Stewards of our Waters and Seas – Time to Recognize and Support Small-Scale Fishers Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2022
As competition to control the world’s water resources increases the 2022 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch calls for global fisheries governance that recognizes small-scale fishers as custodians of water ecosystems and protects their rights from the onslaught of extractive industries and other commercial interests
The world’s water and fisheries resources once seemed abundant and everlasting. That is no longer the case. Small-scale fishers across the globe are facing constraints in sustaining their livelihoods through fishing and losing their ties to water and their own identity. More than 482 million traditional fisher people depend on waters and seas for their livelihoods. They also play a key role in preserving water ecosystems through sustainable fishing, yet their right to food and nutrition and related human rights are often ignored, jeopardized, or outright violated due to ever-increasing ocean and territory grabbing by extractive industries.
Mining, oil, and gas, overfishing and depletion of resources by large-scale industrial fishing, expansion of industrial aquaculture, tourism, construction of ports and infrastructure projects, and top-down conservation initiatives are contributing to the environmental destruction of ocean ecosystems and exacerbating climate change.
Against this backdrop, the 2022 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch report is dedicated to small-scale fishers and traditional fisherfolk who are speaking out against the capitalist onslaught of their territories and reclaiming what has been expropriated from fisher communities across the globe.
Stewards of our Waters and Seas – Time to Recognize and Support Small-Scale Fishers is being launched on World Fisheries Day and is published by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition . It critically examines the challenges faced by small-scale fishers, including policy processes and global fisheries governance that affect their right to food and nutrition.
