Co-creating a fisherwomen-led business empowerment model for sustainable seafood value chains and transformations: Takeaways from India

This study integrated perspectives from coastal women in Alappad, Kerala, and literature on marine fisheries in India to propose a sustainable fisherwomen-led seafood value chain (SVC) model. Findings revealed that the increasing value and demand for India’s seafood products could promote sustainable blue foods and livelihood empowerment. This will depend on increasing opportunities and sustainability practices in the SVC, notably fisherwomen’s empowerment, inclusion, and stakeholder collaboration. Unfortunately, current actors’ interactions, production patterns, and linear operations perpetuate unsustainable trade-offs that are dominantly segmented by fisherwomen, including price manipulation and volatility, seafood waste, and overfishing. These extinguish the critical and often undervalued fisherwomen’s role towards better SVC practices. Through the triple-layer business model approach, this study demonstrates that fisherwomen’s empowerment could promote circularity and increase consumer-producer benefits, including offering flexible seafood products and services. To strengthen this, we propose a fisherwomen seafood customers’ choices App and dashboard to serve as an indicative platform for strengthening fisherwomen-led businesses, customer demand-supply choices, and preferences. We argue that as coastal fisherwomen offer multidimensional SVC services, digitalized and strengthened fisherwomen-led enterprises can strengthen blue transformation targets, including seafood safety, local communities’ nutrition, and security. Without win-win SVC practices, sustainable fisheries practices might not be realized.