vulnerability to shocks and political powerlessness”. He uses the example of
Bangladesh where a successful introduction of fingerlings increased the wild stock. But the poor stayed poor because their access was limited by socio-
institutional mechanisms of economic exclusion and class exploitation. Indeed, for fishers themselves, concern about the sustainability of the natural resource
may rank far below other ‘basic’ concerns such as food insecurity and disease Mills et al.,
2009, Roy, 1993. Béné’s 2003 review is a call to investigate the problem of poverty in fishing communities from a multi-sectoral and multi-
dimensional perspective that is wider than bio-economics alone.
2.1.2 Wealth and Welfare Approaches to Fisheries Management
Tackling a different paradigm, Béné et al. 2010 outline both the prevailing wealth-based approach and the welfare model of fisheries management.
The wealth-based model seeks to maximise economic rent from the sea as efficiently as possible and then to redistribute the profit through taxation or levies
to stimulate economic growth in other sectors. Conversely, the welfare model argues that the main contribution of small-scale fisheries is their capacity to soak
up surplus labour. Béné et al. 2010 argue that poverty must be understood to include aspects of marginalisation and vulnerability as proposed by Allison and
Horemans, 2006 rather than just economic rent. Undoubtedly the ‘tragedy of the commons’ can lead to overexploitation of the resource. With such a threat,
reducing the capacity of the fleet to a level that can efficiently harvest the resource and granting exclusive rights has been shown to work in developed countries such
as Norway and New Zealand. However, Béné et al. 2010 maintain that there are simply not the institutions and managerial capacity in developing countries to
ensure that the stock is extracted in a sustainable way and that the economic rent is redistributed in a pro-poor way. Furthermore, they contend that it is the wider
economies of developing countries that need to grow in order to absorb the excess labour that would be created in pursuing an economic rent strategy. In a review of
Vietnam’s small-scale fisheries, Pomeroy et al. 2009 agrees that the solution needs to be wider than the fisheries sector. Vietnam struggles with unsustainable
fishing methods including high discards, unenforced regulations such as mesh size prohibitions and closed areas, pollution and fleet overcapacity. Fisheries sectoral
management measures such as closed areas, seasons and gear restrictions have an important place in reducing the continual erosion of the resource base but
“solutions involve targeting not just the individual fisher but the whole household and its broader economic livelihood strategies. To be effective, solutions must
address the underlying issues of poverty, household food security, employment, income, and livelihoods both inside and outside the fishing community” Pomeroy
et al., 2009. Alternative livelihoods are needed in advance of pursuing a policy of economic efficiency.
2.1.3 Trade-offs in Fisheries Policy
