Keywords

In this chapter we focus on the wider processes of political-economic change that drive key characteristics of fishing livelihoods. Along with other sectors of economic life, fisheries have been radically transformed through an interrelated set of processes commonly referred to by the shorthand term ‘globalisation’. Globalisation has dramatically expanded the scale and accelerated the pace of fisheries capture and trade, generating new opportunities and challenges for livelihoods and marine environments.

While analyses of the relationships between globalisation and agrarian livelihoods are common (Akram-Lodhi & Kay, 2010; Bernstein, 2010), less frequent are examinations of the influences of globalisation on fishing livelihoods. While not denying the capacity of human agency and choice that feeds into livelihood decisions (Ransan-Cooper, 2016), the livelihoods of fishers respond to regional and global forces that change over time. Whether it be crew on industrial fishing vessels (Minnegal et al., 2003; Pálsson & Durrenberger, 1990), or small-scale fishers accessing new markets, adopting new technologies or transitioning into different forms of production (e.g., aquaculture) (Belton & Thilsted, 2014; Béné et al., 2009; Platteau, 1984), the structural conditions of these economic activities are formed by processes of change that operate at much wider scales than the household or the local community.

Here we document some of the major characteristics of the history of fishing across the Asia-Pacific, before focusing on case studies of the Philippines and PNG. We highlight three related features of globalisation that have influenced fishing livelihoods and that continue to shape them today: migration, engagement with markets and new technologies, and interactions with other forms of economic activity, including those outside the fisheries sector.

Fisheries and Globalisation

The term ‘globalisation’ has many interpretations. We adopt a perspective that views it as a process centred around capital accumulation. Harvey’s concepts of the ‘spatial fix’ (1982) and of ‘time–space compression’ (1989) highlight the drive for capital accumulation, and the increasing power of communication and transport technologies. While this process arguably started with European capitalism and colonialism spreading out from the sixteenth century (Wallerstein, 2004), these processes have intensified since the end of World War II. From this perspective, globalisation is a systemic force driven by capitalism.

A key theme in historical accounts of the globalisation of fisheries has been that of the ‘frontier’—fisheries activities expanding and intensifying in response to new market demands from population growth and increasing wealth (Butcher, 2004). Moore’s (2015) commodity frontier framework distinguishes between two phases of frontiers, and has been usefully applied to tuna fisheries (Campling, 2012). The initial phase of ‘commodity widening’ is based on geographic expansion, and ‘commodity deepening’ involves intensive development: ‘firms dependent upon the appropriation of natural resources seek to continuously expand into new commodity frontiers, whether in terms of geographical extent or industrial intensity’ (Baglioni & Campling, 2017: 2443). Fishing livelihoods have been progressively drawn into these dynamic forces of capital accumulation—moving towards new opportunities; using new technologies to target more types of marine resources, preserve them more effectively and transport them more easily; and accessing trade networks operating at greater scales.

Butcher (2004) and Christensen (2014) distinguish three key phases of development in the commercial fisheries of South-East Asia and the ‘Indo-Pacific’, respectively. From the later part of the nineteenth century until the 1930s, the foundations for industrial fishing in South-East Asia were laid by European colonial powers bringing small island groups together into states, and establishing government control over coastal areas, reducing piracy, expanding transport networks and encouraging fishing investment (Butcher, 2004). In the early twentieth century Japanese fleets expanded industrial fishing into South-East Asia, and built smoking and canning factories (Butcher, 2004; H. Chen 2008a; T.Y. Chen 2008b; Fujinami, 1987). After World War II, fisheries activities in South-East Asia boomed in what was termed ‘the great fish race’ (Butcher, 2004) or the ‘great acceleration’ (Christensen, 2014). State-supported fisheries expanded rapidly, and in the 1950s pre-war Japanese interests also re-established industrial fishing enterprises in South-East Asia (Morgan & Staples, 2006). Subsequently, from the late 1970s, the frontier began to ‘close’, as fish catches began to stagnate.

