Small-scale fishing communities in Africa are the most vulnerable in the world to conflict with industrial fishing fleets, according to the first global study to map the risk country by country.

The research, published in the journal Nature Food, was led by Melissa Cronin, assistant professor of fisheries oceanography at UMass Dartmouth. 

Her team created the Small-scale and Industrial Fisheries Interaction Index, or SIFI Index, which scores 126 coastal countries on how exposed their small-scale fishers are to clashes with industrial fleets. Africa ranked highest, followed by parts of Oceania and Asia.

The most vulnerable countries share a pattern: communities depend heavily on small-scale fishing for food and income, and have little capacity to cope when it is disrupted. Weaker governance made countries more vulnerable too, largely because their populations lean more on small-scale fishing to eat and earn.

“Conflict with industrial boats is a problem that small-scale fishers often raise, but it is difficult to study systematically because it takes so many forms,” Cronin said.

Small-scale fishing underpins the food, income and cultural identity of nearly half a billion people, and the researchers describe competition with industrial fleets as an existential threat to coastal communities. It can also destabilise marine ecosystems and strain relations between countries.

The researchers stressed that their index shows where risk is highest, not where conflict is happening.

“Our analysis helps identify where vulnerability may be greatest, but it cannot tell us when competition becomes conflict or who bears the costs,” Cronin said. “For that, we need to work directly with fishing communities.”

Previous research has, however, shed some light on how conflict can play out. In Ghana, a 2021 survey of 107 fishers across five communities by the Environmental Justice Foundation found that 92.5% had encountered industrial trawlers in their fishing grounds in the previous year. 70% said trawlers had damaged their nets, canoes or outboard motors, and some reported threats of death. 

An earlier analysis of Ghanaian conflict reports from 1985 to 2014, published in the journal Ecology and Society, found that 98% of likely conflict locations were inside the inshore zone meant to keep industrial vessels out. The authors noted that such conflicts can involve destroyed boats, assault, kidnapping and murder.

On Sembilan Island, in Indonesia’s Java Sea, fishers told Mongabay that large cantrang vessels from Java, using a banned seine net, were fishing within about 8km of the coast. Small boats had been damaged or destroyed, and some locals had turned to vigilantism. Between 2021 and 2023, 26 large vessels were taken to court for using the net or breaching zoning rules.

Xavier Basurto, professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University and the study’s senior author, said conflict between the two sectors had worried coastal fishers for more than 30 years. He said it was the first global study “to start directly addressing it in a constructive manner”.

The index identified outliers with unexpectedly low risk, which the researchers say could offer lessons for policymakers.

Elena Finkbeiner, director of coastal community fisheries at Conservation International, said the work offered “a blueprint of critical geographies” for prioritising conservation and management where small-scale and industrial fleets compete for the same resources.

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