Impact of Fishing BoatCraft and Gear Combinations Operating in Coastal Fishery on Fisher Income in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Coastal fishery is an important sub-sector of the fisheries sector in the country. Coastal fishproduction in 2012 was 257,540 Mt and its contribution to the total marine fish productionwas around 62%. More than 100,000 fishers are engaged in the coastal fishery sub-sectorwho represent more than 50% of the fishers of the country. There are several types of fishingboats/crafts and gears are used in the coastal fishery. This study has been done to examinevariation in the per fisher income by different craft and gear combinations used in the coastalfishery. The study was conducted in 2012 and the sampling frame confined to outboard fibrereinforced plastic boats (OFRP), outrigger canoes (Oru), log rafts (Teppam) and motorizedtraditional crafts (Wallam). The sample selection was done by application of randomsampling and data collection carried out administering structured questionnaires. A totalnumber of 150 of above mentioned fishing boats/crafts of five fishing districts in theSouthern and West coast were subjected to this study. Two hypotheses were tested under thisstudy: 1. There is no difference in per fisher income of different fishing crafts (H0:μ1=μ2=μ3=μ4) 2. There is no difference in per fisher profit according to fishing gears (H0:μ1=μ2=μ3=μ4). The collected data were analysed using SPSS software and considered αlevel was 0.05 for the test. Calculated F value for the first hypothesis was 1.94 (P=0.107)which indicated that the Null hypothesis of the first test can’t be rejected. It means the perfisher income does not change acoording to the fishing boats/crafts. The calculated F valuefor the second hypothesis was 2.50 (P=0.009) which explained that the Null hyposthesis ofthe second hypothesis can be rejected. It means that the per fisher profit will be changedacoording to fishing gears used in the coastal fishery. According to the mean seperation itwas proven that the fishers who use trawl lines and bottom long lines earned higher profitsthan the fishers who use other fishing gears.