The Right to Freedom. Socio-Development in Fishing Communities Will Help Close the Gap

“In South Africa pursuing praiseworthy objectives and implementing good visionary policies is one thing, but achieving their materialisation is quite another.”

Co-operatives enhance production, food security, processing, transport capacity, financial needs, sustainability, development, and protection. It is in the co-operative system, if done correctly, that fishing communities can be enabled to improve their plight of poverty. The distribution of rights to land and sea must be guided by social justice rather than market forces and wealth generation for a few.

Historically, because many fishing livelihoods could be undertaken without formal education and normal business and labour rules, it often attracted the poorest, least educated and already low-esteem members of society. Therefore one of the subtle problems that face the small-scale fishing communities is that they are held in low esteem by non-fishers and even by fisheries officials themselves. This leads to fishers being easily taken advantage of by more educated non-fisher persons (“con-leadership”) who mostly have an undemocratic approach.