On the occasion of World Fisheries Day, the declarations of the Collectif Pêche et Développement and the African Confederation of Artisanal Fishing Organisations agree in their demand to implement the FAO Voluntary Guidelines
A year 2020 marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and its devastating effects is leading to renewed fears that fishermen will once again be sidelined in decisions that affect them. In its declaration for World Fisheries Day (WFD) on 21 November, the Confederation of African Artisanal Fisheries Organisations (CAOPA) states that "the beating heart of Africa's blue economy is artisanal fisheries that feed our people".
Indeed, since the beginning of the pandemic, CAOPA insists on the fact that this crisis has revealed the lack of appropriate policies to support artisanal fisheries: basic services such as electricity or access to drinking water, safety on board pirogues, protection of coastal areas from industrial trawling, and finally policies to encourage employment for the youngest. For African artisanal fishing communities, this crisis must "be an opportunity for governments and stakeholders to improve the long-term living and working conditions of men and women throughout the sector".
Women in African artisanal fisheries have paid a high price during the Covid-19 crisis. Deprived of raw materials when fishermen no longer go out, cut off from their markets, they wondered how they could feed their families. Photo: Yoel Winkler - Unsplash/@Yoel100
To achieve this, CAOPA warns that it is not by "pursuing ideas of blue growth based on rapid economic profit" that coastal communities will see their conditions improve, but by "getting actively involved in rebuilding communities" through the implementation of the FAO Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries (SSF), with national action plans, developed in a transparent, participatory and gender-sensitive manner.
For the Collectif Pêche et Développement, policy-makers should recognise the collective capacity of fisherfolk to co-manage their resources and protect the environment. Photo: Thomas Millot - Unsplash/@tmillot
In his statement "Who wants the fishermen to disappear?" the Collectif Pêche et Développement also sounds the alarm about a "sometimes obvious will [...] to marginalise them [fisherfolk] in order to make way for more lucrative activities in the blue economy". It also raises the issue of the growing interest - pushed by some environmental NGOs - in marine protected areas (MPAs), a phenomenon they call 'blue colonialism', "multiplying the number of MPAs banned to fishing" which "in Europe and elsewhere, only rarely involve artisanal fisherfolk in decisions on the oceans, even though they are centuries-old managers [of these oceans]".
This collective repeats, as it has done for a long time, that aquaculture is "an old moon that has already shown its limits" and that fishing in Europe remains essential to feed the population with quality products. In Africa too, "if artisanal fishing is allowed to decline, the continent will face a serious food crisis", CAOPA stresses.
The Collectif Pêche et Développement also joins the CAOPA in calling for greater participation of men and women of artisanal fisheries in resource management and environmental protection, as well as in decision-making at all levels, local, regional and global, concerning the oceans. For this collective also, decision-makers must "commit themselves to meet society's expectations and pursue their commitments to sustainable fishing, based on the FAO voluntary guidelines".
Banner photo by Yoel Winkler - Unsplash/@yoel100
Closing the funding gap for biodiversity conservation is one of the critical topics at COP 16 in October 2024. The funding gap has been estimated at $700 billion in Goal D of the Kunming-Montreal Agreement, based on a report, “Financing Nature”, published in 2020. Taking the example of fisheries and ocean conservation, this article shows the $700 billion figure is based on highly dubious calculations and assumptions. The author argues the funding gap report is not a serious effort to estimate the needs for supporting conservation efforts. Therefore, the $700 billion figure should be rejected by those opposed to the continuing financialisation of conservation.