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
Smith 1979 showed that following a policy of catching more fish more efficiently was to head down a dead end. Bailey 1993 argues that investment in
capital often fails in the long term because many tropical stocks of fish are located close to shore so larger vessels are able to out-compete traditional fishers. Sooner
or later increases in catching capacity surpass Maximum Sustainable Yield MSY and harvesting of the resource decreases. Regardless of whether fishing effort has
already surpassed MSY or not policymakers face a series of decisions about how fish are harvested. Several papers explore the distribution of fish and the trade-
offs facing policy makers. Bailey and Jentoft 1990 argue that projects are frequently justified on the basis of mutually antagonistic goals. Policy makers
want to increase exports, employment and the level of fisher’s incomes. Each of these goals are worthwhile but there are normally trade-offs between them. Bailey
and Jentoft 1990 give the example of a trawler catching the same volume of fish and using five crew compared to fifty small-scale fishers. The owner of the
trawler will see large profits but it is likely there will be a direct negative impact on the catches of traditional fishers, or an indirect negative impact, when the
trawler dumps large volumes of fish on the market and decreases the price. Finegold 2009 identifies this same trade-off between economic efficiency and
employment with regard to where the fish is landed and sold. The traditional way of landing the catch and selling to small traders is threatened by centralisation of
landing sites. Bailey and Jentoft 1990 argue that the choices are fundamentally ethical
and moral rather than technical, and policy makers need to think through the long
term implications of their policies for traditional fishers. The industrialisation of the fishery off Kerala, India, during the 1970s is a helpful example of this.
Modern trawlers overexploited the resource meaning small-scale fishers experienced a 50 reduction in productivity between 1974 and 1982, a decline of
real per capita income from 850 to 420 rupees and per capita consumption of locally available fish also fell from 19 kilograms in 1971-2 to 9 kilograms in
1981-82 Kurien, 1993. Kent 1997 agrees that such policy tradeoffs have implications for food security for the poor. He contends that exports move fish
away from the poor because they cannot compete with the prices being paid and that the foreign revenue generated does not always trickle down to reach the poor.
An export policy may result in foreign exchange for businessmen and central government through taxation but policy makers need to recognise that unless this
money is consciously targeted at improving the welfare of traditional coastal communities they may be left out in the cold. One of the clear messages from
these policy papers is that policy makers must be clear about their goals and if their basic goal is to improve the standard of living for coastal communities the
focus should be broadened to include components such as food security, sanitation, education, lack of market access, infrastructure and encouraging
occupational diversity rather than specialisation Pomeroy et al. 2009, Bailey and Pomeroy, 1996, Allison and Ellis, 2001.
2.2 Co-management and Community Based Resource Management
