Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT: Caribbean Calls on World to Help Save Conch Fishery

Dionne Jackson Miller

MONTEGO BAY, Jun 18 2003 (IPS) - Caribbean fisheries experts are urgently calling for more international regulations to protect one of the world’s largest conch reserves from relentless assaults by poachers.

”One of the most pressing problems that we face today is the scourge of illegal fishing,” Jamaican Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke recently told delegates at a regional conch conference here.

”The impact of these activities has now passed the point of crisis proportions.”

The extent of poaching is forcing the Jamaican government to severely curtail local fishers’ allowable catch for the soft-bodied mollusc, a delicacy for seafood lovers.

Much of the world’s supply comes from the region, Verdin Brown, chairman of the Puerto Rico-based Caribbean Fisheries Management Council, told IPS.

”The major users are the United States and France … a lot of it goes into the European continent,” he added.

A 1999 report estimated that Jamaica earned 8-12 million dollars a year from the fishery and Belize 1.1 million dollars (in 1998). The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands also have significant conch fisheries.

But Jamaican experts say that poachers, mainly from the Dominican Republic and Honduras, now net at least one-third of the annual catch.

The country’s total allowable catch was set at 502 tonnes for the 2002-2003 fishing season, although a December 2002 survey actually showed that 900 tonnes of conch could be harvested sustainably.

”However, it was estimated that some 300-400 metric tonnes would be lost to poachers. Consequently we were left with no other choice but to reduce the total allowable catch available to our nationals to 502 metric tonnes. In effect, we have allocated some 400 metric tonnes to poachers,” Clarke said.

The region’s fisheries officials are already sharing information about the problem and are now considering regional management strategies, such as harmonising closed seasons – periods when fishing is prohibited – to allow stocks to regenerate.

The experts are also pinning much of their hope for sustainable management on the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a global agreement that governs trade in listed species with a permit system.

CITES Species are listed on one of three appendices: appendix 1 – those threatened with extinction, which can be traded only in exceptional circumstances; appendix two – species not necessarily threatened with extinction but whose trade must be controlled to prevent unsustainable exploitation; and appendix three – species protected in at least one country, which has requested help in controlling the trade.

Queen conch is listed on appendix two, and import and export of it from or into countries that are party to CITES requires a permit. Major conch markets like the United States, and France are all party to CITES.

In addition to the permit system, CITES needs to insist that member countries carry out conch abundance surveys, which would scientifically establish their abundance, and how much of the mollusc countries could harvest sustainably, says Jamaican Director of Fisheries Andre Kong.

”Once a quota is set based on that scientific information, there would be no enticement for these countries to come to other countries and illegally fish their conch (and) the level of poaching would be significantly reduced because they cannot export it,” he said in an interview.

Regional law enforcement officials are always on the look-out for poachers, but Brown acknowledges that Caribbean countries have limited resources, which limits the effectiveness of enforcement efforts. Although they have requested assistance from the United States, officials and experts believe that regulation of exports will be more effective.

”Poachers try to take advantage of those openings when they know they can take a fast boat or a large boat into (sparsely) populated waters where they can take sizeable quantities of conch take it back to their countries, process it, and (export it). That’s why we bring CITES into the process,” Brown says.

Chairman of the Gillings Gully Fisherman’s Cooperative, Havelan Honeghan, says that poaching on Pedro Banks, which contains the bulk of Jamaica’s conch reserves, is having a significant impact on the size of the catch.

”No small boat is able to come in (from the Pedro Banks) now with more than 1,500 pounds of conch,” he says. ”That would represent maybe 30 percent of what he could have done three years ago over the same period (about a week of fishing) … it’s a massive reduction.”

Honeghan also notes that smaller export quotas mean less work for the small fishers who supply exporters with conch, and who are now harvesting for about three months of the year, compared to the five or six months of conch fishing they would have done just a few years ago.

Aside from poaching, Jamaica’s conch fishery is already threatened by over-fishing. In 1993-94, for example, an estimated 3,000 tonnes of conch were harvested, prompting biologists to warn of the fishery’s possible collapse, and leading to the development of the current management regime.

Failure to ensure sustainable harvesting could have painful consequences. The commercial conch fishery in the south Florida area was closed in 1975 because of over-fishing, and the recreational fishery closed there a decade later.

”Because of the demand for the resource for consumption, not only within the region but without the region, particularly in the United States, it is less and less sustainable at the levels that it has been harvested in the past,” Brown says.

In an effort to tackle poaching and sustainable management on a regional level, the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council launched the International Queen Conch Initiative in 1996. It led to the Declaration of San Juan, which is based on a regional co-operative approach to manage reserves. (END/IPS/CA/EN/SC/DJM/ML/03)