Illuminating Pathways for Marine Food Systems Transformation by Small-Scale Producers

The diverse characteristics and contexts of small-scale producers underpin their multidimensional contributions to sustainable development, including food provision, resilience, poverty alleviation, and cultural heritage preservation. However, their diversity is often oversimplified, limiting their impact on global development and hindering effective food systems transformation. We use the case of small-scale fisheries, a diverse subsector capable of feeding one in four people globally, to challenge the dominant narrative that small-scale producers are too complex and context specific to be effectively categorised. Our analysis of over a thousand small-scale fisheries, representing 66% of global marine small-scale fisheries, utilised a model-based clustering approach and found five global archetypes of small-scale fisheries. Each archetype was characterised by different operational, socioeconomic, technological, and post-harvest attributes. Our findings start to unlock small-scale fisheries’ potential to contribute meaningfully to food systems transformation. This approach is low-cost, simple to implement and well-suited for decision-making processes in data-limited contexts, particularly in the Global South. The case of small-scale fisheries illustrates how this approach could be transferable to small-scale producers across other food sectors, paving the way for more precise policy-making and enabling their full contributions to sustainable development, potentially benefiting millions of people globally.