- A new study found that small-scale fishing accounts for at least 40% of catch worldwide and provides employment for 60 million people, more than a third of whom are women.
- Small-scale fishing could provide a significant proportion of the micronutrient intake for the 2.3 billion people on Earth who live near coastlines or inland bodies of water, the study found.
- More than 60% of small-scale fishing catch in the studied countries came from places where small-scale fishers had no formal rights to participate in management and decision-making processes.
- “We wanted to have a paper that provided key findings at the global level for each of these dimensions, so that it will be clear for governments that small-scale fishing cannot continue to be overlooked in terms of policymaking,” one of the study authors told Mongabay.
Small-scale fishers do labor-intensive work, generally in simple, locally owned boats using traditional technologies. Despite their toils, they are, as a group, often left out of social, health and economic programs — and even out of decisions about how to manage the waters they live off of. And so, for the last seven years, an 800-strong team of researchers and surveyors set out to do something about it: They built a global data set that aims to make small-scale fishers more visible.
On Jan. 15, that work culminated with a study in Nature that found that small-scale fishing accounts for at least 40% of catch worldwide; provides employment for 60 million people, more than a third of whom are women, and livelihoods for nearly 500 million people; and could provide a significant proportion of the micronutrient intake for the 2.3 billion people on Earth who live near coastlines or inland bodies of water.
“We wanted to have a paper that provided key findings at the global level for each of these dimensions, so that it will be clear for governments that small-scale fishing cannot continue to be overlooked in terms of policymaking,” Xavier Basurto, a professor at Stanford University’s Environmental Social Sciences Department and co-lead author of the paper, told Mongabay. (Basurto was at Duke University while undertaking the study.)
The value of the study was not just in the findings themselves, which weren’t necessarily unexpected, but in their robustness, coming from data carefully collected across 58 countries and analyzed by researchers in fields as diverse as employment and nutrition, Basurto said.
Some of Basurto’s co-authors, including co-lead author Nicolas Gutierrez, are researchers at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an intergovernmental body that publishes official catch statistics based primarily on submissions from national governments. Those official statistics tell an incomplete story, as they don’t differentiate between industrial and small-scale fishers and miss out on much of the latter’s contribution. The United Kingdom, for example, generally includes only catches from vessels 10 meters (33 feet) or longer in its submissions to the FAO, even though these constitute only 21% of its fleet.
In a bid to be more comprehensive, the Sea Around Us, a research initiative at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, built a widely used database, first released in 2016, showing reconstructed historical fish catches from around the world and distinguishing between industrial and small-scale catch. Catch in this database includes not just fish brought ashore but also “bycatch” caught unintentionally or discarded, which is more common in industrial fisheries. The Sea Around Us data indicate that total marine small-scale fishing catch (i.e, not including inland catch) is roughly 27 million metric tons per year, making up about 25-30% of total global marine catch.
When Basurto and co-authors, who are not affiliated with Sea Around Us, set out to determine small-scale fishing’s impact, they worked with dozens of research teams across the world — in-country experts in almost all of the 58 studied countries. They not only separated small-scale from industrial catch data but also included inland catch, which is particularly overlooked. In addition, they collected and analyzed data on employment, livelihoods, nutrition and governance regimes. They used a wide variety of data sources. These included, for example, International Labor Organization employment data, which had seldom if ever been parsed for information on small-scale fishers. In Brazil and China, the teams did their own field data collection, partnering with fishers to sample the amount and types of catch.
They didn’t apply a universal definition of small-scale fishing; rather, they allowed such distinctions to be made country by country. They extrapolated catch, employment and other data from the studied countries to the whole world. In 2023, they released a major FAO report using some of these data. The new paper goes even further, and is the first peer-reviewed work they’ve completed that covers all the dimensions they studied.
Basurto and his fellow researchers found that small-scale fishers catch around 37 million metric tons per year, indicating that small-scale fishing accounts for at least 40% of global catch. About 25 million metric tons of that come from marine catch, very roughly in line with Sea Around Us findings. The remaining 12 million metric tons come from inland fisheries, the inclusion of which explains the higher percentage of global catch than Sea Around Us found, Basurto said. Nearly 500 million people subsist wholly or partly off of the work of a small-scale fisher in their household, the authors found.
The nutrition research was unprecedented because it shows the scale of the small-scale sector’s role in fighting malnutrition, Basurto said. The team found that small-scale fishing catch could provide 20% of the key micronutrients and certain fatty acids consumed by the roughly 2.3 billion people who live within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of a coast or a major inland body of water.
The authors wrote that their paper supports a “more holistic” understanding of small-scale fishers’ role, which has often been “invisible” and can be used to combat the “social, economic, and political marginalization of millions of fishers and fishworkers worldwide.”
Daniel Pauly, a prominent fisheries scientist and the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us initiative, said the breadth of work behind the new study, which he was not involved with, was impressive.
“It’s very comprehensive,” Pauly told Mongabay. “It makes a very good case that small-scale fisheries are important.”
However, Pauly said the research would provide more insight if it offered a “trajectory” showing whether trends, in catches or employment, for example, were rising or falling. The study looks at the five-year period of 2013-17 but doesn’t compare it against any baseline.
Basurto said he and his coauthors’ work was a snapshot and not an attempt to re-create the Sea Around Us’ work, which he called “extremely valuable.” The new study creates a baseline multidimensional look at small-scale fisheries that will allow for future comparisons, he said.
Arne Kinds, a postdoctoral fisheries researcher at the EqualSea Lab at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, told Mongabay it was an exceptional study that provided the sort of systematic data collection needed to support qualitative case studies that have reached similar conclusions, such as those by Too Big To Ignore, a Bangkok-based research NGO that advocates for small-scale fishers.
Kinds cautioned that improved data collection, while important, wouldn’t be enough to elevate small-scale fishers’ voices in policy and management decisions. That will require addressing corruption and the power of lobby groups. “Data is not the only bottleneck here,” he said.
The study in fact includes a section on governance that touches on power imbalances. The authors found that more than 60% of small-scale fishing catch in the studied countries came from places where small-scale fishers had no formal rights to participate in management and decision-making processes. Without such rights, small-scale fishers are liable to lose out to “more-powerful economic sectors,” they wrote.
Basurto has addressed potential solutions to the power imbalances in other work. In November, he and some of the same co-authors from the Nature research published a study in NPJ Ocean Sustainability finding that inshore exclusion zones, which restrict industrial fishing, provide health and economic benefits for small-scale fishers when the rules are enforced, based on data from dozens of such zones around the world.
Banner image: Women set out sprat to dry in the sun in Kigoma, Tanzania, near the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Image by Luis Tato/FAO.
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Citations:
Basurto, X., Gutierrez, N. L., Franz, N., Mancha-Cisneros, M. M., Gorelli, G., Aguión, A., … Thilsted, S. H. (2025). Illuminating the multidimensional contributions of small-scale fisheries. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08448-z
Basurto, X., Virdin, J., Franz, N., DeLand, S., Smith, B., Cleary, J., … Halpin, P. (2024). A global assessment of preferential access areas for small-scale fisheries. npj Ocean Sustainability, 3(1). doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00096-0
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