Citizen 4 – Chia-Ling, traditional mariculturist, daughter-in-law of Li, mariculture enterprise manager
For thousands of years my family has been gardening the foreshore of our beaches for clams. The knowledge that we use today is a mix between traditional knowledge passed down through many generations and information from modern science. Our clam gardens provide us with important subsistence foods and cultural links between our youth and ancestors, and also allows us to contribute to the economy. The impact that our gardens have on the natural landscapes increases their productivity by 150-300%, which means we have a stable access to market, and we also sell other species like octopus, that now occur in the garden areas due to the increased habitat area. The Indigenous Peoples were certainly engineers and marine resource managers. We are happy to see many opportunities emerging to build on their knowledge to improve the food and nutrition security and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and the wider community.
Pathway 5 - Reduce inequalities
Since 2020, management frameworks at national and regional scales, have shifted to provide for equity of access for all stakeholders and are now integrated to incorporate all marine users (Allison et al. 2020). This includes access to productive fishing areas (Cohen et al. 2019), or areas suitable for mariculture, and processes that provide for real-time monitoring of access rights. More corporations prioritise ethical investment strategies and production practices and this change in priority is evident through improved reporting and transparency, and stricter requirements for investment guidelines (Porter and Kramer 2019). Governments and companies are working through partnerships to provide support for the engagement of small-scale fishers and farmers. Business opportunities and access rights for traditional owners have been created to ensure their participation in fisheries and mariculture (Hiriart-Bertrand et al. 2020). There are a range of diverse approaches to sustainability that are more suited to small‐scale fisheries or those in developing nations, than previous certification systems, leading to more localised and sustainable production systems (Stoll et al. 2019). Women are fully engaged in decision-making around seafood and their role in seafood and food security is recognised (Alonso-Población and Siar 2018; Eriksson et al. 2018) (Box 5).
In countries receiving benefits from off-shore licenses there has been a shift toward greater capacity to monitor the catches and more flexible schemes that provide for setting dynamic access levels depending on the productivity within national boundaries, resulting in more sustainable fishing (Bell et al. 2015). There has also been a shift in government policy from focussing on export markets, which limited wealth generation to some parts of the seafood chain, to supporting domestic sector benefits. Some countries have opted to fish their own resources and have established effective management systems, including secure catch share models. Regulatory and market-driven improvements in domestic, low-value, seafood chains has improved food quality and safety (McClean et al. 2019). The benefits of fishing and mariculture are distributed more equally between and within nations and regions, as a result of better partnerships with corporations and strengthened governance to ensure equal distribution of benefits (Österblom et al. 2020).