Food Security and Artisanal Fisheries: Critical Analysis of Initiatives in Latin America

The importance of food security is frequently mentioned in small-scale fisheries policies, but it is seldom articulated as an explicit objective. We propose to approach fisheries as a food system, and by doing so, we seek to contribute to governance processes which integrate poverty reduction, sustainability and development. This paper aims to analyse current discourse and practice in artisanal fisheries, from the perspective of food security and with a specific focus on Latin America. We applied systematic review of secondary data and a detailed survey of initiatives led primarily by the civil society in fisheries, marine conservation and coastal development. We demonstrated a striking divergence between project planning and implementation. Several initiatives which had food security and poverty reduction among their objectives (n=60 in the global sample, nine of which in Latin America) were identified. In spite of reasons for optimism, we observed that interventions which adopted food security in a simplistic manner, or purely at the level of discourse, were predominant. We propose the discussion of mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation which demonstrate the effectiveness of fisheries management and development initiatives in securing the access to resources and their nutritional benefits to fisheries-dependent populations.