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Vezo people: the stakeholders
Vezo fisherman
The fishermen, locally known as the Vezo tribe, (the stakeholders) live and utilize the resources from the Bay of Ranobe and do so under a subsistence way of life. Every day they must go out and fish to feed their families.
The Vezo target organisms from the barrier reef, the lagoon and its patch reef system and mangroves. These include reef fishes, mangrove associated demersial and pelagic fish, sharks, rays, sawfish, dolphins, dugongs, turtles, shrimp, lobster, mangrove crabs, octopus, squid, cuttlefish, gastropods, sea cucumbers, urchins, seaweed, and seabird eggs.
The Vezo undertake two types of fishing practices on the Ranobe Reefs: traditional and artisanal.
The principle traditional fishing practice is done on foot or in small dugout canoes called lakanas in Malagasy, or pirogues in French. The style of lakana is different depending on where you are and the way in which the Vezo sail them.
The biggest difference on a national level is that the Vezo living on the west coast have an outrigger and a sail (lakana fiara) and the boats have a range of about 10km. Vezo living on the east coast only have the narrow canoe and outrigger (lakana) and no sail, which limits their range to a few kilometres away from shore.
In 1995 a census was taken on lakana numbers and 22,000 documented, with 75% of them on the west coast of Madagascar with 50% of these in the Toliara region alone.
Fishing from lakanas, the Vezo a range of techniques:
• hook and line
• gill nets
• beach seines (mainly in the Toliara region)
• traditional spears and clubs
• trawl nets
• traps
• spear guns
• and in the past, natural poisons from locally collected roots.
For artisanal fishing, practised by the Vezo, the main difference is that the boat is powered by an engine. Due to the poverty of the Vezo only a few have the financial means to place a small engine on their lakana.
The majority of artisanal fishing is carried out by foreign or government fishing vessels. A census conducted in 2000 showed there were around 200 artisanal fishing boats in use in the southern region of Madagascar, all under regional or governmental control and mainly targeting shrimp.
Since 1985 there has been a five fold increase (to 1995) in the number of traditional fishing vessels in the country and this has resulted in noticeable declines in a number of heavily exploited resources such as shark, turtles, sea cucumbers and numerous gastropods, which are eaten by locals and their shells sold to tourists.
The methods used by the Vezo, namely the use of beach seines and reef gleaning (trampling on the reef flat during times of low tide to collect fish, octopus, crabs, shells, sea cucumbers etc.), have contributed to a pronounced degradation of shallow water reef habitats in the southern region.
This collective degradation by over exploitation of the resources, population increase and natural events can be clearly seen in the Bay of Ranobe, resulting in the population increasing its fishing effort in order to remain at a subsistence level way of life.