As Campling and Havice (2018) note, national seafood production systems and state-based regulatory regimes have been a crucial element of this process. In the Asia-Pacific, one of the key factors at play has been the rise of different distant water fleets seeking catches around the globe. Fishing states have supported their fleets to fish in distant waters by various means, including subsidies for vessels, fuel and fisheries access fees. For their part, coastal states have shaped fishing patterns by excluding distant water fleets from their EEZs in favour of domestic fleets, as in the case of the Maldives. Kiribati and Vanuatu are examples of a different route, inviting distant water fleets to fish in their EEZs in exchange for fees. A third model is to invite distant water fishing companies to invest in domestic fishing and/or processing capacity, like PNG and Solomon Islands (Barclay & Cartwright, 2008). The Japanese and US industrial tuna fleets were the first in the Pacific, although, by the start of the ‘great acceleration’ both were waning somewhat, in part due to their own rising production costs compared to competitor fleets. Taiwanese and Korean fleets became important during the heyday expansion of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 2000s the Filipino tuna fleet became a regional player, and the Chinese fleet started its steady increase (Barclay, 2014).

As countries became exposed to fishing practices from other countries, knowledge diffused and technology developed. Harvesting practices adopted new technologies to increase their catch, such as nylon fibres for nets and engines for boats. For example, the ‘muro-ami’ fishing technique was introduced to the Philippines by Japan, and was adopted by many vessels in the Philippines until its eventual banning in 1986. Blast fishing became popular after World War II, when access to explosives became common. Processing and preservation technologies, such as canning and freezing, reduced the perishability of fish, and the expansion of transportation networks (e.g., airfreight) all contributed to greater capacity to store and distribute fish catch. The mixing of knowledge and technology is also closely linked to the increase of movement and people, as people moved to access the opportunities provided by fishing livelihoods in more productive places (Eder, 2008). Many industrial fisheries in the Asia-Pacific came to be crewed by foreign labour.

Specific consumer markets have also emerged as crucial drivers of the growth in fisheries. Much seafood exportation has been from developing to developed countries, especially Japan, the EU and the US (Swartz et al., 2010). Consumer preferences, such as for tuna in Japan, have shaped what sorts of fish are caught and how they are processed, and consumer markets increasingly shape the regulatory conditions under which fish are caught through trade measures. The growth of China as a wealthy consumer market has had significant effects on the nature of fishing livelihoods in the Asia-Pacific. While many of the products demanded by the Chinese market are not new, increasing wealth in China since the opening up of the economy in the 1980s has greatly increased demand. Markets for sea cucumbers, shark fin, live reef food fish and fish maw—products highly valued in Chinese cuisine for perceived health benefits or associations with high status—have all expanded greatly since this period (Purcell et al., 2013; Sadovy de Mitcheson et al., 2013; Sadovy de Mitcheson et al., 2019; Scales et al., 2006). This has led analysts to conceptualise the nature of this form of seafood production and trade as ‘contagious exploitation’ (Eriksson et al., 2015), or as ‘roving bandits’ (Scales et al., 2006). More recently, COVID-19 is reshaping the nature of seafood markets and of trade more generally (Robins et al., 2020).

The following sections explore how these global-scale processes have come to concretely shape fishing livelihoods, focusing on three key aspects of globalisation: migration, new technologies and markets, and changing forms of interaction with non-fisheries activities.

The Western Philippines

A particular form of movement in the Philippines since the late nineteenth century has been individuals and families leaving locations characterised by social conflict, high population densities and poverty, towards ‘frontier’ locations characterised by lower population densities and new livelihood opportunities. At different points in time, Mindanao, Mindoro and Palawan served as such frontier settlement locations.

In Mindoro, Indigenous Mangyan groups were once the majority population, but this changed with settlement by migrants during the early twentieth century. They arrived from varied regions of the Philippines (e.g., Luzon, the Visayan Islands) in response to US colonial encouragement of agricultural production and exports, and investments in infrastructure (Helbling & Schult, 1997; Schult, 1991). Migrants settled heavily in the coastal and agriculturally productive lowlands of the island, while Mangyan groups became marginalised upland. Land conflicts soon ensued (Helbling & Schult, 1997). Migrants outnumbered the Mangyan by 1920 (1997) and came to dominate the lowlands and coasts, and consequently the fishing livelihoods.

In Palawan, Indigenous groups occupied different parts of the province prior to settlement by migrants—Tagbanua in the North, Batak and Palawan in the central part of the island, and Molbog in the South. From the late nineteenth century, migration from the nearby islands of Cuyo and Agutaya increased. Long characterised as the ‘last frontier of the Philippines’, migration to Palawan increased after the settlement of Mindoro and Mindanao, and particularly so after World War II. While migrants arrived from diverse locations, many came from the Visayan group of islands (Eder & Fernandez, 1996).

