Fresh caught...

What can be done to save the lobsters?

Local people organize for a greater say over their economic future

By Roger Hamilton, Corn Island, Nicaragua

Hugh Downs fondly remembers catching lobsters as a child. He would go before school, wading along the shore, scooping the tasty crustaceans out of water that barely came up to his knees. Later in the day he would load his traps in a dinghy and go a little further out. The traps would come up full, he recalled. In fact, lobsters would be crawling around the top trying to get in!

But catching lobsters is no longer child's play. It has become a difficult, and often dangerous, way to earn a living. Lobsters have been wiped out of near-shore areas, such as around Corn Island off the southern coast of Nicaragua, and fishing boats must pursue their quarry on distant reefs. Fishermen must use ever more traps to maintain the same catch level. Divers with air tanks scour the coral seascape, plucking lobsters from their hiding places.

Even though these waters scarcely register on the international consciousness, they are part of the global seafood industry. A lobster caught here goes from diver to dugout to mother boat to the storage depot, processor, cargo plane, and on and on, changing hands and increasing in value, until it ends up on a diner's plate in a restaurant in New York or Paris. Throughout the oceans of the world, global demand for seafood is decimating ecosystems. No place on earth, no matter how isolated, is immune.

Even in developed countries, science-based management plans and strict regulations have failed to protect fish stocks and safeguard the environment. In poor countries, with weak governmental institutions, nonexistent data and limited management capabilities, fisheries resources are largely at the mercy of those who would exploit them for short-term gain.

This is upsetting to Hugh Downs. As vice mayor of the municipality of Corn Island until last November, he knows that the health of the local economy depends on protecting fisheries resources. Even more, he feels local government should have a say in setting and enforcing regulations. It should also retain more of the money raised from license and concession fees, which now largely bypass local communities and go straight to the Nicaraguan capital.

Local fishermen call for more regulations. Up until now, local people along Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast have had little voice in deciding how the vital fishing industry should be managed. But this will now change, according to participants at a meeting on Corn Island of a newly formed fisherman's commission. At the meeting, small-scale fishermen, representatives of the fisheries industries and municipal officials all worked to come up with a unified set of positions aimed at influencing municipal and national government policy.

In former years, such an effort would have been doomed to failure, as individual interest groups tended to pursue narrow interests with little regard for cooperation or compromise. But now, an IDB-financed program to strengthen local government is giving new legitimacy to groups such as a fisherman’s commission.

The recent meeting was mostly conducted in Creole, which sounds familiar to someone who speaks English and Spanish, but is nonetheless unintelligible. So after the meeting, Henry Pineda, head of a fisherman's group, and several others, sat at a table in a grove of coconut palms to recapitulate the main points. The others went to fill up their bowls from a great black cauldron of fish stew. A radio played country and western songs, and the secretary from the municipality softly sang along.

The fishermen's complaint, said Pineda, was not that there are too many regulations, but rather that there are not enough. They insisted on the need for tough, well-enforced restrictions to protect the lobster. Although he called this year's catch "phenomenal," he said it could just be a natural fluctuation. "The government studies say that the lobsters are not overfished, but we see that overall, the fishery is down."

As a first step, the fishermen want lobster fishing to be banned during the February-March-April spawning period. But such a ban would have to apply to all fishermen, including foreign boats that operate on government-granted concessions. "We can live with the limitations, if they will save the fishery," said Pineda. "But if the law doesn't apply to everyone, why should we obey it?"

Furthermore, they want a fisheries law specifically designed to meet the needs of the Atlantic Coast. Past laws have not addressed local management issues. "I've got a stack of those fisheries laws in my closet," said Robert Chapman, another fisherman. One law proposed several years ago, he said, was a carbon copy of a Chilean law, with just the name of the country changed.

Diving for lobsters is another problem. The practice is encouraged by the big packinghouses because of its efficiency. But diving is hard on both the lobster population and the divers themselves.

Learning how to dive properly is a demanding and exacting process, where students spend many hours in the classroom and in the water learning safety procedures and the importance of top quality equipment. But the only teachers the Corn Island lobster fishermen have are each other. Their equipment is old and poorly maintained. They stay down too long, come up too fast. In short, in order to earn a living, they violate practically all of the rules of safe diving.

