Paper short abstract:

I argue here that one moral imperative – the maintenance of food security from fisheries – has been retrofitted and subordinated to another – the preservation of coral reef species for their intrinsic and aesthetic values. This moral hierarchy misleads scientific and development aid discourse.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I argue that the western environmentalist ideology of the conservation biology community has in the past two or so decades influenced tropical coastal fishery management discourse and research in ways that divert scientific attention away from a fundamentally agricultural aspect of fishery production - the availability of nutrients. In much recent scientific literature, concerns about fishery-based 'food security' have been retrofitted, using a win-win argument, to an a priori western preservationist agenda which is based on the 'cumulative intrinsic value' of the large numbers of coral and other species that comprise Indo-Pacific coral reef ecosystems - a system of valuation that means little to most subsistence and artisanal fishers. An unacknowledged problem with this idea is that corals, which prefer to live in clear, nutrient-poor waters, transmit very little of their primary production to fishery production. Consequently coral reefs, while they support large numbers of species, and can also support a high standing biomass of fish, are generally comparatively unproductive systems, especially compared to comparatively species-poor and aesthetically unappealing estuaries, lagoons and coastal waters receiving high input of nutrients from coastal runoff or upwellings. I argue that the subordination of one moral framework - fishery production and food security - to another which is based on the western-scientific intrinsic and aesthetic values of coral reefs, misleads both scientific and policy discourse, and I illustrate with a case study from Solomon Islands, and an overview of fishery production in the Indo-Pacific region.