Fishing about and about fishing
I last wrote on Japan in the May WF issue, following the series of disasters - earthquake, tsunami and the Fukushima meltdown. Since then, the surviving NE Japan's fishermen and its fishing industry have been struggling to stay afloat and gradually return to anything that resembles normalcy. Recently and quite timely, Mitsutaku Makino of the Japan's Fisheries Research Agency produced a textbook "Fisheries Management in Japan", (Springer, 2011, www.springer.com, 200 p.; US$129, GBP 90, EUR 100). This book will help non-Japanese readers to grasp the depth of the wounds the country endures, because Japan is world's leading fishing country and the fishing industry is playing a major economic and social role in the Japanese society, and according to Mr.Makino, it's the first English book in over 20 years on social aspects of Japanese fisheries.
The Japanese management system with its large community-based coops has always intrigued me, not less because the attempts by many development agencies to implant Western cooperative system in developing countries had been in most cases unsuccessful, while the Japanese coops seemed to operate satisfactorily. Fishermen and related workers who visited the Japanese coastal fisheries, always returned with positive impressions.
Bryan Pierce wrote in 2002 on the FISHFOLK discussion list: "I have travelled with commercial fishermen from Australia, and they would have taken the Japanese system home in their suitcases if they could have!" And: "What strikes me about the Japanese approach is that it seems to be "grass-roots" driven. Western systems, in my experience, tend to a "top down" approach heavily dependent on coercive action, and too often without either consent of the governed or much reference to reality. My experience is that the Japanese approach is able to react far more quickly and has greater practical success".
The present book's author seems to be of a similar opinion. "Due to the complexity of the system and its intensive nature – writes Makino – fisheries coordination and resource conservation cannot be implemented effectively in a top-down, command-and control manner".
For some 1,300 years, Japan has been committed to its own management system, which however transformed with time remained quite different from Western variants. Nowadays, some 190,000 fishermen, which form almost 90% of the total, operate in inshore and coastal waters, supplying some 62 kg per capita of sea-food or 55% of the average total protein intake to almost 130 mn Japanese people, who're the world's most obsessive fish-eaters. Doubtless, their fishery management system persevered in the teeth of the dynamics of time. Not just that; unlike some other systems… it's working!
The main difference between the "western" and the Japanese approaches consists in the community-oriented management of coastal fishery resources, where authority has been conferred to local people. This, in accordance with guiding concept of the government's fisheries management, namely, that it should be planned and executed by the resource users themselves. But, also in the management of offshore, industrial fisheries, while the national government plays a principal role in the plans and rules making, fisheries organizations participate in their implementation.
In inshore and coastal fisheries of sedentary or locally stable species, at the community/municipality level, the management is controlled by Fisheries Cooperative Associations (FCA). In cases of widely distributed species, there're Fisheries Coordinating Committees, in which the government is playing more pronounced role, according with respective federations of local FCAs.
Another form of participatory management consists of Fisheries Management Organizations (FMO), which are groups of fishermen who are targeting the same species or are employing similar fishing gear. They may be organized within FCAs, or consist of fishermen from several neighbouring FCAs, or even from several prefectures. The FMO-based management is growing (there're 1,738 FMOs in Japan – an over 13% increase since 2003).
As far as conservation of the resources goes, "local fishing is an integral component of local ecosystems, rather than a threatening intrusion into "pristine ecosystems". Therefore… local fishers play a core role in local ecosystem conservation activities, and public citizens are positively participating in such activities".
The following list of the book's 10 chapters would give the potential reader a good idea of what to expect: 1 – the Introduction gives a general information on the country, its fisheries and their associated institutions; 2 – A Brief Institutional History of Japanese Fisheries Management; 3 – Japanese Fisheries Today; 4 – Fisheries Management in Coastal Areas; 5 – Fisheries Management in Offshore Areas; 6 – Institutional Relationship Between Japanese Fisheries Management and the Ecosystem Approach; 7 – Marine Protected Areas; 8 – The UNESCO World Natural Heritage List and Local Fisheries; 9 – Comprehensive Management and Future Scenarios for Japanese Fisheries; 10 – Concluding Discussion.
Japanese traditional management has the form of input and technical controls. Presently, TAC is directed at only 8, mostly pelagic species. Based on the results of seaborne fishing surveys, it's set in a participatory process that involves fishermen's organizations, and prefectural and national authorities. TAC is mentioned also with respect to the dredge fishery for sea cucumbers, where it was set by the fishermen themselves. The author explains also why individual quota systems are costly, crude and hardly adjustable to the species life cycle, and unable to follow large fluctuations and assessment errors, which lowers their utility. It appears that they've got in Japan a well working fisheries management without the so idolized in the West and South individual and tradable quotas, catch shares, etc.
This book should be read by every scholar and student interested in the Japan's way in involving producers and their organizations in the management of their resources. Also all those who're involved in fisheries management in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand should consider it as an obligatory reading, and see how things could be done without alienating and dislocating fishermen from their jobs and bleeding fishing communities, by making their services to fisheries irrelevant. And, above all, my personal recommendation to the NOAA's head and the EU's Fisheries Commissioner: please, read this book.