Compared to Mindoro the settlement of Palawan was less driven by specific projects, and Palawan instead served as a ‘land of opportunity’ for farming and fishing in particular. For example, fishers would often travel to Palawan on a seasonal or intermittent basis, sometimes forming social relationships with local groups already present (Ushijima & Zayas, 1994). After some time of these sojourns, the household might relocate, and then other kin and neighbours would follow (Seki, 2004). The time line of migration to Palawan—Cuyonon initially, followed by Visayan—meant that many of the best farmlands were obtained by Cuyonon households, and more recent Visayan migrants settled along the coast (Eder, 2003). In the south of Palawan, refugees from the civil conflict in the Sulu Archipelago settled from the 1970s.

While the Western Philippines was the source of a significant proportion of the country’s entire landed catch from the 1970s (Butcher, 2004), the vast majority of the vessels were based in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippines, contributing little to the local economy. Although since 1991 the Local Government Code has prohibited the entry of large-scale fishing vesselsFootnote 1 within 15 km of the shoreline, the waters around Mindoro and Palawan remain favoured fishing grounds for many externally based large-scale vessels. Over time, large-scale fisheries based in these locations also emerged. For example, in the 1980s Coron in Northern Palawan became host to a high number of lift net boats, targeting anchovies. Other commercial fishing boats adapted gears and techniques to fish for fusiliers with baited hook and line; mixed reef fish with weighted lines with lures; dynamite (illegal); spearfishing using air compressors for diving; variants of ‘baby’ purse seines and trawlers; and the notorious muro-ami fishery, notable for its high degree of ecological destructiveness and use of child labour. Due to the lack of readily available ice, processing and preserving fish through drying was very common. The fish landed from these vessels served major provincial markets throughout the country, and especially that of Manila, while some were exported.

Small-scale fishers in the Philippines have long been selling their catch commercially. As Firth (1966) and Spoehr (1984) noted, because fish alone does not provide an adequate source of food, full-time fishers (or specialised fishing communities) in particular needed to sell some of their catch to obtain other foods. Fish was bartered for rice, vegetables or other food, or sold at local markets for cash, or dried and sold to itinerant buyers and vessels that collected fish products. With the introduction of motorised boats, and the increased availability of ice and roads, the capacity of small-scale fishers to access new markets, such as the municipal towns, increased.

With the spread of migrants came the spread of knowledge about fishing techniques—migrants from the Visayan region are particularly renowned for their knowledge of different types of fishing gears and techniques. Small-scale fishers in contemporary times in the Western Philippines are notable for the extraordinary diversity of gears and techniques used to obtain marine resources (see Fig. 2.1). Simple hook and line, originally using vine or other natural fibres, was replaced with nylon, and different techniques for hooking fish include the use of bait (e.g., shrimp) and the use of lures (e.g., foil, plastic, feathers). Longlines, utilising many larger-sized hooks to a greater depth, are used to catch larger fish and sharks. Variants of net fishing including bottom-set, floating and drift gillnets are common, sometimes with the use of plungers to scare the fish into the net. Traps made of bamboo or other wood for fish and crustaceans are common, as are specifically designed hooks (squid jigs) used to catch squid. Diving with spear guns is common in the shallows, gleaning occurs along shorelines and beach seines are used in some locations. Many of the fish caught are locally processed and sold in local or regional markets, or in larger destinations such as Manila.

Fig. 2.1
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Fishers catching big-eye scad to use as baitfish for tuna in Puerto, Philippines. (Photo credit: Katherine Jack)

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China is a particularly lucrative market for fishers in the Western Philippines from which demand has intensified in recent decades. Since the opening up of China’s economy from 1978, incomes in China increased, as did demand for specific marine products, such as dried sea cucumbers, live reef food fish, shark fin and fish maw. The high prices paid for these marine products served as a catalyst for fishers throughout the Philippines to focus on them. The exploitation of sea cucumbers and live fish in Western Philippines highlights the dual phases of commodity frontiers, encompassing both commodity ‘widening’ with geographic expansion, and ‘deepening’ with the use of advanced technologies.

