Checklists and Technical Guidelines to Combat Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing

The purpose of this document is to aggregate the coastal, flag and port State responsibilities to combat IUU fishing contained in select international fisheries instruments within a single reference document. The responsibilities are presented as a checklist, in questionnaire format. The document aims to serve both as a reference document for professionals as well as an assessment tool for practitioners, in order to facilitate the identification of legal, policy, institutional and operational weaknesses at the national level when implementing coastal, flag and port State responsibilities to combat IUU fishing. This is the first volume in the series of “Checklists and technical guidelines to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing”

Virtual Water Flows in the EU27: A Consumption-based Approach

The use of water resources has traditionally been studied by accounting for the volume of water removed from sources for specific uses. This approach focuses on surface and groundwater only and it ignores that international trade of products with substantial amounts of embodied water can have an impact on domestic water resources. Using current economic and environmental data, we conduct a consumption-based assessment of virtual water flows in the European Union (EU27). We find that the total water footprint (WF) of 2,280 cubic meters (m3) per capita for the EU27 mostly consists of green water use (precipitation stored as soil moisture), which is omitted in the conventional water accounting. Blue water (surface and groundwater.) and gray water use (the volume of freshwater needed to dilute pollutants to meet the applicable water quality standards), which are targeted by current EU water policies, only make up 32% of the total WF. We also find that Europeans imported 585 cubic kilometers (km3) (109 m3) of virtual water, or around 28% of global virtual water trade flows, in 2009. Within Europe, Germany is a key net importer of water through the trade of products in agriculture, the food industry, the chemical sector, and electricity generation. Countries in Southern and Eastern Europe have specialized in water-intensive agriculture and are key exporters of virtual water despite experiencing physical scarcity of water. Our results suggest that there is a need to reconsider water policy in the EU to address water transfers occurring through trade and to grasp the interlinkages between green, blue, and gray water—which are likely to become more important in water-scarce parts of Europe, with a changing climate

Examining sources of land tenure (in)security. A focus on authority relations, state politics, social dynamics and belonging

This article reviews the current state of literature on the notion of security of tenure of land. This examination is topical as tenure security has become a key objective for land policies and development interventions. While tenure security is widely defined by people’s perceptions, land policies tend to address it through the registration and administration of land rights. The article argues that these practices ignore the complexity of the sources of tenure (in)security. Building on critical development literature of political ecology, social anthropology and political science, these sources are identified as stemming from the politics of land and linked to authority relations, state politics, social dynamics and belonging. The article concludes that their consideration enables us to contextualise perceptions of tenure security and to conceive practices for securing tenure

Benthic habitat modelling and mapping as a conservation tool for marine protected areas: A seamount in the western Mediterranean

1. An ecologically representative, well‐connected, and effectively managed system of marine protected areas (MPAs) has positive ecological and environmental effects as well as social and economic benefits. Although progress in expanding the coverage of MPAs has been made, the application of management tools has not yet been implemented in most of these areas. 2. In this work, distribution models were applied to nine benthic habitats on a Mediterranean seamount within an MPA for conservation purposes. Benthic habitat occurrences were identified from 55 remotely operated vehicle (ROV) transects, at depths from 76 to 700 m, and data derived from multibeam bathymetry. Generalized additive models (GAMs) were applied to link the presence of each benthic habitat to local environmental proxies (depth, slope, backscatter, aspect, and bathymetric position index, BPI). 3. The main environmental drivers of habitat distribution were depth, slope, and BPI. Based on this result, five different geomorphological areas were distinguished. A full coverage map indicating the potential benthic habitat distribution on the seamount was obtained to inform spatial management. 4. The distribution of those habitats identified as vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) was used to make recommendations on zonation for developing the management plan of the MPA. This process reveals itself as an appropriate methodological approach that can be developed in other areas of the Natura 2000 marine networkEn prensa1,92

