From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

3 POVERTY AND WEALTH LIVING OFF THE LANDcountries to try to manage the resource through licences andpermits, rather than seek ever larger catches. 43The Philippines, home to between one and two million fishers, ispiloting an alternative approach known as community-basedcoastal resource management (CB-CRM), whereby fishingcommunities are responsible for restoring ecosystems,patrolling fisheries, and monitoring impact. CB-CRM builds ona long tradition of organisation at both local and national levels.Started by the Filipino association Kilusang Mangingisda, whichis now a nationwide movement with approximately 400,000members, the CB-CRM approach has spread across South-EastAsia.With numbers and organisation came influence, and in 1996 thePhilippines government revised the fisheries law, establishingmunicipal jurisdiction over fishing grounds and creating municipalcouncils where government agencies and representatives offishing communities now discuss and agree on local fisheriesmanagement provisions. 44 Local fishers have seen a halt in thedecline of their catches, and in some cases even a recovery,though overfishing remains a problem.Source: L. van Mulekom (2007) ‘Reflections on Community Based Coastal ResourcesManagement (CB-CRM) in the Philippines and SE Asia’, Oxfam International internalpaper.GREEN REVOLUTION REDUXModernising and improving on largely traditional techniques forploughing, sowing, and harvesting is a mainstay of developmentpractice, and certainly part of the answer to the plight of small farmersand to the rising global demand for food. Some observers placeenormous hopes in the technological revolution under way in thelaboratories of universities and global corporations, trusting in arepeat of the phenomenal increase in agricultural productivity in Asiain the 1960s and 1970s known as the ‘Green Revolution’.The Green Revolution stemmed from two parallel initiatives.Better known is the widespread adoption of new rice and wheatvarieties, combined with the use of chemical fertiliser in largely irrigated127