Today is World Fisheries Day and this year the global call is for decent employment opportunities in the fisheries sector. To mark the occasion the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) is hosting an event entitled Labour rights are human rights: working together to ensure the rights of fishers fighting trafficking and forced labour in the fishing sector at its headquarters in Rome, Italy, from where a message from Pope Francis will be delivered by His Eminence Cardinal Peter A. Turkson, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. We look forward to celebrating World Fisheries day once again with the Holy See, says Audun Lem, Deputy-Director, FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department. This is a timely discussion since we are now undertaking work to draft a FAO Guidance Document on improving social responsibility along the fisheries value chain. The 33rd session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries, held last July in Rome, provided FAO with the mandate to draft these guidelines, which will be discussed in the FAO Sub-committee on Fish Trade, to be held in Norway in 2019, he continued. In the South African context, World Fisheries Day also presents an opportunity to highlight the problems of depleting fish stocks, severe ocean and coastal pollution, and overfishing and poaching. Unless we address these issues collectively, the crisis will deepen, says the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Citing a recent United Nations study which reports that more than two-thirds of the world’s fisheries have been overfished or are fully harvested and more than one third are in a state of decline because of factors such as the loss of essential fish habitats, pollution, and global warming, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries says World Fisheries Day also helps to highlight the critical importance to human lives, of water and the lives it sustains, both in and out of water. Water forms a continuum, whether contained in rivers, lakes, and ocean. Fish forms an important part of the diets of people around the world, particularly those that live near rivers, coasts and other water bodies. A number of traditional societies and communities are rallied around the occupation of fishing, says the Department. Its theme picked up by World Fish, which says in a statement that despite the growth of aquaculture, small-scale capture fisheries will continue to supply most of the fish consumed in much of the developing world in the coming decades. The majority of these fisheries are small-scale, operating in rivers, lakes, wetlands, coral reefs and estuaries in coastal seas, and provide livelihoods for millions of people. Yet small-scale fisheries are frequently overlooked in discussions around the sustainable and equitable use of oceans, seas and inland water bodies. World Fisheries Day serves as an important reminder that we need to change the way we manage global fisheries in order to maintain stocks and healthy aquatic ecosystems, says the statement. WorldFish, an international research organisation headquartered in Malaysia, has through the CGIAR Research Program on Fish Agri-Food Systems, committed over USD 57 million to small-scale fisheries research over six years. This considerable investment is part of its larger and integrated research portfolio on fisheries, sustainable aquaculture and value chains and nutrition, designed to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As I underlined during my recent presentation at Our Ocean conference in Bali, strategic investments in fisheries research, embedded in partnerships and networks and building on the strengths of fishing communities, are crucial for improving human wellbeing and the social-ecological resilience of fishery systems, says Gareth Johnstone, Director General WorldFish. Put another way ,if we don’t give small-scale fisheries the attention they deserve, we are not only undermining progress towards the SDGsin particular the specific target 14.b, which seeks to provide access of small-scale artisanal fishers to marine resources and marketswe are also missing opportunities to advance policies and investments that lead to inclusive, equitable and sustainable development of small-scale fisheries for the millions of people who depend on them.