Increasing pressure on overfished stocks: the small-scale fisheries in Yemen’s Socotra Archipelago

“Qalansiya fishing village” by Gerry & Bonny licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Small-scale fisheries catches in Socotra, an archipelago that belongs to Yemen and is located off the north-eastern tip of Africa in the western Indian Ocean, reached an all-time high of 12,000 tonnes in 2000, before declining to around 3,700 tonnes by 2019. In a recent paper published in Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers with the Sea Around Us (University of British Columbia) and the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean (University of Western Australia) reconstructed the small-scale marine fisheries catch and fishing effort history of the Socotra Archipelago since 1950.

In addition to the decline in catches, the researchers identified changes in the sectoral emphasis of small-scale fisheries, with artisanal (commercial) catches dominating prior to 2010, and subsistence (non-commercial) catches taking the lead thereafter. The observed increase in subsistence fishing is thought to be linked to the civil war in the Yemeni mainland since 2015, which has led many to flee and relocate to the Socotra Archipelago.

Overall, the researchers identified an 11-fold increase in small-scale fishing effort over the nearly 70 years of data analysed. Fishing effort estimates the power and fishing time input in the form of kW/days by fishing gears and sectors deployed in a specific area. This enables researchers to derive a measure of relative abundance called catch-per-unit-of-effort (CPUE), which indicates how much each sector is catching in relation to their fishing intensity input. From 1950 to 2019, the small-scale fisheries in the Socotra Archipelago saw a 78 per cent decline in CPUE.

“The decline in CPUE, especially after 2000, suggests that Socotra’s fish stocks may be overfished or at high risk of overexploitation,” Brittany Derrick, lead author of the study, said.

“A CPUE decline of this magnitude is a critical warning sign of the risk to the underlying seafood resources, as the human population on these islands is reliant on small-scale fisheries for livelihood and food security” adds Dirk Zeller, co-author of the study and Director of the Sea Around Us – Indian Ocean at UWA.

The paper “Small-scale fisheries catch and fishing effort in the Socotra Archipelago (Yemen) between 1950 and 2019” was published in Frontiers in Marine Science https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2023.1201661

Published: 3rd August 2023