Japan's International Cooperation for Fisheries and Marine Resources Management

Abstract

There is a growing need for cooperation for fisheries and marine resources management in developing countries to ensure sustainable fisheries. In this paper, three recent Japanese cooperation projects in Mauritania, the Philippines and Mozambique are analyzed to establish the desirable direction for future Japanese cooperation in this sector. Past experience has begun to teach us that a quantitative understanding and the future prediction of marine resources mainly by biologists alone do not necessarily produce concrete effects. As such socio-economic factors as rapid population growth, poverty, necessity to earn foreign currency and insufficient institutional arrangements lie behind the problems of fisheries resources, it is thus imperative to conduct studies led by socio-economists together with the examination of feasible guidelines for fisheries management, taking the ability of developing countries to implement the planned policies into consideration. There have not yet been many cases of Japanese cooperation for the strengthening of the institutional capacity of the recipient country and for the diversification of income sources to eradicate poverty among coastal residents.