44. This agenda item was introduced by Jean-Philippe Platteau who referred to the conclusions of the Third Session of ACFR on this subject. These were presented by Dr Satia in his Opening Address and were considered by participants as a good starting point for the debate on this agenda item. They are reproduced below for convenience of the reader.
45. ACFR identified a number of issues to be considered for research, and noted that while major segments of small-scale and artisanal fisheries were believed to be poor there was, as yet, no precise definition of, or way to measure poverty in coastal fishing communities. In addition, it was noted that policies/programmes aimed at improving management might or might not extend to the impacts on poverty. The Committee concluded that the conceptual framework within which poverty is considered is of the utmost importance. It noted that (i) poverty is not a static condition and that individuals and households progress in and out of poverty; (ii) poverty can often not be usefully analysed separately from the public and social policies affecting development, and that it should not a priori be excluded that poverty originated not in spite of development efforts, but because of them; and (iii) in conducting studies of poverty in fishing communities it might be important to distinguish between the situation of marine (and large lake) fisheries and that of inland fisheries, as the two groups competed with different resource use groups. The Committee further suggested that empirical research on poverty in fishing communities could be divided into several areas of research. Among these would be:
the importance of the institutional/governance setting for the origin and persistence of poverty;
studies on processes/mechanisms that had permitted fishing communities to escape poverty and, equally important, of mechanisms that had caused fishing communities to become poor;
studies of the potential impact of effort modulating fishery management schemes on poverty in fishing communities;
studies on community organizations and customary management regimes, their importance for adequate use of community resources and consequent effects on poverty;
studies comparing the economic and social rationale of industrial type fishing versus small-scale fisheries in situations where both were feasible;
study of aquaculture as a mechanism for escaping poverty and studies on the scope of occupational opportunities outside the harvesting sector both within and outside the community.
46. Dr Platteau noted that for an increasing number of countries Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS) provide excellent data by household, and that the use of LSMS data in combination with census data might allow the application of poverty mapping techniques to measure poverty for small population groups such as fishing communities. The poverty mapping technique in combination with the conduct of a series of case studies that follow a common methodological framework to ensure comparability, provide powerful analytical tools to explain the causality of poverty by examining various factors that are likely to influence the incidence and depth of poverty. The case studies ought to focus on dynamic forces susceptible of affecting poverty, in particular:
population growth;
market integration (including the opening of export outlets);
emergence or disappearance of alternative income opportunities outside the fishing sector;
increasing socio-economic differentiation due to differential abilities of actors to respond to new economic opportunities because of differential access to credit, subsidies, and political decision-makers.
47. To the extent that the impact of such factors on both poverty and vulnerability is predicted by economic theory to differ according to whether fishermen operate under open access conditions, unregulated common property (membership rules exist but no rules regarding the use of the resource), regulated common property (both types of rules exist), or private property regime, the prevailing governance structure ought to be explicitly brought into the picture, as was concluded by ACFR. Moreover, the very impact of the above dynamic factors on the governance structure should be taken into account, making for a rather complex causal structure with feedback effects (see above paragraph 30).
48. The existence or absence of barriers to entry or exit opportunities must also be considered with a view to assessing whether the fishing sector is tightly related to other sectors of the economy (with the consequence that poverty of fishers and fishing communities should reflect poverty in the rest of the rural economy) or whether it is rather isolated as a result of political marginalization or social discrimination. This aspect of the problem is closely related to that of alternative income opportunities.
49. As far as possible, case studies should take the form of collecting complementary, poverty- and livelihoods-focused data in sites on which in-depth research (including analysis of historical processes and institutional mechanisms) has already been done and has shown promising results from the viewpoint of the effects of the aforementioned factors.