More than 30 types of sea cucumbers are exploited in the waters of the Philippines (Jontila et al., 2018). Once the sea cucumbers are caught they are dried and processed and sold through various market channels to eventually arrive in their destination markets, of which China is the largest. Consumption of sea cucumbers has been popular for centuries in China as a status and health food, and demand has spiked since the 1980s and 1990s (Eriksson et al., 2015). The most expensive tropical sea cucumbers are sandfish (Holothuria scabra), white teatfish (Holothuria fuscogilva), and black teatfish (Holothuria whitmaei), with prices reaching well over US$100 per kilogram in Chinese markets (Brown et al., 2010; Purcell et al., 2018). In their dried form (bêche-de-mer), sea cucumbers are shelf stable for weeks or months, so have offered a rare opportunity for remote coastal areas characterised by a lack of easy market access (Barclay et al., 2016).

Akamine’s (2001) study of sea cucumber exploitation in Southern Palawan shows how fishing livelihoods responded to these market drivers. In the late 1970s, sea cucumbers were caught by skin divers, on relatively short trips closer to shore. While the use of air compressors was introduced around this time (i.e., using an air compressor on a boat and diving with a hose to breathe), many accidents occurred, and so this technology did not become popular until the arrival of more experienced fishers from the Visayan group of islands in the late 1980s. From around this time, vessels started to travel further into the South China Sea, diving deeper and targeting more types of species that became progressively more commercially valuable. Women, who previously participated in gleaning and inshore fishing for sea cucumbers, did not participate in these trips. From the 1990s, the depths to which divers would go to find sea cucumbers increased (up to 60 metres), and the use of depth sounders (‘fishfinders’) was also introduced. However, by the late 2000s, the sea cucumber fishery in Palawan (Brown et al., 2010) and in the Philippines more generally (Choo, 2008) had declined significantly. Overharvesting meant that the trade was characterised by a higher proportion of smaller sea cucumbers and of lower-valued species (Akamine, 2005; Brown et al., 2010), and local extirpations occurred. In Southern Palawan, while sea cucumbers continue to be harvested as a supplemental livelihood activity (Fabinyi et al., 2012), many fishers turned instead to another lucrative marine product: live reef fish.

Live reef fish have long served as an important component of seafood banquets in China, and, as with sea cucumbers, their demand has dramatically increased as wealth levels in the Chinese economy have grown since the 1980s. Particularly highly valued reef fish in these banquets include Napoleon wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus), humpback grouper (Cromileptes altivelis) and leopard coral grouper (Plectropomus leopardus). The fish are caught live and kept alive until they reach a restaurant. The vast majority of higher-valued reef fish end up in China. Exploitation of live reef fish expanded geographically over time, from waters near Hong Kong to the wider Indo-Pacific (Scales et al., 2006), including the Western Philippines. In Palawan, which supplies most of the country’s live fish exports (Padilla et al., 2003), the live fish industry began in Coron in the late 1980s, and from there the trade spread throughout the municipalities of Palawan, all the way down to Balabac in the extreme South. While Coron remained an important trading hub, fewer fish came to be sourced from the waters around Coron due to overexploitation, and municipalities further south formed the epicentre of this trade in Palawan. While many attempts have been made to govern the trade in a more environmentally sustainable way in Palawan and elsewhere, institutions for sustainability have found it difficult to compete against the economic pressures of this lucrative fishery (Fabinyi & Dalabajan, 2011; Sadovy de Mitcheson et al., 2013).

In many instances, the expansion of the live reef fish fishery has been financed with capital originating from further up the commodity chain. Fishers are financed for their fishing trips (many of which last several days, or even beyond a week) by buyers based in the municipal towns. In many cases, these buyers are agents of exporters based in Manila, who in turn have financial relationships with importers based in Hong Kong. In the south of Palawan, many traders are financed by ethnic Chinese buyers (towkays) based in Sabah, Malaysia.

