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A diver in Ancón, near Lima, Peru lands an octopus. Photo: Walter Wust
Peru is the second-largest fishing nation in the world after China, and home to one of the world’s largest single stock fisheries – the anchoveta. In 2018, after a shift to rights-based management, its industrial fishery was one of the first in the world to make its vessel location (VMS) data available to the public in order to root out illegal fishing and improve management.Then late last year, small coastal fisheries began introducing the use of property rights to increase their accountability and productivity, which is important because they feed much of the country.
In 2018, the government of Peru overhauled the management of the industrial anchoveta fishery, with the help of the World Bank. by implementing a cap and trade, rights-based approach based on quotas set by a scientific body and then assigned to individual companies. But to do the same thing in the small coastal fisheries was a much greater challenge. There had been explosive growth in the number of vessels and fishers — according to Peru’s Ministry of Production, the numbers increased by over 640% between 1995-2015. Their proposed rights-based regulation for coastal fisheries covers more than 80 species which needed better management because the free-for-all fisheries combined with so much more fishing effort led to a steady decline or collapse of many dietary staples like scallops, clams, mussels, crabs, and octopus that thrive in Peru’s deep coastal waters. Renu Mittal of the Walton Family Foundation’s ocean program said of the improved coastal fisheries management, “[i]n a country whose fisheries are culturally important and recognized around the world, Peru will stand out as an example of how to manage fisheries sustainably.”
This week, we have featured this series of videos by the Environmental Defense Fund about the impacts climate change is having on the ocean as observed by the people who live and work there — fishermen and women. Their stories have been compelling and provided a sense of the ways that climate change is harming and shifting global fish stocks.
Why This Matters: On Tuesday, pursuant to President Biden’s climate executive order, NOAA announced: “an agency-wide effort to gather initial public input” on “how to make fisheries, including aquaculture, and protected resources more resilient to climate change.
It’s not just men in the fishing sector who are impacted by climate change, overfishing, and COVID-19 — women are too. Women like Alexia Jaurez of Sonora, Mexico, who is featured in this Environmental Defense Fund video, do the important work of monitoring the catch and the price, and most importantly determining how many more […]
By Ashira Morris, ODP Staff Writer Last summer, Florida created its first aquatic preserve in over 30 years. The Nature Coast Aquatic Preserve protects about 400,000 acres of seagrass just north of Tampa on Florida’s Gulf coast. These are part of the Gulf of Mexico’s largest seagrass bed and borders other existing preserves, creating a […]
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