A fight to put artisanal fishers on the map

By: Anita Makri

In August 2015, the government of Costa Rica received a letter from a tiny fishing community on the northern Caribbean coast.

Nestled between Tortuguero National Park and the Nicaragua border, the community of Barra del Colorado — some 2,000 people — have been quietly making a living out of shrimp fishing for generations.

The letter took issue with a 2013 constitutional vote to a ban trawling — a fishing method that can damage marine environments by pulling along undesired fish species and destroying habitats at the ocean bottom.

投票目标工业和半工业拖网运营。But it made no exception for fishers operating at a smaller scale, to catch fish for food or to sell locally for a basic income. For Barra del Colorado and similar communities, it meant losing the legal right to their only livelihood, and a way of life.

“在这个地方，这是我们唯一能做的工作，”利吉亚·梅吉亚·古兹曼（Ligia Mejia Guzman）巧妙地清洁了当天的捕获，虾的虾。这项工作占据了社区中大多数女性，没有社会保障，随着酸磨损的皮肤，手指流血，每天在美好的一天中赚取大约20,000 colones（35美元） - 在两个短钓鱼季节年。她从小就学会了它，就像其他人一样，她对此表示感谢。


这封信标志着为钓鱼许可证而战的开始，今天仍在继续。该社区的盟友之一是Coopesolidar R.L，这是一个当地的非政府组织，促进了建立共识的政策过程 - 涉及政府机构，非政府组织和所有生产性捕鱼部门的全国性对虾的可持续对话。

“我们一直在处理冲突grassroots level, very serious conflicts, trying to get an equilibrium between marine conservation and the sustainable use of these resources that bring development to a lot of people,” says Vivienne Solis Rivera, a biologist with CoopeSoliDar.

The NGO is working in Barra del Colorado to build the community’s capacity to reclaim their licence. That means research, workshops, getting organised to have a voice in policy discussions — work that Solis Rivera says in recent years has had a boost from a new addition to the toolbox: a set ofInternational Guidelines on Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheriesadopted by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in June 2014.

The product of a long consultation with over 4,000 stakeholders from over 120 countries, the guidelines are “the first international instrument dedicated entirely to the immensely important — but until now often neglected — small-scale fisheries sector”,according to FAO。They emphasise the rights of artisanal fishers and offerguiding principles for governance and developmentof the sector.

Costa Rica is by no means unique in overlooking small-scale fisheries. But FAO believes it is the only country to make the guidelines, which are voluntary, a part of itsnational development plan。这使它变得如此a case the UN agency is keen to watch。

Troubled waters

这项努力引起了争议，与该国强大的保护动力直接发展，该国的四分之一领土被指定为受保护的土地。

索利斯·里维拉（Solis Rivera）说：“与环境议程发生了真正的beplay足球体育的微博冲突。”她认为，这些准则为此增加了至关重要的配重：对于Coopesolidar和国家渔业管理机构，Incopesca手头就意味着社区的担忧变得更大。他们给小渔民一个存在。她说，这使他们破坏了。

According to Nicole Franz, a fishery planning analyst who leads FAO’s work on the guidelines, such conflicts aren’t unusual. “We do see that at times there are tensions”, she says, citing a lack of dialogue between the agencies and NGOs leading the different agendas. Her hope is that the guidelines offer a “basis for constructive collaboration”.

At a meeting convened by FAO last year at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, delegates from around the world agreed to work towards indicators to monitor implementation of the guidelines through pilot projects.

Solis Rivera, who took part in the meeting, believes the guidelines can make a difference by “concretizing” a range of issues relevant to policy that affects small fishers. “When the guidelines were approved [in Costa Rica], we were able to really get a tool that could be used to provide more inputs of the need of this approach that considers human rights as the main backbone of conservation,” she says.

The fishermen who take their boats out a few kilometres away from Barra del Colorado, just where the mouth of Rio Colorado meets the Caribbean sea, catch only the amount of shrimp they can sell to middlemen in the area, plus a small percentage each for their families.

They ‘know’ that their nets don’t drag along as much fauna as other trawlers. Yet it takes studies to persuade Costa Rica’s government — and that’s what the community has set out to do, with help from CoopeSoliDar.

Solis Rivera says the guidelines have helped secure the time and money needed to do the research. Since February, through a temporary ‘research licence’, the men have continued to fish legally while gathering information about the sustainability of their practices.

That licence is due to expire soon. At a meeting last week, the community heard that early results of a study commissioned by CoopeSoliDar are promising.

Hanging in the balance

关于拖网的证据，索利斯·里维拉（Solis Rivera）说，魔鬼在细节上：在某些情况下，半工业捕鱼的破坏性比一群小型拖网渔船较小。她认为答案不是要完全禁止拖网，而是要管理它并查看每种情况的细节。

“Trawling by small boats along the coast is indeed different from trawling by large industrial boats,” says Tony Charles, a professor and research fellow at Saint Mary's University in Canada, and Director of the Community Conservation Research Network. He agrees that the right approach is a mix of measures depending on the fisheries, species and what works in a particular area.

Jesús Chavez, president of the fishermen’s association and lead signatory on the letter that protested the ban, says “the conditions in the Caribbean are very different [from elsewhere in the country], and the productive activity is very different”.

Jorge Jiménez is director of MarViva, one of the local conservation NGOs that favours the trawling ban. “There is no evidence that grants an exception,” he says, adding that research clearly shows the technique harms the environment as well as the resource that artisanal fishers depend on.

Jiménez says conservation should be focused on the long-term well-being of communities, but argues this cannot be built on destruction of marine resources. “A revision of existing fishing practices … providing better prices for [fishers’] products … and ensuring the well-being of the ecosystem is the balance we need to achieve.”

查尔斯说，可以训练渔民切换到新方法 - 但是，如果拖网是唯一的方法，那么妥协和与他们一起减少影响很重要。他说：“不能通过一项行动来实现保护”。“政府是否应该在拖网禁令中如此僵化，以伤害那些最了解沿海海洋栖息地的人，并且最有可能关心保护鱼类和海洋的人？这似乎不是最好的道路。”

Information and power

Other communities are also struggling to get an official licence to fish. A group of women mollusc gatherers in Chomes, a fishing community of some 3,000 people on the country’s Pacific coast, have secured a licence for just one of the four species they can harvest.

CoopeSoliDar的帮助下,they’re now organised, routinely recording data on the mollusc species in their mangroves.

The idea is to capture knowledge that then feeds into policy discussions. “We really need to generate information that is clear to them [the community], that is simple, that is in their own language, and that they can manage to improve their resources,” says Marvin Fonseca-Borrás, a geographer with CoopeSoliDar.

Back in Barra del Colorado, Fonseca-Borrás is leading a discussion with fishermen and an environment ministry official over a map that captures the community’s knowledge of marine areas and fish species.

他说：“海洋空间规划技术可能是我们必须与渔民交流的最强大的工具。”“它提供了有关海洋生态系统生物多样性的信息，但它也使我们减少不同参与者之间的差异。它使我们能够找到可行的解决方案，以应对结合保护和发展的挑战。”

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This article wassupportedby洛克菲勒基金会贝拉吉中心。近60年来，贝拉​​吉奥中心（Bellagio Center）支持人们通过其会议和居住计划在全球范围内改善贫穷和弱势群体的生活，并一直是变革性思想，倡议和合作的催化剂。

From November 5 – December 3, 2018, the Bellagio Center will host a special thematic residency onScience for Development, with a cohort of up to 15 scholars, practitioners, and artists whose work is advancing, informing, communicating, or is inspired by the use or design of science and technology to address social and environmental challenges around the world.