The price of poor diving practices, such as a too rapid ascent and decompression, is a crippling and sometimes fatal condition called "the bends." When a diver gets the bends, he must be immediately transported to a decompression chamber. But the only facility on the Atlantic Coast is in Puerto Cabezas, and the only reasonable way to get there quickly is by air, which makes the bends worse. Some of the fishermen said they wanted a decompression chamber in Corn Island, but Corn Island Mayor George Howard said a better alternative was to stop diving and use traps. The economic rewards of diving make it irresistible to poor people, however. It requires no capital investment, and large lobster processing companies supply the diving equipment. "The government can make laws," says Corn Island Mayor Howard, "but the big companies give them equipment, without taking responsibility. The government must hold the companies responsible, and it must encourage other ways of fishing."

The problem of financing. If a fisherman wants to stop diving for lobsters and instead use traps, he must buy a boat. Then he can join the fleet that leaves at 5 a.m., venturing out three to 15 miles, and set his traps: 50 to 150 if he has to haul them up by hand, up to 250 if he has a power winch.

But a boat, a sturdy aluminum panga, is expensive, costing as much as $6,000 on the Atlantic Coast, or double what it would go for in Managua. Likewise, a motor that sells for $3,000 in the capital doubles in price before it reaches the Corn Island consumer. As if the price inflation weren’t enough, local banks refuse to lend to small-scale fishermen.

So fishermen who need financing must go to a local seafood packing company, such as the Consorcio Pesquero Atlántico. Housed in a cluster of two-story buildings, the company buys not only lobster, but also shrimp and finfish. Despite its laid back appearance, the plant is run with military discipline, particularly as regards sanitary requirements established by the United States Department of Agriculture. One never knows when an inspector might show up.

Before stepping inside, even visitors must don white boots, a white smock, a white cap, remove all jewelry, even wedding rings, and walk through a concrete trough of disinfectant.

White-uniformed workers with specific responsibilities process the fish or shellfish, which are unloaded at the dock outside. Some flash freeze fish; others perform quality control checks on lobsters or grade shrimp. Different workers scrub floors and counters.

Upstairs, where dress is more casual, the visitor walks past clerical workers and is ushered into the office of Floyd Forbes, the company's genial executive vice president. His firm exports to the United States and Europe, its boxes of frozen lobster tails bearing the Celebrity brand label.

Although fishermen needing financing have little choice but to come to the company, Forbes insisted that his firm makes its money from profits on lobster, not by making loans. At any one time, he said, 200–300 fishermen who have received equipment from the company are busy paying it off with lobster. He added that many are debt free in 12 months.

Forbes believes that large firms like his and the small-scale fishermen share a common set of interests. For example, he strongly supports a closed season on lobster, as well as strict enforcement. Although lobster production has held up over the years, the amount of fishing effort expended to maintain catch levels has risen by eight or nine times over the past decade.

But back at the soup cauldron, small-scale fishermen like Corn Island's Robert Chapman are not so sanguine about the role of the big packing companies, particularly as regards financing. "If you get financing from a company, you have to sell to that company," he said. The ultimate answer, the meeting participants agreed, was for the government to step in and find a system for providing credit to people like him.

What happened to agriculture? Another alternative to diving–and to going out to sea at all–would be to remain on the island and farm. But here again, the problem is financing. According to the meeting participants, banks are only interested in putting money into coffee, cotton, and cattle, all of which are produced in the country's Pacific region, not on the Atlantic Coast.

Rincard Hunter, a big, jovial man with a hearty beard, said he would much prefer to till the soil than venture out in pursuit of lobsters. In fact, he said, 75 percent of people on the island once were farmers, growing fruits, vegetables, melons, and cassava. Others collected coconuts.

The island is blessed with excellent soil, he said. "We could grow tomatoes this big," he added, making a large circle with his thumbs and forefingers. Fresh fruits and vegetables would also help to support tourism, another industry that could relieve pressure on fisheries resources, he said.

Agriculture effectively came to an end on the island a number of years ago when a hurricane made landfall, wiping out the crops. Today, Hunter said, would-be farmers need credit and technical assistance to clear fields and resume planting. But he complains that the only action the government is taking on Corn Island in regard to agriculture is a study of an insect that carries disease from wild cotton to commercial fields. But the cotton is grown on the Pacific, not here. "On the island they have technicians, GPS, a jeep, a house, traps, but nothing for us," he said.

Hunter had a vision of an island of both farmers and fishermen, where financing would be available for people who wanted to work and produce, and where the natural resources on which they depended would be conserved for future generations. It's an ambitious vision, but the people of Corn Island will be working together with their local government to make it happen.

Date posted: May 2001