A special webinar led by Illuminating Hidden Harvest (IHH) Team from WorldFish, FAO and Duke University on the road to the Virtual Dialogues on the Road to the 34th Committee on Fisheries (COFI34).

Date: Friday, 17 July 2020 

Time: 19:00 - 20:30 (UTC+8) 

• Click here to watch the recording
• Click here to read the questions and answers summary report

The webinar was a hybrid panel with three short presentations. The IHH project’s rational and methods and some of the progress and results so far (introduction, country case studies, thematic studies), followed by a moderated roundtable discussion on how to leverage the methods, information, and results from IHH towards improved policy decision making and in-country capacity for inter-disciplinary data collection and analysis. 

Marine and inland small-scale fisheries (SSF) employ over 90 percent of fishers and fish workers worldwide and, among these, 96 percent live in developing countries where they produce almost as much fish for direct domestic consumption as large-scale fisheries. Approximately one-third of all small-scale catch comes from freshwater fisheries. Furthermore, big questions remain: what is the importance of SSF for food and nutrition security, local economies and poverty eradication? How are the overall benefits generated by SSF distributed and how can they be enhanced? In the face of these contributions and important questions, it is clear that SSF does not receive enough attention in policy. The Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative (IHH), a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization, WorldFish, and Duke University, has set out to capture and quantify the contributions of SSF to the three pillars of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental) at national, regional and global scales. 

Using a diversity of methods, including over 40 country case studies, global datasets, and thematic studies, IHH will allow the quantification of key indicators at national to global scales, also highlighting local examples where high-quality data provide new insights, but a global synthesis is perhaps not yet possible. This will underpin a more informed inclusion of SSF in policy-making processes across scales. In addition, the results of IHH will support the design of a participatory framework for the implementation and monitoring of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) around the world. By highlighting the role that SSFs play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 14 (life underwater), SDG 1 (no poverty) SDG 2 (food security), and SDG 5 (gender equality), IHH research aims to increase the support from policy-makers for the implementation of the SSF Guidelines. 

For more information, visit the link here. Follow the news on FAO Flickr Collection and social media updates using the hashtag #COFI34.