Cooperation as a survival strategy among west of Ireland small-scale mussel farmers

Both large and small-scale producers continue to operate in aquaculture, even if frequently the economic pressures on small fish farmers are immense and some branches of aquaculture (such as salmon rearing) have tended to organise on an ever-larger scale. How small producers have survived in Irish rope mussel aquaculture is the question posed in this paper. Based on 18 months of ethnographic study in the West of Ireland's Killary Harbour, the contribution that formal and informal cooperation has made to the persistence of small-scale mussel production is assessed. Although formal and informal forms of cooperation are by no means the only conditions of the persistence of small-scale production in the Killary site, they are shown to have critically improved the survival chances of individual producers and of groups of producers. What is also shown is that informal cooperation has significantly eclipsed formal cooperation since 2000.