The live reef fish fishery is notable for its high dependence on particular technologies. While many fishers use weighted hooks with lures to catch live fish, the use of cyanide and air compressors is also common. Fishers dive deep with the assistance of a compressor and squirt a solution of cyanide into reefs to stun and catch the fish. If a fish is brought up too quickly from deep water, the swim bladder will rupture, killing it, and so fishers have to be skilled in puncturing the swim bladder with a hypodermic needle, obtained from local health clinics. Once the fish are brought to the surface, they are kept alive in specially designed aquariums in the vessels that allow fresh water to continuously flow through. If a fish is below optimal market size, it is placed in a grow-out cage for weeks or even months before being sold. Since the leopard coral groupers lose their bright red colour when staying for long periods of time in shallow water, many of these cages are located tens of metres below the surface. Fishers dive to feed them, using air compressors for breathing. After the fish are sold to a buyer’s aquarium, the fish are often fed antibiotics and tranquilisers to reduce their mortality and stress during transport. The fish are then transported in oxygenated bags to the local airport, where they are flown to Manila, and subsequently transferred to a commercial flight to Hong Kong. The expansion of this trade in Palawan has, therefore, been highly dependent on the capital originating from buyers at higher levels of the commodity chain, and on the expansion of the physical infrastructure (roads, airports) and use of technologies (cyanide, needles, air compressors, medicines) required to catch and transport these fish.

Not only has the practice of fishing activities changed over time, as these examples of sea cucumbers and live fish show, but also the significance of fishing within the broader spectrum of activities that constitute household livelihoods in the coastal Philippines is dynamic. While specialist fishing communities that rely almost entirely on fishing as a livelihood remain common in the Philippines (Spoehr, 1984), especially in contexts where there are few other viable livelihood options, there are also many instances in which fishing is combined with other sources of income, such as farming, livestock raising, small household enterprises such as mixed-goods stores, and transport work (Eder, 2003). In these instances, fishing can be combined in a highly flexible manner, taken up in a seasonal, part-time or supplemental fashion. Fishers also typically practise multiple types of fishing activity at different times of the day, month or year.

As fishing activities in general become increasingly difficult in parts of the Western Philippines due to lower catches and increased pressure from regulations (e.g., MPAs), residents in some cases are turning to additional or alternative sources of income. For example, the growth of aquaculture in many regions of the Philippines has generated opportunities for fishers. In the Western Philippines the government has done much to stimulate seaweed production through support programmes. While this activity contributes to livelihood portfolios, in many cases as a supplemental livelihood activity, without substantial investments it rarely generates the sorts of profits found in the sea cucumber and live reef food fisheries. In parts of coastal Mindoro, which has had a longer history of settlement and economic diversification than Palawan, remittances from family members working overseas also now form a considerable proportion of household incomes.

In particular, fishing livelihoods in the Western Philippines have been adjusting to the rapid rise in tourism. Promoted heavily by governments in the Philippines at all levels, tourism is widely viewed as an economic activity that can generate economic benefits and to do so in a more environmentally sustainable manner than many fisheries. Not every community in Western Palawan is regularly frequented by tourists, and a range of positive and negative effects of coastal tourism has been identified (Fabinyi, 2020). However, the growth in recent years has been enough to drive many previous full-time fishers into livelihoods based instead on tourism (e.g., guesthouse accommodation, converting fishing boats into ‘beach-hopping’ or dive boats, guiding, etc.), or mixing tourism and fishing livelihood activities (e.g., supplying restaurants with seafood). The growth in related infrastructure (airports, roads, buildings) has also drawn people to work in construction and other wage labour jobs. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down the tourism industry in Western Philippines, so many people again turned to fishing as their main livelihood.

Papua New Guinea

In contrast to the Philippines, PNG is a country with a much lower population density. According to the World Bank, in 2019 the population of the Philippines was around 108 million for 300,000 km2, whereas the PNG population was around 8.7 million for 463,000 km2. In general there are much lower levels of industrialisation in PNG, and subsistence horticulture remains the most important livelihood. Fishing livelihoods are in general much less diverse, with most fishing being for home consumption or sale in local markets, resulting in significantly less fishing pressure on the marine environment. Yet, both during colonial times and more recently, coastal zones of PNG have also been rapidly drawn into trading networks at multiple scales, and these trade networks and market demands and opportunities exercise significant influence over the sorts of fishing livelihoods available to coastal residents.

