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 Editorials | Environmental | May 2005 
Lagoon's New Status Will Change Lives
 Anton Caputo - Express-News
| | Sixty-four-year-old Jose Lima has been shrimping in Laguna Madre for 25 years and supports the site's protected area designation. (Photo: Delcia Lopez/Express-News) |
Laguna Madre, Mexico — Shallow blue-green waters dotted with hundreds of small islands stretch toward the horizon, as vast meadows of sea grasses sway just beneath the shimmering surface.
This is Mexico's half of the Laguna Madre, or Mother Lagoon — a natural wonder shared with Texas that serves as nursery to 60 percent of the marine species found in the Gulf of Mexico.
It's a nature lover's paradise, a stopover for hundreds of species of migratory birds and home to more than 2,000 species of plants and animals.
At the other end of the food chain are the 14,000 or so fishermen, farmers and ranchers who scratch out a living here.
So much life and commerce, struggling for advantage in these super-salty waters, has put both sides spiraled toward disaster.
Overfishing and erosion of natural habitat damaged the fisheries. And plummeting prices forced desperate fishermen to grab for more of a dwindling catch.
An even greater threat, perhaps, were the grand visions for transforming the area.
One proposal called for dredging a ship channel through the pristine waterway. Another would have turned the most sensitive areas of Laguna Madre into a Cancun-style resort.
All that changed last month, when conservationists on both sides of the border, after years of wrangling, convinced the Mexican government to designate the lagoon a protected area.
"This is a remarkable development — dizzying when you compare it to just six years ago when there was a proposal to extend the intracoastal waterway through the Laguna Madre down to Tampico," said Jeff Weigel of the Nature Conservancy's Mexico Program, which is working in Laguna Madre with the Mexican conservation group Pronatura Noreste.
Over the next year, various groups will try to devise a plan to protect the Laguna and pump some much needed money into depressed local villages. The plan could include fishing seasons, no-take zones to help fisheries recover, and training villagers in other small businesses to replace income lost from new regulations.
"In Mexico a lot of the conservation work has to be based on providing income for the people," said Karen Chapman of Environmental Defense's Cross Border Institute for Regional Development. "It's a critical part of it. Where in the U.S. a lot of conservation work is based on what is the need of the resource first. It's a different economic environment."
Natalia Avia Garcia sits at a wooden table, expertly peeling a small mountain of shrimp. Surrounding her and her co-workers — three other women and three young children — are three walls and a slanting tin roof, the fourth wall open to the waterfront. This is the economic engine of Las Higuerillas, one of countless squatter fishing villages that dot the Laguna. Here, officials from the local shrimp co-op weigh the day's catch and dole out handwritten receipts.
Avia, 39, is suspicious of any preservation effort. In the past, the government has confiscated boats and fishing nets. "I hope they allow us to keep making a living," she said.
It's a modest living. Avia will peel 3 kilos of shrimp and net about 30 pesos, or a little less than $3, for the day.
That's why many here are open to the changes offered by Pronatura's outreach workers, said Benito Treviño, the village's municipal delegate. He believes today's shrimpers will have little to leave their children the way things are going.
"It's hard to make a living off the Laguna," he said. "It's hard to support a family at these prices."
A kilo of shrimp brings 20 pesos, paid by the co-op. Working full time, a fisherman can earn about 7,000 pesos a month, or $635, according to Pronatura.
From that, he must make payments on a boat, which costs 15,000 to 20,000 pesos, and a motor, which costs 70,000 to 80,000 pesos and lasts three to five years.
"Who is worried? The people who own the co-op are worried, not the shrimpers," Treviño said. "They're not going to be happy with regulation. There will maybe be some times that we cannot fish, but if it's done in a manner that we have alternative means of making a living, the people will understand that it is for the good of the community."
Procoro Torres Cruz, a co-op representative in the village, sits behind a pair of scales, handing out tickets to fishermen who drop off their catch.
