Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in the wet season (November to April) but many people were involved
all year round. The food available in the local market was very limited
and imported shop-bought food was prohibitively expensive, so most
people relied on food grown in their
machambas
for the bulk of their food,
with i sh or shelli sh providing the animal protein. The
machambas
were
constantly being expanded into the few remaining areas of forest and
scrub by slash and burn clearing methods. On Inhaca Island in southern
Mozambique this method has produced land that is high in nutrients
for the i rst year of cultivation but that soon becomes poor in nutrients
and becomes impossible to cultivate after 15 years (Serra King, 1995).
Erosion is also a problem in land cleared by slash and burn, and this may
be something that will impact on the coastal habitats. The cash economy
was very limited so there were few shops and it was virtually impossible
to buy a meal or cooked food of any kind in the village, so there were few
opportunities in service jobs. This situation may be typical of a largely
cashless economy for poor rural Mozambicans. In Tanzania many rural
areas are much more developed and there are more opportunities for jobs
with regular salaries and cash (Andersson and Ngazi, 1998). Street food
is common and provides an extra employment opportunity. There was no
tourist industry mainly because of the inaccessibility of the island and the
lack of basic infrastructure.
The gender roles in the i shery at Quirimba were fairly typical of those
found in tropical artisanal i sheries around the world. Women throughout
East Africa, South East Asia and the South Pacii c glean intertidal l ats
for invertebrates and the i shery for i sh is dominated by men (Palau -
Matthews and Oiterong, 1995; South East Asia - Bailey and Pomeroy,
1996; Kenya - Juma, 1998). Although the biology of the women's inver-
tebrate i shery was not included in the present study and can be found
in Barnes et al. (1998), the socioeconomics were studied to some extent.
Women collected the three main species of mollusc on the intertidal
(mainly
Thalassia hemprichii
) and upper subtidal seagrass beds (mainly
Enhalus acoroides
).
The community on Quirimba utilized a wide variety of resources.
Although seine net i shing in the seagrass beds was the main single
employer, most households used a wide range of sources of subsistence
food and additional income, typically a mixture of men's income from
i shing by net or trap, food from the
machambas
grown predominantly
by women, invertebrates gleaned from the seagrass intertidal by women
and some additional invertebrates collected by children. Consequently,
although many people were involved in the seagrass-based i sh and inver-
tebrate i shery very few people, except maybe some boat owners, were
entirely reliant on the seagrass i shery. As Bailey and Pomeroy (1996)
