For 10 days in April I visited Bahía de Kino, an end-of-the-road fishing town on the Gulf of California two hours outside of Hermosillo, Mexico. I was on my ninth assignment for Rare as part of an ongoing project to collect stories about the Pride program and the diverse communities around the world where Rare works.
These gigs are dream assignments. By design I’m sent to far-off, environmentally important and culturally dynamic places. The visits are relatively long (compared to magazine assignments), and I am immediately embedded into the local communities—and sometimes their controversies. This visit in particular was one I’d been anticipating. I personally find the subject of sustainable fisheries fascinating, and I knew this job would be challenging professionally. The broad subject of food and agriculture has been a personal project of mine for nearly a decade, and I’m always eager to learn more about how our oceans also play into it all. But I was aware that even with the help of Rare and partner staff on the ground here, the fishermen wouldn’t necessarily welcome me and all my cameras.
Fisheries are perhaps the most tangled loose end of the expansive international conversation that has arisen around food systems. Moreover, this is a region of Mexico known for its independence—and that’s in a country where the reach and effectiveness of government regulation is uneven at best. Maybe more so than at any site I’ve visited to date, the Bahía de Kino is a place where the goal of having the community on board, participating in the solutions and taking responsibility for this resource, is not only desirable—it’s essential. The focus of this Pride campaign is specifically on commercial overfishing and the effort to balance the conservation needs of the San Pedro Mártir Island Biosphere Reserve and surrounding waters with the economic needs of Bahía de Kino. This town is an archetype for fishing communities up and down the coast—and in many ways around the world. If Pride has a positive impact here, it probably will work in many other places, too.
Threats to biodiversity here include overfishing and destructive fishing practices by both multinational fishing operations and local fishermen; inadequate resources at all levels for management and enforcement of existing regulations; and the chronic lack of any widely-understood, long-term vision for the fishery that considers both social and environmental sustainability. There are several good organizations working on these issues including Rare’s partner, the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), but the challenges are large. Most of the local fishermen are independent, not-always-completely-legal types, often uninterested in collaboration or organization. And resources for research and enforcement of rules are severely limited.
Like many fisheries in the world, the ecosystem in the Gulf of California is in collapse. Species ranging from sea cucumbers to endangered green turtles are increasingly endangered; at the same time, local fishermen are less able to make a living. Anecdotes abound from them about how the fishery was more bountiful in the past, and I heard them with more than merely sentimental frequency. Walking the tide line as the fishermen beached their boats in the early afternoon, I saw nets only partly full of small fish, and catch wells sloshing with skates, rays, and mullet—species previously considered bycatch that would have been tossed overboard. But now that the more desirable top-level predators have been fished out, these are all that remains. We are literally eating our way down the food chain.
I wandered the street where the signs say ‘Mercado de Pescado’ (fish market). These “markets” are makeshift, single-family roadside stands or the occasional family-run fishing cooperative (the extent of any commercial organization that I saw). At only one stand all week did I see any fish that weighed more than a pound or two—two prominently and proudly displayed large jacks. The rest of the markets’ offerings were invariably a mismatched assortment of smaller species plucked from further down the food chain.
Rare’s Pride program here is part of a much larger, complex approach that’s emblematic of what needs to happen throughout the Gulf and around the world if we are to have any hope of reviving collapsing fisheries and their associated communities. We need a plan that addresses both people and nature; we need new laws and regulations to help guide that plan; and we need better enforcement. Even more important, though, is creating an ethic of compliance by people who believe that conservation will help them.
Working out the shot list, in Bahía de Kino.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by RICHARD BEAVEN. RICHARD BEAVEN said: "eating our way down the food chain" powerful thought and work from @jasonbhouston http://tinyurl.com/23ymdrc [...]