Building food security and resilience into fisheries governance in the Eastern Caribbean

Abstract

Fisheries resources are of particular importance to the small island developing states of the Eastern Caribbean. There is an increasing demand for seafood to address food security and nutrition, to support coastal livelihoods and to contribute to sustainable development. The Caribbean Community recently developed a Regional Food and Nutrition Security Policy and a Common Fisheries Policy. These instruments, however, only make passing mention of fisheries and food security, respectively. There is little evidence of food security being integrated into fisheries governance. Yet, recent research has shown that resilience perspectives on fisheries governance in the Eastern Caribbean can be useful for obtaining ecosystem services, such as those that relate to food security, from social–ecological systems. This resilience takes into account global and regional environmental change, multiple levels of governance and degrees of adaptive capacity, matching the scales of social and ecological processes and managing social networks in the institutional arrangements for resource use and conservation. Building food security and resilience into fisheries governance requires the development of adaptive capacity, especially through social networks, and with an emphasis on policies that enable fisherfolk self-organisation.