Call Goes Out for Gender Mainstreaming in Offshore Tuna Industry

Minister for Fisheries Semi Koroilavesau called on the need to harness and improve our regional and national standards in addressing gender needs. He highlighted this while launching the ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Fiji’s offshore Tuna Industry Report’ on Thursday. Mr Koroilavesau said in recent years some women in the Pacific have become observers on tuna fishing vessels and some were engaged in shore-based activities, however, these have been done at a slow pace.

“For Fiji, there have been very few women employed on fishing vessels,” Mr Koroilavesau said.

“The perception that fisheries are a male-dominated sector, has led to a degree of gender blindness in the tuna longline fishing industry. This gender blindness means that the post-harvesting and trading activities by women and in other areas of work that women could be employed in, are often overlooked or neglected in fisheries development, management and planning. As a result, training and assistance programmes are often targeted for men.”

He said there was also a lack of gender-disaggregated data overall and a knowledge gap about consumption patterns and the differing constraints on men and women to enable more effective participation in markets.

“This lack of data on women’s roles in offshore fisheries perpetuates the existing assumption that women’s interests are taken care of by men and that women are better off employed in other sectors and not in the offshore fishing sector,” Mr Koroilavesau said.

“This led to Pacific Leaders declaration on gender equality. This means that we need to invest in the collection and use of desegregated data across sectors and ensure that there is sufficient budget allocation to address the needs of gender equality. There is also an emphasis on the need to understand the specific barriers faced by women and other marginalised demographic groups in the fisheries supply chain. There is also a need for policies and practices to be more inclusive and tuna fisheries work should include social inclusion and gender analysis.