Migratory fishing in Malawi and its challenges for beach-based rights co-management

Abstract

ABSTRACT Migratory fishing is widely practiced in water bodies of Malawi. Fishers follow geographic changes in the availability of good catches or move away from areas or water bodies where stocks have been depleted to unprofitable levels. They also move due to seasonal ecological changes that make it impossible to operate certain gears or due to seasonal decline of catches to unprofitable levels. There are also instances whereby groups of fishers migrated permanently from less productive areas to more productive areas, for example, the aTonga fishers who moved into the central and southern areas of Lake Malawi from Nkhata Bay in the last century. Thus, these types of fishing migrations can be characterized as permanent, temporary seasonal routine or temporary incidental. The cultural dynamics of migrant fishers vary in that some groups maintain their ethnic practices in their new homes when they migrate permanently, while others integrate into the local communities. Temporary migrants have generally been seen as problematic by the receiving local communities due to the social dissonance, in particular adultery and sexual affairs with school girls, that most bring about since they do not bring their spouses and families with them. Although co-management, implemented in Malawi from the 1990s, was supposed to institute limited access and thus curtail migrant fishing, the structural characteristics of small-scale fisheries and reciprocal migration make it impossible to limit access. The best that local controls resulting from co-management can do has been to try to channel formal reporting by migrant fishers of their presence in an area from local chiefs to Beach Village Committees.