ON 10 JUNE 2014, the member States of
the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations (FAO) adopted
the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing
Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the
Context of Food Security and Poverty
Eradication (1) (“Guidelines”).
To make these Guidelines effective,
it is crucial that the FAO, governments,
and civil society have access to data to
help understand small-scale fisheries.
Currently, catches from these fisheries are
not collected separately, but are lumped
in with industrial catches, even though
they represent about one-quarter of global
catches, and the majority of catches in
many developing countries. To promote
the transparency needed for good governance
(2, 3), the FAO ought to request
from member countries a report of catch
data that distinguishes between industrial
and small-scale fisheries.
Many decades of debate have failed to
produce one, agreed-upon definition of
a “small-scale fishery,” but the modest
variations in definitions between countries
do not preclude efforts to gather global
statistics. Just as the Guidelines do not
impose a single definition of small-scale
fisheries, each of the FAO’s member States
could define their own small-scale fisheries,
reflecting local realities.
These changes would help to highlight
the importance of small-scale fisheries
and may also help governments that
still treat these fisheries as a solution to demographic pressure and rural landlessness
(4) to focus instead on their inherent
value.
Daniel Pauly1
and Anthony Charles2
*
1Sea Around Us,
Fisheries Centre,
University of
British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4,
Canada.
2School of Business and School of the Environment,
Saint Mary’s University,
Halifax, NS B3H3C3,
Canada.
*Corresponding author. E-mail: tony.charles@smu.ca