In pre-colonial times, internal migration around PNG was relatively limited in geographic extent. After European contact and settlement, there was a reduction of movement in response to violence and warfare, but over time more people began to migrate to government and mission stations, and urban centres (May & Skeldon, 1977). This rural-to-urban migration has meant that in some coastal communities where fishing is a major livelihood, remittances from urban centres (e.g., Port Moresby) are significant—although this is variable (Carrier, 1981; Hayes, 1993; Vieira et al., 2017). In recent decades, in addition to well-established forms of rural-to-urban migration, internal migration has often been characterised by people moving towards large-scale resource extraction projects such as mines (Bainton, 2017) or agricultural plantations (Curry & Koczberski, 1998). Unlike in the Philippines, fishing is rarely the main motivation for migration in coastal villages. In a study of 14 coastal villages across PNG, not one migrant respondent nominated fishing as their reason for migration, most nominating other employment opportunities and marriage as their reasons (Cinner, 2009). However, thousands of internal migrants living in settlements around the cities of Madang and Lae work in the tuna industries based around those cities (Barclay, 2012).

Nevertheless, the ways in which migration patterns affect livelihoods and resource use in coastal communities remain highly important, largely due to the social relationships between migrants and non-migrants. In terrestrial parts of PNG, Filer (1997) has documented the emergence of an ‘ideology of landownership’, where the growth of resource extraction projects from the 1980s led to heightened consciousness of and identification with customary landownership. This has led, for example, to contestations and disputes over who is a rightful landowner, to whom one has social obligations, and who should, therefore, benefit from the activities of mines (Bainton, 2009).

Fishing and marine tenure, similar to terrestrial sectors, have also been subject to disputes about rightful ownership (e.g., Kinch, 2020; see also Foale & Macintyre, 2000 for Solomon Islands). Central to these disputes are ideas about who holds customary rights. In his study of coastal communities across PNG, Cinner (2009) noted that migrants were in many cases excluded from access to marine resources, and were less involved in decision-making. Therefore, while coastal fisheries are not a pull factor for migration to coastal areas in PNG, patterns of migration do inform who is able to fish as a livelihood. As Connell and Lutkehaus (2017: 92) note in their study of resettlement projects in coastal PNG, ‘social relationships are written in the ground and editing or removing the writing is almost impossible, establishing a geometry of power that absolutely marginalises potential settlers’.

Central to the increasing emphasis on access rights to marine resources has been engagement with markets. Exchange practices in coastal zones of PNG have been a crucial part of life from pre-colonial times (Malinowski, 1922). With the emergence of marketplaces in urban areas during the colonial period (Busse & Sharp, 2019), fish have been sold for cash income. In a study of six sites in coastal PNG, Cinner and McClanahan (2006: 78) found that ‘more than half of the caught fish were bartered or sold’. Similarly, in a study from Madang Province, Havice and Reed (2012: 424) note that fish catch is transitioning from consumption to selling in markets for cash, while in Manus, Lau et al. (2020) found that selling fish in the market was the preferred use for fish, over bartering, sharing or eating. Most urban areas and many coastal rural areas in PNG have marketplaces that sell diverse species of fish caught from a range of gears, raw and cooked (Busse & Sharp, 2019; Cinner & McClanahan, 2006). Specific technologies have emerged together with the expansion of domestic markets that have also increased the capacity of people to fish further distances, use new techniques for catching fish and to access further markets. These include the use of outboard motors, fibreglass boats, synthetic lines, metal hooks, compressors for diving, ice and ice chests and fish aggregating devices.

In addition to the development of catching fish for local marketplaces, a variety of export fisheries has emerged in PNG, including tuna (Barclay & Cartwright, 2008; Havice & Reed, 2012), aquarium fish (Máñez et al., 2014), live reef food fish (Hamilton & Matawai, 2006) and dried sea products. In coastal areas, bêche-de-mer and other dried products such as shark fin have been traded to South-East Asia since the 1800s, but became a significant industry in PNG from the early 1990s, as demand for these products in China boomed (Barclay et al., 2019; Kinch, 2020). Sea cucumbers are harvested usually by groups, dried and processed locally, and then transported to provincial capitals for trade onwards (see Fig. 2.2). In the 1990s the bulk of the trade went to Singapore and Malaysia, but from the mid-2000s Hong Kong and China became the main destinations.

Fig. 2.2
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Fisher holding freshly caught sea cucumbers. (Photo credit: Arselene Uyami-Bitara)

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In many coastal parts of Milne Bay Province, as with other coastal areas in PNG, sales of bêche-de-mer became the most important source of cash income, almost exclusively in some places (Foale, 2005; Kinch, 2020). The strong demand for bêche-de-mer translated into high prices that dwarfed other income-generating opportunities, so fishing livelihoods became largely focused on this one commodity. While this increase in cash income led to benefits for many families, including basic necessities such as food, it also generated social challenges. As much of the diving for sea cucumbers was done by physically capable young men, they subsequently ended up controlling much of the cash, with tensions among younger and older men (Rasmussen, 2015), and between men and women (Barclay et al., 2016; Barclay et al., 2019). The rapid increase in the value of marine resources also led to protracted disputes among groups over access to fishing grounds (Foale, 2005; Kinch, 2020).

