Women and sustainable fisheries exploitation: A review

Abstract

Sustainability in the extraction of fishery resource need to be proactively upheld if the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be anything to go by in Nigeria and other developing countries. The fishery resource, of the biotic component of the environment, and the main focus of this paper, is renewable resource whose existence if not for adverse environmental factors and natural speciation that occurs over thousands of years, is a continuum. The biological attributes of these fauna and flora render them amenable to usage in manners that still allows their continuous existence for the profit of mankind. Ignorance and the consequent inappropriate harvesting methods and uses of the fishery resource make them prone to abuse, imperilment, and eventual extinction. The influential and important roles of women as fishers, fishmongers, processors, concerned citizens of healthy living and organizers of the end use of the fishery resource put women in a vantage position to influence; thereby, enforcing conservation and sustainability in the extraction of the resource when trained in natural resource management. Consequently, women need to be trained and equipped with knowledge such as basic principles in these areas: biological attributes of the aquatic resources, measures of aquatic resource management, and approaches such as co-management, , community-based and ecosystem-based approaches to fishery management; including simplified principles embedded within international instruments that form the legal frame work for resource management.