Japanese small-scale bottom trawler
FISHERIES MANAGEMENT – THE JAPANESE WAY
M. Ben-Yami Column WORLD FISHING AND AQUACULTURE July 2015
FAO FISHERIES: MODEL 2015
My association with FAO had started long before I joined the staff of the FAO Fisheries department, when in the late 1950s, still a commercial fishing skipper, I was engaged to carry out, along with FAO experts, Joachim Schaerfe and Norio Fujinami, an underwater study of the Mediterranean trawl gear. On FAO staff I was from 1975 to1982. Between 1976 and 1994, FAO published many of my reports and 9 "POP" training manuals and books in the field of fishing technology, which I authored or co-authored. One, the 1996 "Purse Seining Manual", even earned me a Russian doctorate. During my career, FAO has engaged me in several consultancies both, in the field and at the FAO HQ in Rome.
All this I haven't written just to brag, but to show my readers that for some 60 years I have not been a stranger to FAO, and that my impressions from revisiting it last April may carry some weight.
Obviously, I found the FAO Fisheries quite altered. Well, most of my FAO contemporaries, not to speak about elder colleagues, had passed to the other world. Of the few still with us and not yet retired I managed to meet only one. The time was too short to look for the others. But, let's have a look at a bit of FAO's history.
When, following the end of WW2, the UN established its Food and Aquaculture Organization, the total world's fish yield for lack of any reliable statistics could only be estimated. The initial figure hovered at a few tens of millions of mt. In 1975, the global yield was somewhere between 40 and 50M mt. It's now about thrice as big.
Between the 1950s and 1980s FAO Fisheries was busy in promoting marine fishing. Only a few people were dealing with aquaculture, which yields at that time were comparatively insignificant. Fisheries technical divisions were instituting development projects all over the developing world, mostly financed by the World Bank, external donors from the developed fishing countries such as the Danish DANIDA, Norwegian NORAD, German GTZ, Canadian CIDA, and some others.
We have trained fishermen and governments' fishery officers on every aspect that would lead to higher catches both, individually and by organizing courses globally at strategic spots in the southern hemisphere and at the FAO HQ. Our development projects have been focused on small fishing craft motorization, supply of synthetic materials for local netmaking, introduction of modern fishing craft design and construction, and fishing surveys and reconnaissance. In parallel, many of our projects involved post-harvest procedures and fish processing and marketing components, as well as studies in life history, behaviour, and stock assessment of the target species. All this was done by experts, mostly employed as consultants and supervised by our HQ staff. The logistics were taken care by a special Fisheries Operations Service. FAO Fisheries have organized several world conferences that dealt with fishing gear and methods, fishing vessels design and construction, and fish utilization technology and, jointly with Fishing News Books, produced several large volumes of meetings papers and discussions, and a whole series of fishing manuals. Our HQ in Rome has always been boiling with activity, consultant masterfishermen, technologists, socio-anthropologists, economists, and ourselves coming and going, with every developing coastal country a prospective or actual host for FAO fishery projects.
But, as the Latin proverb says: tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis (times change and we change with them), the drive for production was replaced by fighting overfishing, and technical improvements and development – by striving for sustainability. As Dr. Rebbeca Metzner, Chief of the Policy, Economics and Institutions Branch, Mr. Jiansan Jia, Deputy Director of the Resources Use and Conservation Division and Dr. Lahsen Aborbouch, Director of the Policy and Economics Division, consecutively, told me: the job now is to find and maintain the right balance between the fishing and conservation of fish stocks. Any production growth can only come from chiefly marine aquaculture, which is why the Department is now named FISHERIES AND AQUACULTURE.
Officially, FAO stresses the importance of fish to the well-being of disadvantaged communities in developing countries and to poverty reduction and food security, which requires responsible and sustainable use of fisheries and aquaculture resources, and even "preferential access" and "exclusive zones", as well as defense of tenure rights for small-scale fisheries.
But I found FAO Fisheries rather emaciated in terms of staff size and budget. Some sort of reverse Parkinson Law must've happened here. It's my impression that the Department's present activities, however important and valuable, are limited mostly to verbal and paper work. Although my page is too short to give the Department full justice and to list all the good people, who've lent me some of their time, one recent initiative should be mentioned.
Called THE BLUE GROWTH INITIATIVE it's trying to contain three missions: Food security, Poverty alleviation and Sustainable resources management. What I like about it is that it's not, like some "green" initiatives, only about fish stocks conservation, but also about improvement of fish workers' and their families' social conditions. This, in view of FAO's figures of some 200M people (with dependents - some 880M) employed in fisheries, fish farming, handling, processing, and trade associated jobs. Also FAO considers fishermen not only as users, but also as resource stewards. FAO hopes to share the program multilaterally with many organizations worldwide, as well as with States' fisheries administrations. It appears that Indonesia already has jumped on the bandwagon.
FAO is currently co-organizing also the 'Tenure & Fishing Rights 2015 forum on rights-based approach for fisheries and already kept its inaugural meeting last March in Cambodia. This Forum is intended to connect fishing people, their communities, academics, representatives of NGOs, industry, governments and international organizations worldwide.
If you've expected some criticism on my part, not this time. It's the least thing FAO now needs. What it needs is lots of money for fisheries staff and field work.