Abstract
Small-scale fishing communities are increasingly connected to international seafood trade via exports to a growing global market. Understanding how this connectedness impacts local fishery systems, both socially and ecologically, has become a necessary challenge for fisheries governance. Market prices are a potential mechanism by which global market demands are transferred to small-scale fishery actors. In most small-scale fisheries this happens through various traders (intermediaries, middlemen/women or patrons). By financing fishing operations, buying and selling products and transferring market information, traders can actively pass international market signals, such as price, to fishers. How these signals influence fishers' decisions and consequent fishing effort is still poorly understood yet significant for future social-ecological sustainability. The paper uses an economic framed field experiment, in combination with interviews, to shed light on this. It does so in the context of the Philippine patron-client 'suki' arrangement. Over 250 fishers in Concepcion, Iloilo were asked in an economic experiment, to make decisions about fuel loans in light of changing market prices. Interviews with participants and their patrons gathered additional information on relevant contextual variables potentially influencing borrowing. They included fisher characteristics and socio-economic conditions. Contrary to our hypotheses, fishers showed no response in their borrowing behaviour to experimental price changes. Instead, gender and the previous experiment round were predictive of their choice of loans in the experiment. We explore possible reasons for this.
Highlights
Small-scale fisheries (SSF) are increasingly linked to expanding global seafood trade and, as such, are more affected by various market features at these larger scales, such as fluctuating demands, volatile prices, or eco-certification schemes (Berkes et al, 2006; Crona et al, 2015, 2016)
We first introduce the results of the risk elicitation task, because this is subsequently used as an explanatory variable in the regression models
In the focus group discussions, fishers who completed either framing generally agreed they were easy to understand and that both were similar to gambling, which is a common activity in many sitios
Summary
Small-scale fisheries (SSF) are increasingly linked to expanding global seafood trade and, as such, are more affected by various market features at these larger scales, such as fluctuating demands, volatile prices, or eco-certification schemes (Berkes et al, 2006; Crona et al, 2015, 2016). With trade liberalization, prices received by small-scale fishers are no longer domestically set, but are affected by international markets, and much less connected to, or driven by, local supply and overexploitation (Thanh and Flaaten, 2012). Existing literature on SSF suggests that fishers change their efforts as a result of economic incentives (Andersson and Ngazi, 1998; Gössling, 2003; Kooiman et al, 2005; Johnson, 2010; Máñez and Ferse, 2010; Brewer, 2011), but their specific responses (a behavior) to fluctuating world market prices, and the effect of these responses on resource extraction, remain uncertain. Empirical literature documents a wide range of responses by fishers to such price changes (Pollnac and Crawford, 2000; Salas et al, 2004; Miñarro et al, 2016), indicating that our understanding of this complex phenomena is still incomplete
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