Biology of Marine Organisms and Biomimetics

Marine fisheries resources cannot indefinitely meet the growing demand exerted by humans. From 1950 to 1988, the production of capture fisheries increased from 20 to 90 million tons per year then, despite an intensified fishing effort, this production stagnated at 90 million tons/year reflecting the maximum limit reached of what can be provided by our oceans. At the same time, the overexploitation of natural fish stocks increased from 10% to 34% between 1974 and 2017. Coastal fish stocks are decreasing drastically and impacting the standard of living of artisanal fishing communities. Artisanal fishermen represent 2/3 of fishermen in the world. The reduction in fish resources caught by artisanal fishermen is a global problem and can be highlighted by the drastic reduction in the volume of products caught daily. This decrease affects both fished invertebrates and fish. Maricultures and in particular artisanal maricultures constitute a sustainable alternative to fishing. Marine aquaculture production has increased fivefold since 1980 and represents approximately a third of the tonnage caught by fishing. The development of artisanal maricultures around the world is quite recent. In Madagascar, village farming was developed in the early 2000s. It is practiced by both women and men. In the area targeted by this project (Toliara region, southwest of Madagascar), sea cucumber village farming today represents 226 farms involving 307 families of village fishermen on more than 300 km of coastline and village seaweed farming is practiced by 1,700 fishing families (around 3,500 villagers). Spiruliculture, for its part, has given rise to some 30 private Malagasy companies and emerging coral farming is being implemented on a trial basis in a few villages. The success of the Malagasy model is internationally recognized and the demand to transpose this model to other countries is significant. To respond to this request, various actions were carried out. As non-exhaustive examples, consultations in sea cucumber farming and village farming were carried out in Nosy Ankao and Nosy Ve (Madagascar), in the Seychelles, in the Sultanate of Oman, in Rodrigues and St Brandon (Mauritius), in Colombia, in Mayotte and New Caledonia (France). In these countries, this work has sometimes led to the consolidation of research into these maricultures but none has led to the development of financially independent private firms or to obvious positive impacts on coastal villagers. The reasons for the lack of effectiveness of the transfer of skills are varied: they can be due to biological problems (for example poor practice in the growth of the aquacultured organism), agronomic (poor "scaling-up" of the technique), economic (for example poor calculation of profitability or bad business plan) and/or sociological (for example poor understanding of the structure of the targeted communities, poor supervision of mariculturists). After discussing it with several requesting countries, the idea of training in Madagascar for representatives of foreign entities interested in good practices of these maricultures and village farming is unanimously perceived as an essential step that is part of the solution to these problems. Training relating to certain specific artisanal maricultures (such as, for example, shellfish farming) already exists in the world, but there is no training relating to generalities relating to artisanal maricultures, nor any training covering the specificities of village farming and four maricultures developed in Madagascar.