Fisheries

Fisheries encompass the variety of human activities to harvest aquatic animals and plants. The term includes the harvest of fish per se as well as crustaceans, seaweeds, mollusks, and marine mammals, but not aquaculture. Fisheries can be in either inland, coastal, or high seas environments. Globally, about 90 million metric tons of fish are landed yearly, about one-eighth from inland waters, the remainder from the oceans. Fishing gears or instruments for harvest are quite diverse: from static gears such as fish traps, weirs, hooks and lines, and gillnets, to mobile gears like spears, cast nets, haul and purse seines, trawls, and dredges.

Fishers can be differentiated into two main categories: artisanal and commercial. Artisanal fisheries are typically defined by low levels of capitalization and productivity and the use of catches for subsistence or localized markets, whereas commercial fisheries are defined oppositely as highly capitalized, efficient, and oriented toward global markets. These ideal types seldom capture the empirical reality of fisheries, as many fishers deemed artisanal have motorized boats, sell their catches for distant markets, and can be quite efficient; and many deemed commercial supply local buyers only, have small boats, and are engaged in fishing informally in concert with other sources of livelihood, a characteristic generally ascribed to artisanal fishers.