Using Fish Consumption Data to Estimate Inland Fisheries Harvest

Inland freshwater fisheries provide important food, livelihood, cultural, and recreational benefits to society. These benefits are often overlooked, however, in part due to the difficulty, in many areas, of estimating inland fisheries harvest and consumption. Part of this difficulty arises due to lack of resources to monitor the diversity and geographic range of inland fisheries harvest and the lower values placed on ecosystem services provided by inland fisheries. One way of better estimating inland fisheries harvest is to use fish consumption data, obtained through household surveys, to estimate how much fish must have been harvested in order to match the amount of fish consumed. Surveys from the Ayeyarwaddy Delta, Burma, and rice paddies in Southern Cambodia provided data on household fish consumption that were then used to estimate how much freshwater fish were consumed by each household and thus how many fish were harvested to meet this consumption amount. Government-reported harvest estimates were found to be much lower than the harvest estimates obtained via the consumption studies. The low harvest estimate that is reported by the government could contribute toward the undervaluation of inland fisheries and the benefits they provide to human health and wellbeing locally, regionally, and globally.