Developing a characterization matrix for small-scale fisheries.

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) play a major role in the fisheries sector with over 490 million people depending at least partially on them. The sector is estimated to account for 40 percent of total inland and marine capture fisheries production, up to 90 percent of all those employed in capture fisheries, including an estimated 21 million women. However, due to the diverse and often highly dispersed nature of small-scale activities, information on small-scale fisheries (such as catch, employment, nutritional contribution, and governance arrangements) is not included nor disaggregated in official statistics, or may not explicitly accounted for when designing national, regional, and global policies.  As long as data on small-scale fisheries remains “hidden”, they will continue to be marginalized in policy-making processes, decision making and management.

A critical issue in the collection of data on SSF is the lack of a statistical definition and difficulties of characterizing of a fishing operation as “small-scale” or not. Many countries (as well as regional fisheries bodies and management organizations) have already developed some form of definition of small–scale and large-scale fisheries in their fishery legislation or fishery policy, but these are specific to the national or regional context and are generally not comparable in a regional or international context. Current definitions of SSF are typically based on a limited set of quantitative metrics such as vessel size and power, gear type, or area of operation. Such narrow quantitative characterizations have issues at the transition between small scale and larger scale and may exclude legitimate SSF fishers or enable larger scale vessels to be included as part the small-scale fleet.

In recent years, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed a matrix scoring approach that aims to provide systematic method for the characterization of the scale of fishing units. The matrix is intended to enable the objective identification of fisheries or fishing operations that may be considered small-scale and contribute to a better quantification of the number of such fisheries, their catches and the issues that relate to their operations.

The paper will present an overview of FAO’s characterization matrix, the results of testing at the national, regional and global level and the role of the matrix as part of FAO’s efforts to highlight the critical role of small-scale fisheries.  This includes the development of international standards for the definition and collection of data for small-scale fisheries by the Coordinating Working Party on Fishery Statistics (CWP), an international and interorganizational forum composed of 19 participating organizations for agreeing common definitions, classifications and standards for the collection of fishery and aquaculture statistics.