Global Implications of China’s Future Food Consumption

Rapid economic growth and urbanization in China have led to a substantial change in consumption patterns and diet structure of Chinese consumers over the past few decades. A growing demand for feed, fuel and fiber also places intense pressure on land resources. With continuing growth of China’s economy and migration from rural to urban, the increase in food consumption and change in diet structure will likely continue, which will not only impose pressure on domestic land resources but also exert impact on land resources in other countries through import. This article applies a global multi-region input-output (MRIO) model to trace agricultural land use along global supply chains and examines the impact of China’s future food consumption on global land use in 2030 against different socio-economic and technological scenarios. Our result shows that by 2030, China would need an additional 21% of cropland to support its increasing food demand driven by population growth, urbanization and income growth and the associated diet structure change. Almost a third of cropland associated with household consumption (34 Mha) will be “outsourced” to foreign countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, United States and Thailand, for the consumption of cereal grains, soybeans and paddy rice. China also consumes 2.4 Mha cropland from Africa for its consumption of cereal grains and oil seeds. The dependence of domestic consumption on significant amounts of foreign cropland shows that China would face serious challenges to meet its grain self-sufficiency policy in the future, and at the same time this dependence would contribute to environmental and food security problems elsewhere

Agriculture, nutrition and education: On the status and determinants of primary schooling in rural Mali before the crises of 2012

This cross-sectional study examines the status and the determinants of primary education in food insecure areas of Mali. Net and gross enrolment ratios in primary school were between 0.3 and 0.4 for both girls and boys and well below national levels, highlighting a critical gap in terms of access to primary education. Schooling was found to respond to a broad range of determinants, including child's age and nutrition status, as well as on household consumption, on farm labour, teacher availability, and village level remoteness. Interestingly, no significant gender differences were found in terms of primary education. School meals were found to be associated with increased enrolment, attendance and attainment. The scale of the problem in Mali strongly suggests the need for investments in education and social protection to be prioritised and funded as part of national education policy and development strategies

'Thinking like a fish': adaptive strategies for coping with vulnerability and variability emerging from a relational engagement with kob

Based on ethnographic fieldwork amongst a group of commercial handline fishers in the town of Stilbaai in South Africa's southern Cape region, this paper presents a range of flexible, adaptive and evolving strategies through which fishers negotiate constantly shifting variability in weather patterns, fish stocks, fisheries policies, and economic conditions. These variabilities constitute a diverse set of vulnerabilities to which fishers must respond in order to sustain their livelihoods. In this context, the act of 'thinking like a fish' on the part of the fishers provides them with an effective means of adapting to variability and uncertainty. Findings of ethnographic research in 2010-11 suggest that a number of the fishers who participated in the research actively work towards achieving a balance between profit and sustainability. 'Thinking like a fish' is an embodied, interactive way of knowing that emerges from interactions between fishers and fish, offering an ethical and ecological outlook which is a valuable resource for fisheries and conservation management in the region. We suggest that the deeply embodied interactional component of 'thinking like a fish' results from a desire to understand the life world of fish and to think from their perspective in order to more effectively target them while sustaining the species and ecosystem

Neoliberalism and the revival of agricultural cooperatives: The case of the coffee sector in Uganda

Agricultural cooperatives have seen a comeback in sub‐Saharan Africa. After the collapse of many weakly performing monopolist organizations during the 1980s and 1990s, strengthened cooperatives have emerged since the 2000s. Scholarly knowledge about the state–cooperative relations in which this “revival” takes place remains poor. Based on new evidence from Uganda's coffee sector, this paper discusses the political economy of Africa's cooperative revival. The authors argue that donors' and African governments' renewed support is framed in largely apolitical terms, which obscures the contested political and economic nature of the revival. In the context of neoliberal restructuring processes, state and non‐state institutional support to democratic economic organizations with substantial redistributional agendas remains insufficient. The political–economic context in Uganda—and potentially elsewhere in Africa—contributes to poor terms of trade for agricultural cooperatives while maintaining significant state control over some cooperative activities to protect the status quo interests of big capital and state elites. These conditions are unlikely to produce a conflict‐free, substantial, and sustained revival of cooperatives, which the new promoters of cooperatives suggest is under way