Aim: The project “Fish for food security in city regions of India and Ghana: an interregional innovation project (Fish4Food)” studies the food systems that serve low-income consumers in selected city regions of South Asia (India) and West Africa (Ghana), with the aim of improving their quality and scope.
Objectives: To recognize new knowledge on emerging issues in food security. The Fish4Food project aligns with this objective by realizing new knowledge, products, practices, and policies at various levels of the low-price fish chain (from local to international) that improve food and nutritional security of the urban poor.
Method: The project has two aims namely, first to understand the present state of fisheries-related food security in selected city regions; the second one is to find innovation to improve food security through fisheries. The project makes use of a mixed-methods approach.
Reference: Link
The article titled “Whose sea is it anyway” was developed in the context of the Global Challenges Programme (GCP) Fish4Food project, a collaboration between Dutch, Indian and Ghanaian academics and practitioners, that aims to collect data, analyze them and improve low-price fish chains in West Africa and South Asia.
Since 2016 Amrita University has been collaborating on this project involving two countries; Ghana and India. The objective of this research is to investigate the flow of fish to the urban low-income communities through the marketplaces. This project is funded by the Netherlands organization for scientific research (NWO) for the period 2016 to 2021, having a budget of 750 thousand Euros. This project is headed by Dr. Maarten Bavinck, University of Amsterdam. Amrita University is the nodal partner in conducting research in India.
Dr Amalendu Jyotishi (then working at Amrita university) spearheaded the project and lead the research and data collection work in India from Amrita university. Dr Priya Gupta of Amrita University is a collaborator in this project since 2019, researching fish consumption behavior among low-income households in Chennai and Bangalore.The aforementioned article was published in the State of India’s Environment 2019 report by Dr. Joeri Scholtens (AISSR, UvA) and Prof. Amalendu Jyotishi (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India). Oceans and fisheries are increasingly framed as a domain of looming problems, like pollution, climate change, and overfishing, or booming opportunities for so-called “blue growth”. Both these framings tend to overshadow the fact that for hundreds of millions of poor people across the globe, fish and fisheries are foremost a source of livelihood and affordable nutritious food. The article describes how India’s fisheries are passing through a critical phase where the relation between production, livelihood, and consumption reflects various trends of concern.
