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China not only has the largest fishing fleet in the world, but with 1.4 billion people is also a huge market of people who like to eat fish and seafood. Europe as the foremost import market of such commodities clearly has an interest to develop its relations with China in ways that respect the interests of both sides. The Fisheries Committee of the European Parliament gathered to discuss the role of China in global fisheries in its session on Wednesday 25 January 2023.

Big relief and a lot of excitement - those were the predominent sensations for participants heading for the 2023 edition of the 'love your ocean' platform coordinated by the German Ocean Foundation at the international Boot fair in Düsseldorf, Germany. After a two-year break due to the pandemic Mundus maris was happy to be on board together with Quantitative Aquatics, the scientific non-profit running the global databases FishBase, SeaLifeBase and Aquamaps. We were in good company with other organisations committed to ocean literacy, recovery and protection and contributing to the UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030.

Portus00In the video available to visitors to the Fiumicino Ship Museum next to Rome's international airport, the archaeologist Renato Sebastiani states that without the ancient port of Ostia the greatness of imperial Rome would not have been possible, a metropolis of about one million inhabitants. Certainly a statement that can be shared, but it is only one side of a coin that seems to have many, well more than two. And here we have to open a necessary digression.

 

 

This was the last webinar in the 2022 series of monthly events of the research platform V2V (Vulnerability to Viability) to which Mundus maris is a partner. Dr. Friday Njaya, Director of Fisheries in Malawi, presented the key lessons from the development of Transboundary Fisheries Management (TFM) on Lake Chiuta. The lake is shared between Malawi and Mozambique. Since the mid-1990s, fisheries co-management was introduced on the Malawian side of the lake by establishing Beach Village Committees (BVCs).so as to address any issues through greater participation.

The rotating presidency of the long-standing G7++ gatherings of country representatives interested in the maritime safety of the Gulf of Guinea convened its Plenary session this year in Abidjan under the shared lead of Côte d'Ivoire and Germany. The presidency had invited this time also a few representatives of civil society with particular emphasis on the 'Blue Economy'. The SWAIMS project to which Mundus maris members had repeatedly contributed in previous occasions in the form of presentations and meeting participations had proposed Prof. Stella Williams of Mundus maris as one of those speaking for civil society.

Sustainability at Scale: Connecting Small-Scale Fishers for the Mobilization of Local Knowledge, Solutions and Capital Opportunities - thus is the full title of the V2V November webinar presented by Dr. Maria José Espinosa, CEO of the Mexican non-profit organisation Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI).  Through their field work, COBI found and documented that small-scale fishers and their organisations are flexible and make daily decisions to adapt to local, national, and international stressors.

"Leading by examples", thus was the motto of the African regional gathering of the 4th World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress convened in Cape Town, South Africa, 21-23 November 2022. This congress concluded the series of five regional conferences, one for each continent, towards the end of the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022). Hosted by the University of the Western Cape together with the Fisheries Department and organised by the Too Big To Ignore global research platform led by Ratana Chuenpagdee, the congress attracted some 160 participants mostly on site, but also offered online participation. Moenieba Isaacs of UWC (pictured) chaired the opening together with Shehu Akintola of Lagos State University.

MicaelaTrimbleOver the past decade, small-scale fisheries in Uruguay have been undergoing a governance transition from top-down management towards co-management, involving the creation of consultative councils composed of fishers and government actors. In this talk delivered in the monthly webinar series of the V2V research platform, 28 October 2022, Micaela Trimble explores the challenges of this bumpy process as well as some multistakeholder participatory processes with transformative potential for the viability of the sector.

Atlas des pêches et pêcheurs d’Afrique de l’Ouest. États membres de l’UEMOA : Bénin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinée-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Sénégal, Togo. Editeurs scientifiques: Pierre CHAVANCE et Pierre MORAND. Publié en 2020 par IRD Éditions - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Marseille, France, et UEMOA - Union Économique et Monétaire Ouest-Africaine, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. 163 p. ISBN papier : 978-2-7099-2840-3

The book (in French) covers the West African Economic and Monetary Union - WAEMU - member states and is produced within the framework of a vast programme called the "Concerted Fisheries and Aquaculture Development Plan" adopted by WAEMU in 2007. Its main objective is is to improve the quality of statistical data, an essential factor for sustainable management, based on scientific knowledge, for small-scale maritime and inland fisheries.

MadridJustice02

Some 40 environmental organisations throughout Spain together had called to participate, on Saturday, November 12, in a demonstration for climate justice and stronger efforts to curb climate change. The action was aimed at the participants of the UN Summit on climate change (COP27) meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.

The analyses all show that CO2 emissions are still growing and governments and companies continue to spend massively on fossil exploration and exploitation.

MelissaMarschke3The September 2022 webinar of the V2V research platform to which Mundus maris is a partner featured Melissa Marschke and Peter Vandergeest who have worked together for the last decade or so on 'Unacceptable working conditions in global fisheries: Lawlessness, Criminality or Enabling Policies and Political Economies?'. They shared the results of their research and that of campaigns by advocacy groups digging up facts about at times horrendous living and working conditions particularly on vessels ploughing the high seas outside the purview of legal regimes. The first scandal broke about labour abuse of mostly Burmise and Cambodian migrant workers in the Thai fisheries in the mid 2010s.