ISEAL and AidEnvironment’s new whitepaper builds understanding and support for equity and livelihoods in seafood and beyond. It recommends realigning focus from risk reduction to sustainable livelihood and fairness.
Challenges and opportunities for small-scale producers
Small-scale fishers and farmers are major contributors to global food security. They play an important role in local, regional and global food markets.
But they are especially vulnerable to poverty, inadequate resource access and a lack of support systems: all exacerbated by climate change, adaptation and resilience challenges.
Smallholder communities are calling on policymakers to take urgent action, and interest is growing among businesses for more sustainable, inclusive approaches addressing inequities.
The whitepaper: tackling seafood challenges
The seafood sector faces declining fish stocks, environmental degradation and economic instability.
Fishers play a central role in the sector, especially in post-harvest and processing activities. Closely connected to their communities, they create employment opportunities, and create dynamic, environmentally-resilient rural economies.
The potential of small-scale fishers to drive positive changes will only be realised if they are suitably resourced, highly-valued and empowered.
To help, the whitepaper shows achieving large-scale, long-term change demands coordination and collaborative approaches.
It offers practical steps for collaboration between actors. These could also apply to small-scale production beyond seafood: mining and renewable energy like micro-grids or solar panels.
Forestry and timber production, tourism and handicrafts can also benefit from the paper’s recommendations.
Advancing equity and livelihoods
The ISEAL paper offers three recommendations to help with systemic change for smallholder livelihoods.
They include:
- Engaging industry and multistakeholder initiatives in a roadmap process to support living income and wages.
- Encouraging national and international governments to adopt livelihood agendas.
- Supporting sustainability systems, including certification initiatives, to tailor and adapt their systems and data platforms, to integrate social issues and enable conditions for income improvements.
Learning from other sectors to accelerate action
The whitepaper complements two new ISEAL learning briefs, which focus on how collaboration advances better incomes and improvements for small-scale producers.
The human rights and social justice challenges faced by smallholders are not exclusive to seafood. These learning briefs represent a first step towards a dialogue to identify and adapt suitable approaches to tackling issues between different sectors.
The first briefing considers four levels of interventions that can contribute to income improvements, across producer, market/value chain, community/seascape and policy/national level and presents a strong case for a holistic approach, given the interconnected social, environmental and economic impacts.
The second briefing highlights this with specific examples from three sectors; cocoa, cotton and seafood.
Fostering future collaboration
“Overall, this research provides an exciting opportunity for stakeholder engagement, and we look forward to fostering collaboration, ready to convene, contribute and drive meaningful change to advance livelihood and income improvement ambitions for small-scale producers,” said Sheila Senathirajah, ISEAL Senior Manager, Innovations.
For more information on ISEAL's work and thinking on advancing livelihoods and equity strategies, contact Suzy suzanne@isealalliance.org and to keep abreast of related conversations on incomes, join the Living Income Community of Practice.