What is CBFM?
Community based fisheries management, or CBFM, is founded on the idea that each community is accountable for maintaining its own ecosystem.
This region has started a Community Based Fisheries Management (CBFM) program to strengthen the fishing industry and the local fishing community. Between late 1995 and mid-1997, Bangladesh’s Community Based Fisheries Management (CBFM) initiative began operations in 19 rivers and future work in this area to expand the nation’s inland open water fisheries.
What is the principal of CBFM?
Community based organizations are given control over the management of fisheries resources. They are expected to do it in a fair and sustainable manner. The advantages of this strategy are clear: it supports the poor and is fair and durable.
What are the stages of CBFM implementation?
There will be five steps to the CBFM implementation.
- Preparatory stage,
- Planning stage
- Implementation stage
- MEAL stage (Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Learning)
- Feedback and edition of plan
How do CBFM connect with fisheries management?
Natural resources for fishing are abundant and diversified in Bangladesh. Hence, Bangladesh’s fishing industry has a significant impact on the country’s income, employment, nutrition, and foreign exchange profits. This is characterized as a decline in fish populations as a result of excessive fishing and water body exploitation, which results in the catchment of undesirable fish and lowers production capacity. The marine ecosystem is in danger due to human activity and rising human population.
Fisheries are being threatened by anthropogenic reasons such as pollution, coastal expansion, offshore oil and gas extraction, mining, and fisherman’s illiteracy.
The effective management of fishing grounds, the sustainable use of fishing grounds, and the improvement of the socioeconomic situations of the actual fishermen are all essential to the overall development of the fishery sector in Bangladesh.
It is commonly believed that community based fisheries management (CBFM) holds great promise as a strategy for sustainable fisheries management. To take into account input from the public, a number of nations are attempting to decentralize fisheries management.
The CBFM acknowledges that local communities and their constituents manage fisheries in practice. Upland communities are provided incentives to safeguard, restore, manage, and grow coastal communities by acknowledging their tenure over the lands.
Fishers must share responsibility for dwindling stocks, declining economic returns, and declining employment possibilities in fisheries. Because of the more localized nature of this type of management, there are a wide variety of management approaches that can be used, based on regional variations and the specifics of various fisheries. Because of this, there is no one method or set of rules that govern CBFM’s application. Instead, the foundation of CBFM is the idea that local engagement and community collaboration may be a highly effective and accurate method of managing, monitoring, and sustaining coastal resources.
Instead of managing fisheries on a larger scale, CBFM shifts the focus of fisheries resource management to specific areas/fishing communities. Nowadays, top-down management from outside managers is used to manage fisheries in many places in a centralized or uniform manner. The local population, which is most impacted by the resource being managed, is more involved in this approach. Local interactions that may not be included in larger scale management systems can be reinforced by empowering local interests, as in CBFM. The vast knowledge base of fisherman, who already possess the majority of the necessary tools for effective local monitoring and research, is used by CBFM.
Due to the requirement to safeguard fisheries from massive operations and traditional fishing grounds from commercial fishing vessels, CBFM has gained enormous popularity in emerging nations. Communities are banding together to create bigger groups to administer local resources and defend their shared rights.
Farhana Islam
Agriculturist, Researcher
