Sustaining Food Production: Fisheries Management Options for Lake Ardibo, Northern Ethiopia

Lake Ardibo is one of the important freshwater lakes in northern Ethiopia and today it supports many fishers and their families, who are directly depend on the lake fishery for their protein food source and income generation. The open nature of the fishery resource and high unemployed youth participation in the fishing activity is urgent call and in the long term the lake fishery may become overexploited and collapse so there is a need to introduce some management options for the lake by assessing the current condition using fishermen and key expert interviews as well other secondary data assessment and after this using simple excel sheet and expert analysis were used to compile this paper. Hence based on the analyzed data and observation the fishermen are welling to practice licensing, mesh size regulation, gear restriction and closed season in lake Ardibo fishery. Finally, the researcher recommend that the fishermen should aware about the fish stock resource condition i.e. their market size of the fish, breeding season, area and practices for the sustainable food production from the lake and lastly the regional fishery proclamation should be enforced and applied on the ground