Status and Contribution of Small-scale Fisheries in Menabe, Southwest Madagascar

Small-scale fisheries are critical for food security, nutrition, and livelihoods in Madagascar, yet remain poorly understood due to chronic data deficiency and underreporting. Madagascar’s dispersed and often mobile coastal communities depend heavily on marine resources particularly the Vezo people, whose nomadic fishing culture spans thousands of kilometres of coastline. Previous research on Malagasy small-scale fisheries is scarce, fragmented, and temporally inconsistent, leaving significant gaps in understanding trends in catch composition and sustainability. Although fishers have reported anecdotal evidence of declining catches and increasing fishing effort, national management responses have been limited, hindered by a lack of quantitative data and formal stock assessments. This thesis presents research that uses participatory, community-based fisheries monitoring to generate the first multi-gear, multi-species dataset collected over a meaningful timeframe for southwest Madagascar. By engaging fishers directly in data collection and analysis, the research provides some of the first quantitative evidence of changing catch rates, shifting species composition, and indicators of overfishing in the Menabe region, a key fishing area in Madagascar. In Chapter 2: I collated data from eleven villages in the Menabe region of Madagascar over a two-year period (2010–2012). This dataset included 17,000 fishing trips, which accounted for more than 2 million landed fish; length measurements were taken for more than 120,000 fish. Simple length-based methods were used to assess sustainability (e.g., whether fish were allowed to grow, spawn, or reach large size). The results show clear signs of overfishing for 65% of the most commonly caught species. Specifically, fishing mortality was higher than natural mortality (meaning fish are being caught faster than they can replace themselves), and the majority of fish were caught before they reached maturity, never having a chance to reproduce. This is the first scientific assessment of overfishing in Madagascar’s small-scale fisheries. In Chapter 3, I compared catch data collected in 2011 in the two villages of Betania and Avaradrova with data collected in the same two villages in 1991. This chapter again highlights clear evidence of overfishing across the 20-year period, including declining catch-per-unit-effort, smaller average fish size, and the disappearance of high-value species from catches. Using snapshot data from 20 years earlier shows that even imperfect data can reveal meaningful trends and fill knowledge gaps, particularly in data-deficient areas. In Chapter 4, I update the analysis, providing another comparison of fisheries catches in the two villages of Belo-sur-Mer and Ankevo-sur-Mer , 60km south of Morondava, comparing data collected in 2011 and those collected in 2021. Between the studies, CPUE decreased in Belo sur Mer, whereas in Ankevo sur Mer, CPUE had increased in 2021, and there was a higher proportion of some larger and higher-value fish species. These relative improvements in Ankevo-sur-Mer were likely due to a decrease in total fishing effort, resulting from migration, cyclone impacts, and protection from a nearby national park, which allowed for some initial recovery of highly exploited populations. However, despite these improvements in Ankevo-sur-Mer the majority of fish caught across both villages in 2021 were still too young to have reproduced, indicating that these fisheries are still experiencing overexploitation. Finally, in Chapter 5, I assess the nutritional role of small-scale fisheries. This chapter demonstrates that these fisheries are important for food security in Madagascar, with 95% of the catch remaining in the country, highlighting the vital role small-scale fisheries play in providing micronutrients to local and national diets. However, this research also highlights how both fisheries and food security are vulnerable to overfishing, driven by commercial markets and higher prices, undermining both the sustainability of the fishery but also reduced access to important nutrients for local communities. Additionally, some fish that are highly nutritious are dried and sold for use in animal feed, further reducing the nutrients available for people locally. This study shows how understanding which fish contain key nutrients, and where those fish go, might guide better fisheries management which balances both ecological sustainability, livelihoods and food security. In conclusion, this study highlights the value of community-based fisheries monitoring; the approach used here demonstrates how simple, low-cost monitoring methods can produce useful locally grounded indicators, alongside empowering communities, and improving dialogue between fishers, managers, and decision makers. Rather than serving as a substitute for scientific approaches, community led fisheries data collection contributes useful data as well as locally relevant knowledge, which in turn serve to support more inclusive and more equitable governance. The findings from the studies presented here have been used to inform both regional and local management planning in the region, allowing these initiatives to include fishers contributions and knowledge these results continue to support and shape discussions between NGOs and local communities. Ultimately, this work provides a baseline for future assessment, it is hoped that continued local monitoring can form part of a wider suite of monitoring and management, focusing on the value that community monitoring offers with regards to strengthening community participation in fisheries management governance, timely and locally relevant data, and strengthened knowledge exchange between fishers, scientists and decision makers, so that it can contribute to broader efforts across the region to improve management of small-scale fisheries in turn resulting in more sustainable fisheries which in turn support the lives and livelihoods of the coastal communities across the Menabe region.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Charlie Gough (21064133)

• Small-scale fisheries
• Madagascar
• overfishing
• community monitoring
• nutrition

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved
• Open Access after 2027-11-05

Identifier

10779/exe.32125861.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32125861