The conflict between poverty and river system management: the case study of Malawi, Southern Africa

In a country where over 75% of the families cannot feed themselves, producing on average only 64% of their own food requirements, and where at least 500-1,000 people died of hunger and hunger-related diseases in 2002, managing riverine fisheries and systems is a big challenge in Malawi.The deep poverty of Malawians has meant pressure on catchment areas or rivers, where there is over-cultivation, poor management of cultivated fields, and indiscriminate cutting down of trees. In addition, there is proliferation of riverbank cultivation, as these areas seem to offer fertile, alluvial soils from degraded upland areas. All these lead to river sedimentation, water pollution and fish habitat alteration.

In the late 1990s, the Malawi government introduced a community participatory fisheries management programme, but which seem to have yielded little success in managing fisheries in Malawi. The paper discusses results from a recently conducted focus group discussion involving over 100 influential individuals involved in co-management of fisheries in rivers and lakes of Malawi. The complexity of managing natural resources including riverine resources in poverty-stricken communities is noted.

The objective of this paper is to highlight the dilemma in which farming communities fall having hard choices between conserving natural resources such as fish and obtaining food and income from natural resources.

The author makes the following observation:

• the interrelationships between poverty, low agricultural productivity and natural resource degradation in less-favoured areas (e.g. steep slopes) are well known
• co-management is widely seen as a way to curb the depletion of natural resources
• although the sample size, particularly on riverbank cultivation, was relatively low, the case studies presented in this paper show that at the height of poverty, the challenge to manage fisheries is great.