholars who recognise the importance not to consider ecological or social resilience separately but instead to try to integrate both the social and ecological mechanisms of resilience into one single combined concept, that of social-ecological resilience (Armitage et al., 2012).
6 Conclusion
- The nexus between food security, poverty alleviation and resource conservation is one of the most challenging problems faced by many countries in the developing world (Adams, 2004; Sanderson, 2005; Rice, 2011; Bene et al., 2011).
- In the case of small state islands where natural resources are particularly limited and the dependence of the population on these resources particularly high, the problem becomes even more acute (Reenberg et al., 2008; Schwarz et al., 2010; Hardy et al., 2013).
- The wantok has been implemented for many decades in the Solomon Islands fisheries, but its adaptation to the modern world is a critical issue.
- In particular the growing pressure for cash that is imposed by the increased marketization of the economy does represent a direct challenge for some of the more fundamental values 23 that underpin this customary system.
- In that sense the long-term evolution of the whole fishery is still hard to anticipate.
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Frequently Asked Questions (13)
Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "Viability and resilience of small-scale fisheries through cooperative arrangements" ?
The lessons from the present analysis confirm, however, the importance of the wantok in maintaining the current socio-ecological viability of the whole system, and suggest that this importance may increase in the future as the pressure on the resource continues to increase.
Q3. What is the effect of the slowed down subsistence and cash income indicators?
The slow decrease in both subsistence and cash-income indicators (while the resource level remains constant) is the consequence of the growth in population and the subsequent increase in number of fishers - over the 10 years of the simulation.
Q4. What is the resilience of non-cooperative fishers?
While the resilience index of non-cooperative fishers remain systematically at zero (suggesting that non-cooperative strategies provide the system with no resilience at all), the resilience index of cooperative fishers shows that for a large range of initial biomass the cooperative strategies offer the strong resilience property to the system.
Q5. Why are the fishers from group 1 able to sustain a positive cash-income?
Because they are very efficient fishers from group 1 are able to catch enough fish to feed the whole community and still maintain positive the14aggregated cash-income for the whole community.
Q6. How long does the food security of the whole community last?
The food security of the whole community is at stake for approximately one year during which the households subsistence is just maintained at the threshold level Hlim.
Q7. What is the effect of the shock on the resource-base B(t)?
The combined effect of their fishing pressure on the resource (diagramme (a) black curve) leads the resource-base B(t) to slowly decline, forcing them to fish more intensively, in line with the race for fish described in the Tragedy of the Commons narrative.
Q8. What are the challenges that small-scale fisheries are facing?
Small-scale fisheries are facing increasing challenges induced by the amplitude and the pace of the changes that are taking place in both their economic and ecological ’worlds’.
Q9. What is the resilience index for non-cooperative fishers?
Figure 4 shows the resilience index computed for both non-cooperative (black curve) and cooperative fishers (light blue curve) as a function of the initial biomass B(0) for a 50% shock in the biomass.
Q10. What is the role of the wantok system in promoting cash viability?
The resilience analysis shows that this household subsistence condition can be satisfied at all time even in the case of severe shocks- provided that the resource-base started above a critical biomass level B♯.Cooperation is better for cash viability Although no specific condition was imposed in the bio-economic model on this dimension, the simulations indicate that the cash income generated by fishers operating under the wantok system is always superior or equal to the cash income derived under non-cooperation, at any time.
Q11. How did the wantok system recover from the shock?
This ability to preserve a critical function of the system was achieved by a change in the fishing strategy: fishers from the group 3 and 4 started to fish again for a short period of time,8. Complementary analyses (not shown here) indicate that in the same conditions a resource affected by a similar shock but exempt of any fishing pressure is able to bounce back to its original level.
Q12. What are the lessons from the present analysis?
The lessons from the present analysis confirm, however, the importance of the wantok in maintaining the current socio-ecological viability of the whole system, and suggest that this importance may increase in the future as the pressure on the resource continues to increase.
Q13. What is the main reason why the situation is exacerbated?
In some places, this situation is exacerbated by the rapid demographic transition that characterises the developing world (Sunderlin, 1994; Botsford et al., 1997).