Shifting Baselines

After 19 hours via London (where I had the unfortunate Sea Cow sighting), I arrived (and felt like I put the 'poo'ped) in Maputo, Mozambique. Tomorrow I deliver a talk to the Mozambique Fisheries Division on the fisheries catch reconstructions I recently completed as part of my Ph.D. research (co-funded by the Sea Around Us project and WWF).

Small-scale fisheries are often overlooked statistically, politically, and in economic terms. This is because small-scale fishers, as Dr. Daniel Pauly once explained during a talk, don't play golf. Their physical and socio-economic remoteness from urban centers frequently combined with a historical battle with poverty keep small-scale fishers quite literally at bay.

Part of my job was to reconstruct Mozambique's small-scale fisheries and look to see how the industrial fishing sector might also have been underreported (in this case, via the discarded fish caught by shrimp trawlers). Mozambique suffered a brutal civil war from 1976-1992 and it's also one of the poorest countries in the world, so collecting good fisheries statistics hasn't been a national priority and this is reflected in some odd statistics.

For instance, Mozambique has one of the longest coastlines of any African country and a high coastal population. Fish is likely vital to the survival of many coastal people. Yet the World Resources Institute reports that Mozambique's per capita fish consumption is 3kg while the average for sub-Saharan Africa is 8kg, which is a better indication of poor statistics than fish consumption rates.

I won't bore you with the methods--this is a blog for Pete's sake. The result of the study is this: conservative estimates of marine fisheries landings for Mozambique are 5.5 times greater than those reported by FAO. "Big deal," you say. "Big problem," I say.

Total reconstructed catch (small-scale, industrial, and discards) compared to FAO reported catch for Mozambique, 1950-2004

Think about some of the big studies in fisheries based on FAO data: e.g., fishing down marine food webs, fuel use by global fishing fleets, and the inferred collapse of fisheries by 2048. The underreporting that has taken place Mozambique is not exceptional. Just as the collapse of North Atlantic cod is a trend can be generalized globally, so can the problem of marine fisheries underreporting (which is why D. Pauly outlined the rationale for catch reconstructions a decade ago).

I head next to the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association Scientific Symposium and then on to Dar Es Salaam to again present the results of this study and one for Tanzania. Thus, I'll be exploring African small-scale fisheries for the next week and I hope you join in the discussion and (for the diehards) maybe even skim recently released Fisheries Centre Research Report on this topic. For now, I leave you with a dhow.

The maneuvers by Zanzibari small-scale fishers would put many sailors to shame.