Changing fisheries practices and their socioeconomic implications in South Coast Kenya

A study conducted in South Coast, Kenya to determine the factors that influence the harvesting of fish in the area, assess the changes that have occurred in local fishing practices and their socioeconomic impacts; establish stakeholder characteristics in relation to changing fishing practices; and identify the winners and losers in the changing fisheries management regimes. Information and data were collected from four sites, namely Vanga, Shimoni, Msambweni and Gazi. It was established that changing fishing practices in the area have led to over-exploitation of the fish stocks from the coral reefs. sion analysis of the data indicated a significant inverse relationship between fish harvesting rate and price. This is inconsistent with the theory of production, which predicts output to increase with increase in price. In the study area, when the price of fish is low, fishermen tend to spend more hours per day fishing in order to compensate for the lost income due to price decrease. This results in over-fishing within the coral reef. Similarly, the output has a significant inverse relationship with distance to the fishing ground. There is a significant positive relationship between effort and output; when fishing effort increases by one unit, output increases by 0.43 units in weight. The other explanatory variables, particularly income, education and age, have a positive but insignificant relationship with output; the adjusted R2 is 0.714, which means that these variables explain 71% of the variation in output. From the estimation of a transformed log–log model, the results obtained are consistent with the estimates of the original model.