TITLE:
Safety Equipment in Artisanal Maritime Fishing in Gabon: Between Adaptation and the Weight of Socio-Cultural Logics at the Libreville Artisanal Fishing Center (CAPAL)
AUTHORS:
Aline Joëlle Lembe Bekale, Léandre Edgard Ndjambou
KEYWORDS:
Safety at Sea, Artisanal Fishermen, Fishing Site, Fishing Rites and Traditions
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.11 No.5,
May
26,
2023
ABSTRACT: Maritime
safety equipment allows to prevent and minimize the risks inherent to
navigation at sea. However, in the artisanal maritime fishery in Gabon,
fishermen are confronted with the major difficulty of the inaccessibility of
protective tools to carry out fishing trips in all peace of mind. The absence
of equipment to help maritime navigation poses the problem of insecurity in
which the various artisanal fishermen work, often victims of numerous accidents
at sea. This article aims at highlighting the difficulties of accessibility, by
the fishermen, of all the conventional protection tools recommended by the
administrations. In fact, the methodology used is based on the consultation of
official reports and publications on the subject, field observations and
semi-structured interviews with 110 actors. The results obtained reveal, on the
one hand, a plethora of conventional protective equipment required of fishing
vessels. On the other hand, they reveal the high cost of safety equipment which
creates, among the professionals concerned, a reluctance to acquire all of the
said tools and forces the interested parties to associate them very often with
the traditional procedures for rescue at sea.