Like millions of fisherwomen around the world, Kokoly, an octopus fisherwoman from Lamboara, Madagascar, relies on the ocean to live, as both a source of income and nutrition. With local fish stocks depleted and once vibrant reefs turned to rock, Kokoly’s life is now one of survival.
More than 100 million people in the global South rely on small-scale fishing for their livelihoods and food. These not so small small-scale fishers make up more than 90% of the world’s fishermen and fisherwomen. They fish in near-shore tropical ecosystems, which harbour a variety of marine life. But the lives of these people are ever more precarious. Overfishing, both by small-scale fishers themselves but also industrial fishing fleets, has greatly undermined the fishing stocks they rely on. Climate change, as the result of man-made CO2 emissions, is making the oceans hotter and more acidic, further diminishing sea life. At the same time, these coastal communities face rising ocean levels and increasingly extreme weather events.
In most traditional fishing communities, women not only fish, but make and fix nets, and process and trade catches. They live from fishing, but most have no rights over their fisheries, and are often at the bottom of global seafood supply chains that drive overfishing. Research published in the late 1980s shows that fisherwomen in Oceana caught a significant part of the region’s marine food. The regular way they fished also made women more reliable providers of protein for subsistence than men. But more than 30 years on, the huge role of fisherwomen still goes largely unrecognised and often unpaid.
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