Defining fishers in the South African context: subsistence, artisanal and small-scale commercial sectors

Evolution of a new policy for the management of marine fisheries in South Africa led to the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998 (MLRA). Among other innovations, this requires that management strategies be developed for subsistence fisheries. As a prerequisite, definitions and criteria are needed to identify and distinguish them. To achieve this, the Chief Director of Marine & Coastal Management (MCM), the authority responsible for managing marine fisheries, appointed a Subsistence Fisheries Task Group (SFTG) to make recommendations about definitions and modes of management. The process involved successive surveys and consultations with fishing communities, communication with MCM, and a national workshop of all participants. This led to consensus about the following definition: Subsistence fishers are poor people who personally harvest marine resources as a source of food or to sell them to meet the basic needs of food security; they operate on or near to the shore or in estuaries, live in close proximity to the resource, consume or sell the resources locally, use low-technology gear (often as part of a long-standing community-based or cultural practice), and the kinds of resources they harvest generate only sufficient returns to meet the basic needs of food security. This definition builds on the facts that existing subsistence fisheries are usually: (1) local operations; (2) customary, traditional or cultural; (3) undertaken for personal or family use; (4) primarily for nutritional needs (though excess resources may be sold to ensure food security); (5) based on minimal technology; and (6) undertaken by people with low cash incomes. They are specifically non-commercial and non-recreational. The definition was designed to allow protection of the rights of these people and sustainability of the resources. While developing this definition, it became obvious that the definition of “commercial fishing” in the MLRA is also inadequate, and a new definition was developed. Commercial fisheries span a wide spectrum, and the SFTG defined “small-scale commercial fishers” as a distinct component that has not received adequate attention, and for whom specific management plans need to be developed. They are distinguished by living on or close to the coast, having a history of involvement with fishing, being personally involved in hands-on day-to-day running of their enterprises, operating with limited amounts of capital investment and low levels of technology, and employing small numbers of people.Keywords: defining subsistence, fisheries management, subsistence fishersAfrican Journal of Marine Science 2002, 24: 475–48

Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class

Examines the impact investment market landscape, what makes it an emerging asset class, expectations for financial returns, estimates of potential investment opportunities in specific sectors, and risk management and performance monitoring issues

Fully Online Grammar Compression in Constant Space

We present novel variants of fully online LCA (FOLCA), a fully online grammar compression that builds a straight line program (SLP) and directly encodes it into a succinct representation in an online manner. FOLCA enables a direct encoding of an SLP into a succinct representation that is asymptotically equivalent to an information theoretic lower bound for representing an SLP (Maruyama et al., SPIRE'13). The compression of FOLCA takes linear time proportional to the length of an input text and its working space depends only on the size of the SLP, which enables us to apply FOLCA to large-scale repetitive texts. Recent repetitive texts, however, include some noise. For example, current sequencing technology has significant error rates, which embeds noise into genome sequences. For such noisy repetitive texts, FOLCA working in the SLP size consumes a large amount of memory. We present two variants of FOLCA working in constant space by leveraging the idea behind stream mining techniques. Experiments using 100 human genomes corresponding to about 300GB from the 1000 human genomes project revealed the applicability of our method to large-scale, noisy repetitive texts.Comment: This is an extended version of a proceeding accepted to Data Compression Conference (DCC), 201

Inter-sectoral Competition for Water Allocation in Rural South Africa : Analysing a Case Study Through a Standard Environmental Economics Approach

South Africa has adopted an ambitious new water legislation that promotes equity, sustainability, representativity and economic performance through water management decentralization, new local and regional management institutions, water users' licensing, and the possible emergence of water rights' markets. This paper addresses the diversity of water users and uses that currently exists in rural areas, and especially focuses on the competition for water that may result from such a diversity in a context of water scarcity, and from the diversity of objectives formulated by the public authorities. The paper first briefly describes the current institutional arrangements regarding access to water. It also presents the situation in rural areas where farming communities and the mining sector are interacting on water- and labour-related matters. The paper then presents a case study whereby these two sectors have embarked into a negotiation process on water rights transfer, under the auspices of several public role players. It proposes an analysis of the case study through a standard environmental economics model. The model considers the marginal net private benefit (MNPB) generated by mining activities and the associated marginal returns to water (MRW). The transfer of water from farmers to mines results in a loss in crop production potential by the fanners and the subsequent loss of income and potential for development. Such a loss can be considered the opportunity cost of water for smallholders. If not compensated, it represents a proxy of the externality associated with the water transfer. The model first highlights the difference in terms of water productivity in the two sectors, and its consequences if a system of transferable licenses is adopted. Then, some policy options (taxes, standards, subsidies) are tested and discussed. (Résumé d'auteur

On Region Algebras, XML Databases, and Information Retrieval

This paper describes some new ideas on developing a logical algebra for databases that manage textual data and support information retrieval functionality. We describe a first prototype of such a system