He shrugs his shoulders when asked about the preservation effort, saying he will have to see how it is implemented before forming an opinion.
Some alternative moneymaking ideas include producing bone meal from the endless supply of fish bones that now end up as rotting garbage on the village's dirt streets, or producing and selling a dried shrimp snack. The latter would elbow out the co-ops and, theoretically, funnel more profits to the fishermen.
Another possibility is ecotourism — bird-watching and similar endeavors aimed at attracting well-heeled visitors.
And another: Joel Hernandez Peña is raising quail in the Matamoras townhouse Pronatura uses as an office. He plans to eventually reintroduce the fowl to area ranches, which will use them to draw quail hunters — for a fee, of course.
"What it means is that they are likely to be able to keep their ranch," he said. "That's the ultimate goal."
The Laguna Madre is a 277-mile stretch of hyper-saline water trapped between the mainland of North America and the barrier islands that stretch along the Gulf Coast. The unique watery environment is split evenly between Texas and Mexico.
It spans five miles at its widest and sports an average depth of 3 feet. The hot glare of the sun causes the shallow waters to evaporate quickly, making the lagoon one of the saltiest on Earth.
Boats ply the waters for all manner of fish, including mullet, drum, oyster, trout and sand shark. But shrimp is king. Over a year, Mexican shrimpers will pull roughly 4,000 tons from the shallow lagoon.
The area is typically shrimped with fixed-net systems called charangas. The large V-shaped nets — roughly 60 yards on each side — are set into the Laguna with a series of long stakes. The contraption funnels schools of shrimp to the tip of the V, where they are trapped in boxes and later scooped out by shrimpers.
The charangas are thick in spots shrimp are known to travel. For instance, more than 1,000 have been documented in the waters around Las Higuerillas. Local fishermen say that when viewed from the air, they form a contiguous barrier across the Laguna.
There are fishing laws on the books, but people in the fishing village say they are not enforced, making the Laguna a free-for-all for licensed and unlicensed fishermen alike.
That's why Treviño and the fishermen who make up the village's informal group of decision makers say they are willing to accept more regulation.
"In reality we are working in a way that is unsustainable for future generations," Treviño said.
"The Laguna belongs to all of us. Not just this generation, but to future generations."
They also hope the protected designation — and the increased federal scrutiny it brings — will prompt the government to officially recognize communities like Las Higuerillas. The move could bring the village electricity and other much-needed infrastructure.
Ernesto Enkerlin, president of Mexico's National Commission of Protected Areas, isn't surprised local fishermen are accepting of the changes.
Many were suspicious of the designation when it was first discussed, he said. But the government made an effort to show the leaders of the fishing communities similar villages in protected areas where sustainable fishing regulations have worked. Pantanos de Centla and Laguna de Terminos are two examples.
Many of those communities also share their waters with gas and oil rigs. Oil exploration hasn't yet reached the Laguna Madre, and its newly protected status could limit or eliminate such activity, Enkerlin said.
In his 22 years of shrimping in the Laguna, Adan Ramirez is hopeful. Over the course of a year, prices rise and fall drastically according to the demands of restaurants in Vera Cruz and Mexico City. He's particularly interested in the shrimp snack, which doesn't require refrigeration and can be dried and bagged locally.
Pronatura workers will also help the villagers come up with a community logo to help market the product and raise the profile of Las Higuerillas.
"This way we have a process that we manage and we don't have to depend on other people for everything," Ramirez said.
Veteran shrimper Jose Lima is also convinced it's worth a try.
After 25 years fishing the Laguna Madre, Lima can read it like a road map. He perches on the side of the speeding fishing boat, navigating his young partner around sandbars and sunken obstacles in the shallow lagoon.
The 64-year-old fisherman knows the coming regulations will change the way he works the waters. But he thinks they could put an end to the illegal netting and unlicensed fishing he regularly sees — activity that he believes is ultimately destroying the shrimp on which he depends.
"If it is here to protect this way of life and help the community, then it is welcome," Lima said. |
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