1
Regional Comparisons
To make comparisons about the state of digital fisheries across the different Commonwealth regions, it is first important to highlight key divisions in fisheries that make broad region-to-region comparisons inaccurate and unhelpful.
Therefore:
- Fisheries can broadly be divided into SSF and LSF. There are several different definitions of SSF and LSF, but in general, it is important to understand that SSF often (unless in developed countries) suffer from a lack of funding (government and business and personal capital injection), use simple equipment on board and in many cases make short trips, close to shore and land seafood mainly for local consumption.
- Each of the Commonwealth regions has at least one country that is more developed (based on GDP) than others in the same region. This has an important bearing on comparisons between countries within the same region. For example, Commonwealth Pacific fisheries are quite different when comparing the SSF of Australia and New Zealand versus the Pacific SIDS.
It is therefore important that broad regional characterisations are not made about whole regions. Comparisons must account for differences in developmental status of a country and the difference between SSF and LSF. The table here provides general illustrative purposes only to highlight the four-dimensional complexity of any regional comparisons made.
Examples to illustrate these four dimensions above:
- Low GDP country = Ghana. SSF are undeveloped. LSF (national) are undeveloped, but Ghana also has some LSF that are developed based on fishing agreements with foreign nations.
- High GDP country (compared to Ghana) = Malta. SSF are based on traditional methods and therefore largely undeveloped. Yet other SSF in the European Commonwealth (the United Kingdom) are considerably developed.
2
Regional Comparison Matrix
To try and standardise some sort of high-level comparison between the different Commonwealth regions, we created a matrix that accounts for the aforementioned divisions and lists a range of different needs and barriers to digitalisation.
Each intersect between a region (or country)/fishery sector is qualitatively scored 1–5 based on our understanding of the state-of-the-art from our literature review research and the KI interviews. All scores a relative. Cells with bold outlines are those for which we found it difficult to find good information. The idea of the matrix is to highlight patterns across the Commonwealth, and this is not meant to be a prescriptive or comprehensive analysis. It contains many educated guesses and would likely look slightly different with different experts if they were asked to fill the matrix.
Matrix illustrating qualitative scoring for barriers to (and needs for) digitalisation in fisheries per region, accounting for inherent differences in small- and large- scale fleets and GDP within each region (low versus high).
1 = low (poor resilience, access, investment, other) 5 = high. Colours are on the same scale as the 1-5 scoring. Cells with thick black lines are those for which data / understanding was lacking and therefore an educated guess was made).
Key patterns across the Commonwealth:
- SSF in less-developed countries are generally the least resilient sector to climate change and the impacts of COVID.1
- SSF generally score less than LSF when considering barriers to digitalisation,2 i.e., there are more barriers to digitalisation.
- Africa and Asia score the lowest (have the least conducive/enabling environments for fisheries digitalisation) overall followed by the Caribbean and the Americas, the Pacific and Europe.
- SSF and LSF scores follow the same pattern with low scores in Africa and Asia followed by the Caribbean and the Americas, the Pacific and Europe.
3
Grouping Small Scale Fisheries
Based on the aforementioned qualitative analysis, KI interviews and our knowledge of the different regions, the most useful groupings to simplify comparisons between the diverse SSF is based on a development scale and is illustrated below.
Diagram illustrating the approximate (assumed) difference in developmental status of small-scale fisheries between the five Commonwealth regions.
The methods used to collect information for each of the regions come with their own pitfalls. The primary one being that the summaries of digitalisation may be missing information that was not uncovered through the literature review and KI interviews. Hence, the following summaries must be taken with caution and be used only as approximate generalisations.
SSF in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands.
- These fisheries are all limited by connectivity issues based on either a lack of infrastructure and/or mobile connections that are too expensive to warrant the use of innovations that rely on mobile technologies.
- Maritime weather information across the regions is generally poor which in combination with limited connectivity presents issues with technologies aiming to improve safety at sea.
- For Africa and Asia, the ability to form personal, digital identity is commonly lacking which subsequently limits enrolment in technologies that provide access to direct to consumer/market sales and personal financial transactions.
- The funding environment in the fisheries in these regions also lacks, largely having a limited scope (small and short period funding pots) and often lacking from investment from private enterprise. Funding is more common from NGO-type sources and outside philanthropy which is useful for the initial build of initiatives but often leads to a bottleneck longer term once platforms are up and running. This is where industry and government investment and incentive schemes may play an important role.
SSF and LSF in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom
- Many of these fisheries do not suffer from lacks in infrastructure or data capture.
- Limitations in these fisheries regarding digitalisation are often based around poor data harmonisation, communication between devolved administrations and a lack of government drive to actively promote digitalisation and collaboration with industry.
- Policy and regulatory environments in these fisheries will likely benefit from reform that allows better data sharing and collaborative use.
SSF in the Caribbean appear to lie between the two aforementioned examples, with better investment and movement towards digitalisation in fisheries but with significant holes in data infrastructure and sharing.
It is difficult to compare LSF from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean because there is little information available, and in many cases, these LSF are developed based on fishing agreements with external/ foreign operators.
4
Pioneering Digital Innovations for Fisheries
There are a huge number of potential digital innovations to improve fisheries sustainability and economic productivity across the Commonwealth region.
Drawing on examples from the KI interviews from across all regions, we summarise below what we consider to be pioneering innovations and where they would be most useful across all the regions – largely for the SSF sector in the less developed nations within each region.
Note: For the aforementioned reasons regarding the differences between SSF and LSF, these innovations have different scope and worth in different regions and in different fishery sectors (SSF versus LSF).
“Pioneering digital innovations” from within the fisheries of the Commonwealth.
Summary of what we believe are the top three, established key pioneering technologies and where they would be most useful across the 5 Commonwealth regions. *denotes the ‘home’ region of the technology. Numbers refer to species notes that can be found below the table.
Summary of digital innovations in fisheries split into digital technologies and digital solutions / services.
(1) ABALOBI may not be entirely feasible in highly fragmented island states as it relies on good transport networks for the quick movement of seafood products from net to plate.
(2) ABALOBI would certainly be useful across Europe; however, a number of separate technologies already exist that somewhat fill the different niches across which ABALOBI stretches (e.g., direct to consumer market applications like PeskyFish (the United Kingdom), traceability and transparency apps like Verifact (multiple countries) and custom analytics like the Seafish annual economic performance reports (the United Kingdom), etc.)
(3) Cash transactions between individuals is less of an issue in Asia than it appears to be in SSF communities in other regions. The MCash app is like D-cash but specific to Sri Lanka only (at present).
Footnotes
[1] Bennett, N.J., Finkbeiner, E.M., Ban, N.C., Belhabib, D., Jupiter, S.D., Kittinger, J.N. Mangubhai, S., Scholtens, J., Gill, D. and Christie, P. (2020) ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic, Small-Scale Fisheries and Coastal Fishing Communities’. Coastal Management 48, 336–347.
[2] Towards Integrated Assessment and Advice in Small-Scale Fisheries: Principles and Processes (2008) Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.