Those who are involved with fishing and fisheries resource management—including fishermen, their communities, production, processing, distribution, and marketing industries, and various government and non-governmental organizations—confront the contradictions arising from the appropriation, allocation, and distribution of fisheries and marine resources in a variety of ways. The authors call into question the assumptions of policy prescriptions to common resource problems by examining the experiences of people and societies confronted with and adapting to these resource appropriation, allocation, and distribution problems. They suggest that tragedies of resource depletion and institutional failure to deal with them are not characteristic of human nature, but rather are by products of particular cultural practices, institutions, and assumptions. The detailed, empirical ethnographic study of these relationships holds great potential for informing those who are making future policy decisions as well as contributing to the theories of human behavior and cooperation to solve such problems.

Food and people. Protect and produce. Building the global community. Food and agriculture: the future.

The African Water Resource Database (AWRD) is a set of data and custom-designed tools, combined in a geographic information system (GIS) analytical framework, aimed at facilitating responsible inland aquatic resource management with a focus on inland fisheries and aquaculture. It thus provides a valuable instrument to promote food security. The AWRD data archive includes an extensive collection of datasets covering the African continent, including: surface waterbodies, watersheds, aquatic species, rivers, political boundaries, population density, soils, satellite imagery and many other physiographic and climatological data. This technical paper is the first of two publications about the AWRD, and it gives a general overview addressed both to administrators and managers, as well as for professionals in technical fields. The second part of this technical paper is available separately (ISBN 9789251056479).