Case study: Coastal zone management in Western Samoa

Fishing has always been an important subsistence activity in western Samoa. Referring to Samoa's marine fish resource Kramer (1888) wrote ‘naturally,there are fishes throughout the whole year,for the sea is as inexhaustible as the land'. How much truth this statement holds for the present is open to speculation.Jordan and Searle(quoted in grattan 1948)referred to samoa’s fish fauna as one of the richest on the globe.This may have been true in the past but is not a so now.Gilson(1970) writes that ‘Consdiering the samoan pattern indeed to have provided, in the past,an ideal basis for comfortable and convient settlement.