The consequences of this intensified effort were that from the mid-2000s sea cucumber stocks declined precipitously. As in the Philippines, PNG fishers shifted their attention from higher-value species to lower-value species, meaning they had to take even greater amounts to maintain incomes (Barclay et al., 2019). In 2009, a moratorium was instituted to ban the sale and trade of bêche-de-mer.Footnote 2 With the sudden cessation of income from sea cucumber, fishers were forced to shift into other livelihood activities. The amount of cash income derived by many coastal communities declined significantly (Barclay et al., 2019; Vieira et al., 2017).

While livelihood activities have always been mixed in coastal PNG, subsistence gardening remains a core component of most coastal livelihood portfolios. For example, sweet potatoes, bananas and taro are grown by 99 per cent, 96 per cent and 95 per cent of the PNG population, respectively (Bourke & Allen, 2009: 195). In coastal areas such as Milne Bay, while some income-generating opportunities remained after the bêche-de-mer ban was imposed, such as in copra plantations, overall, livelihoods became focused again on gardening. However, in some places gardening productivity was reduced by years of neglect, as people had focused on bêche-de-mer fishing (Barclay et al., 2016: 39). Although shark fin and trochus shell remain relatively important as cash-earning commodities in Milne Bay (Vieira et al., 2017), the fishing component of livelihoods has reverted to being more of a supplemental activity generating food and some cash income. Thus, as climate change effects increase (Connell & Lutkehaus, 2017) and the stocks of vulnerable, high-value species such as sharks and sea cucumbers decline, fishing livelihoods in PNG will continue to evolve in relation to the opportunities afforded by migration and other land-based livelihood activities, in particular farming.

Conclusion

While fishing livelihoods have been practised for millennia, they are not static. Even in economically remote parts of the Asia-Pacific, fishers have responded to market demands from nearby and beyond. These market demands shape what kinds of fish are targeted, what technologies are used in the catch, processing and distribution of fish, and how fishing activities relate to other livelihood activities, many of which are similarly shaped by other market demands. In many cases, these market demands and opportunities are also a major factor behind where people choose to live. Ultimately, changing markets and population densities strongly affect the status of fisheries and the conditions for their sustainability (Cinner et al., 2013).

The interactions between fishing livelihoods and these broader global forces are mediated by very different contexts in PNG and Philippines. Cultures (Chap. 3) and governance (Chap. 4) are very different in these countries, and the Philippines has a significantly greater degree of economic integration with local and international markets, and a much larger, more densely distributed population than PNG. Yet, despite these different contexts, both countries have experienced increases in the geographic scale and the technological intensity of fishing activities—commodity ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ (Moore, 2015). Taking into consideration historical trajectories and market drivers, we can see how fishing livelihoods are influenced not only by individual or household decision-making, or by local or national governance structures, but also by wider, systemic forces of global economic transformation.

In many cases, these wider forces of global capitalism and development have favoured fishing activities to the point that they have become biologically unsustainable. This has flow-on effects for fishers who have to adapt to target other fish, or adopt new livelihood activities beyond capture fisheries alone. The extent to which fishing livelihoods integrate, compete with or are ultimately surpassed by newer forms of coastal livelihoods such as tourism and aquaculture will be a major part of fishing livelihoods in the future.

For fisheries managers and policymakers, understanding the historical trajectories of fishing livelihoods, how they have changed and adapted over time, and how they are integrated with the wider economy provides important context on the external drivers of fishing activity and how fishers are likely to behave. For example, the relationship of fishing livelihoods to economic activities in other sectors is important when trying to generate ‘alternative’ livelihoods and encourage fishers to exit from the fishery, or when implementing regulations that rely on some degree of reduced fishing effort (Barclay et al., 2019). While economic and market-based approaches to fisheries governance attempt to work with individual markets, this approach can potentially conceal the wider systemic forces at play—the logics of commodity widening and deepening that ultimately drive further exploitation.