On 2 October 2015 Brazil’s President, Dilma Roussef, announced major changes to overcome the problems of governance and corruption in the country, prompted by the scandal involving the petroleum company Petrobas. However, in the ensuing adminstrative reforms, fisheries have been accorded a low priority. The Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture will become extinct and its functions integrated into the Ministry of Agrobusiness, which is firmly in the hands of powerful landowners. This change means the downgrading of artisanal fishers and family agriculture, just as they were expected to gain importance as a result of the Voluntary Guidelines for Small-scale Fisheries adopted by the Committee of Fisheries (COFI) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) a year ago.
One million fishers and their families in Brazil have been forced to accept a reduction of social security benefits and loss of compensation for environmental services during the closed fishing season.
The Fisheries and Aquaculture Ministry was created by ex-president Lula as an extension of the special secretariat for fisheries, which became operational in 2003, as a reward to fishers who got him elected in 2002. However, instead of improving fisheries, there has been a total lack of management, fuelled by successive ministers, which resulted in 80% of fisheries (including lobsters) being labelled overexploited and in danger of collapse.
The network of fishers, aquaculture farmers, academia and civil society, organized under the name of Teia da Pesca Artesanal, is launching a campaign to lobby government to integrate fisheries and aquaculture into the Ministry of Agrarian Development, which is already carrying out many services for artisanal fishers aquaculture families and defends the concept of access to property and resource. Teia da Pesca Artesanal also believes that the management of aquatic resources should be under a co-management agreement with full stakeholder participation and under the co-ordination of the Ministry of Environment.
Negotiations on this agreement were the objective of a national seminar which took place in the capital Brasilia the week before the extinction of the ministry was announced. The integration of artisanal fisheries into the Ministry of Agrarian Development had been negotiated with the outgoing Minister Jader Barbalho, but it seems that once more, the fishers of Brazil have been left behind.