Who Brings in the Fish? The Relative Contribution of Small-Scale and Industrial Fisheries to Food Security in Southeast Asia

Lydia C L Teh,Daniel Pauly

doi:10.3389/fmars.2018.00044

Abstract

Amidst overexploited fisheries and further climate related declines projected in tropical fisheries, marine dependent small-scale fishers in Southeast Asia face an uncertain future. Yet, small-scale fishers are seldom explicitly considered in regional fisheries management and their contribution to national fish supply tends to be greatly under-estimated compared to industrial fisheries. Lack of knowledge about the small-scale sector jeopardises informed decision-making for sustainable ecosystem based fisheries planning and social development. We fill this knowledge gap by applying reconstructed marine fish catch statistics from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam – countries of the Gulf of Thailand - from 1950 to 2013 to assess the relative contribution of small-scale and industrial fisheries to national food security. Reconstructed catches quantify reported and unreported fish catch from industrial, small-scale, and recreational fishing. We then conduct a comparative analysis of the degree to which the industrial and small-scale sectors support food security, by converting total catch to the portion that is kept for human consumption and that which is diverted to fishmeal for animal feed or other purposes. Total reconstructed marine fish catch from the four Southeast Asian countries totalled 282 million t from 1950 to 2013, with small-scale sector catches being underestimated by an average of around 2 times. When the amount of fish that is diverted to fishmeal is omitted, small-scale fishers contribute more food fish for humans than do industrial fisheries for much of the period until 2000. These results encourage regional fisheries management to be cognisant of small-scale fisheries as a pillar of socio-economic well-being for coastal communities.

Highlights

Small-scale inshore fisheries are the backbone of socio-economic well-being in coastal communities throughout the world (Béné, 2006; Harvey, 2006; Teh and Sumaila, 2013), in the tropics where the majority of countries with heavily fish dependent populations are situated (Golden et al, 2016)
The historical reconstruction of fisheries catch statistics for Cambodia (Teh et al, 2014a), Malaysia (Teh and Teh, 2014), Thailand (Teh et al, 2015), and Vietnam (Teh et al, 2014b) estimated total fish catch from each country’s EEZ in the period 1950 to 2010 that were caught by their domestic fishing fleet, by adding unreported catch to officially reported fish landings
Reconstructed marine fish catches from the industrial and smallscale sectors, as well as recreational fishing, in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam totalled about 282 million t from 1950 to 2013, averaging 972,000 t in the 1950s and increasing to 7.3 million t in the last decade (Figure 1, Appendix 3 in Supplementary Materials)

Summary

Introduction

Small-scale inshore fisheries are the backbone of socio-economic well-being in coastal communities throughout the world (Béné, 2006; Harvey, 2006; Teh and Sumaila, 2013), in the tropics where the majority of countries with heavily fish dependent populations are situated (Golden et al, 2016). In these locations, fish is crucial for food security and health, providing daily protein requirements, and a range of essential micronutrients that fend off diseases of malnutrition. There is a very real and urgent need to assess the role of small-scale fisheries, and to translate this knowledge to timely and relevant policies on sustainable fisheries and marine management for food security (Teh et al, 2007; Barnes-Mauthe et al, 2013)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion