En un día soleado en la playa parada frente al mar contemplo el ambiente. Me dispongo a comenzar mi recorrido y a lo lejos diviso unas escaleras. Sí, me encuentro en Tres Palmas y el buen clima combinado con la calidez de la playa invita a las personas a recrearse en el litoral. Es un día perfecto para que los usuarios puedan hacer “snorkeling” o quizás prefieran remar sobre una tabla, tal vez se les antoje bucear o simplemente recolectar varios cristales marinos a través de una caminata placentera.

Es sin duda un pedazo de costa versátil. No solo se mantiene en su acostumbrado oleaje leve que rompe en la orilla y que permite hacer todas y cada una de las actividades recreativas mencionadas anteriormente, sino que también en temporada de invierno o en eventos atmosféricos específicos provee la plataforma para hacer el tan aclamado deporte de las olas.

Es un paraíso en miniatura, donde puedes desde relajarte hasta experimentar la mística experiencia de correr una ola si las condiciones del tiempo lo permiten. Es un paraíso donde tanto locales como extranjeros (mayormente) convergen para vivir la naturaleza de una forma más personal. Encontramos desde familias hasta parejas e individuos (en su mayoría) que disfrutan de cada una de las posibilidades que ofrece el litoral. Al entrar en contacto con la costa inmediatamente percibes la conciencia de muchos usuarios sobre la importancia que tiene recoger la basura. Letreros coloridos hechos a mano anuncian, tanto en inglés como español, la necesidad de mantener la playa limpia.

Este cuadro no es sorpresivo. Son todos estos elementos agrupados los que te hacen sentir que de verdad estás en un paraíso. La playa te invita a que disfrutes sus distintos usos generosamente y simultáneamente nace un deseo genuino de mantenerla como ella merece. Todo sea para mantener el ambiente en perfecto estado para volver a “snorkear”, remar sobre una tabla, caminar por el litoral o tomar el sol. Todo sea para poder nuevamente volver a contemplar una puesta de sol más y guardarla en nuestra memoria (mental o digital) en el paraíso de los atardeceres.

Esta artículo es el segundo de una serie de observaciones sistemáticas que se están llevando a cabo en Rincón para conocer los usos recreativos que el público le da al litoral rincoeño.

Nada nuevo bajo el sol, ya que hay bastante evidencia sobre el incremento en el consumo de pescado en los países desarrollados y la extracción de los abastos en los países menos desarrollados. Basta con darle una mirada a los paquetes de pescado congelado en el supermercado para admirar la globalización hecha mariscos.

The New York Times tiene en estos días, en su sección Mundial (World), una serie de seis reportajes sobre el mercado europeo y su consumo de pescado proveniente de África. La serie describe las consecuencias sociales, culturales y económicas de ese proceso que sobre-pesca los recursos, desplaza pescadores (que inclusive emigran en pateras a España y otros países),contribuye a la corrupción por los permisos y la ejecución de leyes y reglamentos, y ha erosionado la capacidad de los africanos para alimentarse de su pesca.

Por un lado entran divisas (moneda fuerte, la más fuerte, el Euro) y por otro salen los recursos marinos. Como en toda controversia, hay varios lados, por lo que les invitamos a leer esa serie de artículos y a examinar la evidencia.

Hoy proveemos el reportaje en su totalidad, pero les invitamos a suscribirse a la página de TNY, que es gratis y así pueden acceder a las series de reportajes.

For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau’s fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.

Publicado por Manuel Valdés Pizzini

Para leer el reportaje, puede pulsar abajo:

Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow

By SHARON LAFRANIERE
Published: January 14, 2008

KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.

The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.

Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.

“I could be a fisherman there,” he said. “Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.”

Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.

That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.

Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.

The region’s governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries’ decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare.

But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.

“As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we’ve done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa,” said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, a London-based research group.
European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa’s management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds.

Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.

“One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy,” he said.

“The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality.”
Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.

Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.

The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea’s ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.

In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.

“The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.

In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.

“Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue,” said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. “Now even five pirogues would not be enough.”
Fishermen like Mr. Diouf argue that Africans should have first priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus stocks.

But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa’s nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal’s fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should “cause significant alarm.”

But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.

Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania’s government sold six more years’ access to 43 European Union vessels for $146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania’s government budget.

“I don’t know a government in the region that can say no,” said Mr. Chavance, the French scientist. “This is good money, and they need it.”

Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: “The E.U. has the money, so it has the power. It is easier to sacrifice the local fishermen.”
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since 1996.

Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns P.C.A., a fish exporting firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou’s rough-hewn harbor.

“We can’t compete with the European Union,” Ahmed Cherif said as he strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. “The government should have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work.”

Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply northwest Africa’s seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and local development.

In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch remain firmly in European hands.

African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop the port.

In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and transparency.

“One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not respected scientific recommendations,” he said. Ultimately, African governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.

Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to license them.

Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.

For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau’s fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.

Mr. Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.

That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying salaries and still emerging from civil war.

Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s 12th fishing minister in eight years, said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic pressures.

Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he replied: “This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen.”

Las islas pequeñas son territorios vulnerables al proceso de cambio climático y su impacto en el incremento del nivel del mar. Una reducción en el espacio habitable, en estos entornos de por sí minúsculos, tiene un efecto devastador en la economía y en las condiciones de vida. El cambio climático y sus efectos se suma a la lista de riesgos ambientales a los que están expuestas estas islas. El documento Surviving climate change in small islands: A guidebook es una excelente guía para conocer, aprender y evaluar el proceso de cambio climático y su impacto en las islas pequeñas.

La guía está dirigida a oficiales gubernamentales, de manera tal que puedan tener a la mano toda la información necesaria para conocer sobre éste proceso y su impacto en la sociedad, ambiente y economía local. Es también una guía muy apropiada para el público en general. Tiene estudios de casos, definición de términos y datos muy concretos de observaciones atmosféricas y de las ciencias terrestres que evidencian el cambio climático y sus efectos por el planeta.

This guidebook provides information, ideas, tools and techniques for those who need to start taking action today to prepare for climate change. It is primarily aimed at government officers who would like to learn more about climate change, its impacts and preparedness options. It has been written to assist those with little knowledge of, or exposure to, climate change. An important message in this guidebook is that communities and governments can best prepare by building on their existing strengths and good practice.

Referencia:

Surviving climate change in small islands: A guidebook

Emma L. Tompkins1, Sophie A. Nicholson-Cole1, Lisa-Ann Hurlston2, Emily Boyd1, Gina Brooks Hodge3, Judi Clarke4, Gerard Gray5, Neville Trotz4 and Lynda Varlack6

October 2005

1. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
2. Department of Environment, Cayman Islands’ Government, P.O. Box 486 GT, Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands
3. The Anguilla Tourist Board, Anguilla
4. Project Implementation Unit of the Adapting to Climate Change in the Caribbean Project, Barbados
5. Ministry of Agriculture, Land, Housing and Environment, Montserrat
6. Department of Conservation and Fisheries, British Virgin Islands

Produced by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, UK, as part of a project: ‘XOT 005 Preparing for and adapting to climate change in the UK Overseas Territories’.

Para obtener una copia del informe pueden pulsar aquí.

Hace unos días me comentaba uno de los compañeros y colega del CIEL, que la cantidad de información que se pierde a diario en términos costeros es enorme. Esto me hizo recordar algo que hace algún tiempo dije en una conferencia a estudiantes de geografía en Río Piedras. “La información es cada vez más importante.” El futurólogo y economista japonés Taichi Sakaiya ha comenzado a hablar del “Chika” (valor-conocimiento).

Según Sakaiya nos encontramos entrando a lo que él ha llamado “sociedad del conocimiento”. La información no solo es utilizada por la comunidad científica, sino que es necesaria y utilizada por distintos grupos e intereses de la sociedad. Esto es la realidad de la información costera y marina.

Gobiernos, industrias, científicos, pescadores, recreacionistas, en fin el público en general necesitan información real y exacta relacionada al ambiente marino-costero. Los pescadores quieren saber cuando hay mal tiempo, los turistas quieren saber sobre la calidad del agua, los buzos quieren conocer sobre la turbidez, los surfers quieren saber si hay olas, etc. Dirigidos por la Comisión Oceanográfica Intergubernamental de la UNESCO y por otras agencias de la ONU, se ha organizado una iniciativa conocida como: Sistema Global de Observación del Océano (GOOS por sus siglas en inglés). Con éste sistema se patrocina y se impulsa la creación y operación perpetua de una red a nivel global donde se adquiera, se integre y se distribuyan las observaciones relacionadas al océano.

Los objetivos principales del GOOS son identificar los datos marinos necesarios para el funcionamiento de las actividades de los interesados del ambiente oceánico, recolectar, adquirir y hacer disponible los datos, facilitar el uso productos de los datos, entre otros. El gobierno de los Estados Unidos está haciendo una aportación al GOOS, desarrollando su Sistema Integrada de Observación del Océano (IOOS por sus siglas en inglés). Este sistema suministrará observaciones costeras y oceánicas promoviendo la seguridad, el desarrollo económico, la conservación de recursos marinos, protección de calidad de vida, educación y comunicación de la información.

En Estados Unidos los Sistemas de Observación Oceánica y Costera han sido diseñados, implementados y operados, a través de asociaciones regionales (AR) de usuarios y proveedores. Estos movilizan la data, la información y los productos necesarios para sistemas marinos y estuarinos de acuerdo a las necesidades de uso común. Estas asociaciones representan los intereses de individuos y entidades que realizan sus actividades entorno al ambiente costero y marino, además de impulsar a su vez la investigación y el desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías.

En Puerto Rico se está organizando un Asociación Regional para el Caribe Estadounidense (CaRA por sus siglas en inglés), la cual es subvencionada por NOAA (Administración Nacional de los Océanos y la Atmósfera). Para el desarrollo de la misma, se identificarán los “stakeholders”, o grupos de interesados, determinando las necesidades de la industria del turismo regional para el sistema de observación. Además se llevará a cabo el establecimiento de un comité timón y una oficina provisional para CaRA, para así poder realizar vistas públicas y reuniones organizativas, pertinentes al desarrollo del proyecto. Finalmente se vislumbra el establecimiento de un ente jurídico y la publicación de la información. Este último proceso ya ha comenzado a tomar forma, en la actualidad se cuenta con una página de Internet, para lograr el propósito de difundir la información.

Al entrar a la página de CaRA, podrá obtener información fundamental del proyecto, su misión y sus proyecciones. Contiene un trasfondo informativo más específico sobre las diferentes asociaciones regionales en Estados Unidos, con sus respectivos enlaces. Además podrá tener acceso a información meteorológica, con gráficas actualizadas sobre las condiciones marítimas y predicciones climatológicas en el área del Caribe. Encontrará también los contactos de las personas a cargo de este proyecto en Puerto Rico, así como enlaces de interés relacionados a este Sistema de Observación.