The Mexican government is making a final effort to save the vaquita, a tiny porpoise that has been driven to the edge of extinction as a result of illegal fishing for another endangered species that is served as a delicacy in China.
Scientists say that fewer than 100 of the vaquita, a marine mammal, remain in its habitat, the northern Gulf of California. Several thousand fishermen working there depend on the yearly shrimp catch for a modest living.
The fishermen’s gillnets, stretching for miles across the sea, have long been a lethal threat to the vaquita, which become entangled in them and die. But over the past few years a new threat has emerged: illegal fishing for a large fish called the totoaba whose swim bladder is dried and cooked in soup in China, where some consumers believe it has medicinal properties. The vaquitas are also caught and killed in the nets set for totoaba.
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Shrimp fishermen and their long gillnets have been the focus of the effort to protect the vaquita in the northern Gulf of California.
San Felipe Journal: A Porpoise Is Ensnared by Criminals and NetsSEPT. 14, 2014
The government’s new policy, which Rafael Pacchiano Alamán, an under secretary in the Environment Ministry, announced on Friday, will ban gillnets for two years across 5,000 square miles of the upper gulf and compensate the fishermen for their lost catch.
The ban will take effect later in March, and the government will begin paying the first installments of $72 million in subsidies to fishermen and others who make their living from the shrimp catch. The payments will be spread over two years.
I really think that this is the last chance, and we had better get our act together, said Omar Vidal, the director of World Wildlife Fund Mexico, who said that more than two decades of efforts to save the vaquita had slowed but not halted its decline. I think the government is very serious.
The two-year moratorium on the use of gillnets will give researchers time to improve vaquita-safe nets that will catch enough shrimp to generate sufficient income for fishermen. Fishermen complain that the nets that are now available do not allow them to make enough money to feed their families.
Enforcement of the ban will be a bigger challenge. Officials have failed to enforce past limits on gillnet fishing, and boats regularly sneak into what had once been a small vaquita refuge of about 480 square miles.
The totoaba trade has raised the stakes. With swim bladders fetching as much as $10,000 a kilogram, organized crime is controlling the business, paying the fishermen, smuggling the fish bladders to California and shipping them to China.
Mr. Pacchiano said that the navy would work with environmental and fishing officials to stop illegal fishing and enforce the gillnet ban. Drones, satellites and a fleet of patrol boats will help enforce it, he said.
The federal government’s initiatives are positive, but more is needed, said Silvia Díaz of Greenpeace Mexico.
Conservationists called for additional measures, like a broader development plan for fishing communities to promote tourism.
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