ABSTRACT
Coastal fisheries in the South are often equated with material poverty (Thorpe et al. 2007; Daw et al. 2009; Béné et al. 2010). This particular category of primary livelihood activities, which provides direct employment to more than 30 million people (FAO 2009) and indirect employment to many tens of millions more, currently faces substantial ecological crises (Pauly et al. 1998; Worm et al. 2006). Ecological degradation is supposed to be one of the causes of poverty in the sector; an opposite vision suggests, however, that because of the open access nature of the resource, it is the already poor who seek out fishing for a hand-to-mouth existence (Jentoft and Eide 2011). Whatever one's views on this matter, many in the fisheries field agree with Béné (2003:968) that especially “small-scale fisheries should… be at the core of [poverty alleviation] research.”
