Rethinking fishing communities to safeguard life above water
- PDF / 145,994 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 26 Downloads / 175 Views
COMMENTARY
Rethinking fishing communities to safeguard life above water Divya Karnad 1,2,3 Received: 30 October 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Policy makers around the world do not envision small-scale fisheries as a part of the future of any nation’s fisheries, but Dr. Jentoft’s (2019) keynote address highlighted that they are too important to too many people to fail. There is much to agree with in Dr. Jentoft’s keynote address, as he goes against the grain of the neo-liberal fisheries development narrative to discuss community and commons. There are also key lessons that developing countries can take away as they plan the development of their fisheries. At this time, when the whole world has come to a stop in the wake of a pandemic, Dr. Jentoft’s address serves as a useful beacon for people, as they reflect on how to give fisheries, and the larger globalized economic system in which they are embedded, a future. Dr. Jentoft’s keynote address reminded me of the struggle for survival of small-scale fishing communities that I had lived and worked within India. Constantly having to invoke various political and cultural reasons to justify their continued existence, such as being a “traditional occupation,” I think academics and policy makers alike have lost track of what it truly means to be a small-scale fisherman. In my work, just as in his, I have contemplated the complexity of trying to define small-scale fisheries, in a dynamic, evolving, and adaptable socio-economic and cultural landscape (Karnad 2017a, b). The struggle to try to define small-scale fisheries in the complex real world has been such that many scientists have stopped trying to define them all together, with those that do rely on technological differences (Smith and Basurto 2019). But Dr. Jentoft offers a different perspective, “...small-scale fisheries will not thrive if their communities perish.” he writes, offering the link to community as a way to identify and define diverse and complex small-scale fisheries. To my mind, this
* Divya Karnad [email protected] 1
Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana 131029, India
2
Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning, Morattandi, Tamil Nadu 605101, India
3
InSeason Fish, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600031, India
raises tension. From an academic perspective, the idea is appealing. Rethinking most fisheries in terms of community relationships, rather than their mechanical power, technical modernity, and so on, suggests that one may begin to find links and relationships to community among most fisheries (whether presently classified as small-scale or not). However, from a non-academic lens, simply re-describing small-scale fisheries from a new perspective i.e. retaining existing terminology with its baggage, could allow policy makers to ignore or, more significantly, eliminate the possibility that relationship to community may develop in any fishery. This might do a disservice to what is currently called medium- and large-scal
Data Loading...
