Management of tropical fisheries often fails because of a limited sectoral approach that disregards the livelihoods of small-scale fishermen. Fishermen are viewed as specialists, although many fisheries cannot provide an income that is large and stable enough to allow for such specialisation. The economic outcome of the enterprise is linked to the production patterns of the resource, and the dynamics of the resource affect the livelihood strategies of the people exploiting these resources. The limiting factors for specialisation in four enterprises exploiting natural resources (purse-seine fishery, sago extraction, nutmeg and clove cultivation) were studied in terms of size, patterns and uncertainty in production and income in the coastal community on Ambon and the Lease Islands (Moluccas, Indonesia). This was done for labourers and owners of fishing gear and land. Only owners of purse-seine vessels have sufficient mean income to maintain their families (27.5 rice equivalents per day), although the basic uncertainty in their daily income is extremely high (CV = 410%). For owners of the other three enterprises income is not enough to maintain a household, because of the small scale of the production units, being only tens of trees. For labourers, the daily incomes from fishing and sago extraction are too low (mean income = 3.2 and 4.1 rice equivalents per day) to maintain their households of six members at the poverty level (0.88 rice equivalents per capita per day), although both activities can be practised almost year round. Moreover, daily income for labourers from the fishery is highly uncertain because of the uncertainty in daily catches (CV = 220%), which is not reduced by price compensation. Although the sharing system reduces the basic uncertainty in the daily income of labourers, the resulting income is still highly uncertain, ranging from 0 to 78 rice equivalents per day (CV = 170%). Mean daily income from nutmeg and clove picking are several times higher (8.4 and 13.9 rice equivalents per day), but because of the limited temporal availability of these resources (roughly two months per year for both spices), they cannot provide enough income to maintain a household. The low income and high uncertainty for the labourers involved mean that the purse-seine fishery cannot provide a stable basic income: to stabilise it, other sources of income are needed. This has consequences for many characteristics of the fishery, such as the large proportion of part-time fishermen, the allocation of fishing effort and the type of technical innovations implemented in the fishery. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
