Against the backdrop of Belize’s reputation for holding one of the Caribbean’s most progressive legal frameworks for sustainable fishing, a newly released independent audit has uncovered deep systemic flaws that put the nation’s $28 million annual fishing sector and thousands of coastal livelihoods at growing risk. The 2025 Belize Fisher’s Audit, carried out by global sustainable fisheries nonprofit Ocean Outcomes as a five-year follow-up to the organization’s first 2021 industry assessment, analyzed 29 key metrics spanning fisheries policy, wild fish stock health, and the sector’s socio-economic footprint in Belize.
While the audit offered clear praise for the 2020 Fisheries Resources Act, framing the legislation as a robust, forward-thinking model for balancing environmental protection and industry activity, it warned that translating that strong legal framework into on-the-ground effective management remains far from complete. The most pressing gap identified is the chronic lack of systematic, standardized data on catches and landed fish across nearly all commercial species targeted in Belize’s waters. Without consistent, reliable reporting protocols, national fisheries regulators lack the information needed to accurately monitor the health of fish populations, set science-based harvest limits, and keep the public updated on the sector’s status. This lack of data is already problematic, with the audit noting that a number of high-value key species are already showing early signs of overexploitation.
The risks of failing to address these gaps are enormous for Belize’s economy. The national fishing industry contributes approximately $28 million Belize dollars to the national economy each year, directly employing more than 3,300 people across coastal communities and supporting a total of up to 20,000 indirect and direct jobs. Yet beyond data gaps, it is the systemic exclusion of working fishermen from industry governance that sparked the most pointed criticism during the public unveiling of the audit findings.
Speaking at a launch panel, Jorge Aldana, president of the San Pedro Fisher Folk Association, emphasized that working small-scale fishermen have been effectively locked out of the decision-making processes that directly determine the future of their livelihoods. “Fishermen have limited space in the decision-making process. In the national council, where fishermen are represented, we only have two seats, and those representatives are hand-picked by ministers or policymakers, not elected by actual working fishermen,” Aldana explained. “We the fishermen, from our 22 national associations, need to have an active role in selecting who speaks for us, so the real concerns of people working on the water can be heard.”
To pull the sector back from growing risk, the audit lays out a series of urgent recommendations: improving cross-sector management transparency, expanding access to low-interest concessionary financing for small-scale independent fishers, and ensuring that local community and working fisher voices are meaningfully included in upcoming decisions on fish stock rebuilding, a process that is set to move forward in the near term.