Costa Rica’s National Parks in peril: Under pressure to allow commercial fishing Costa Rica’s National Parks in peril: Under pressure to allow commercial fishing
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- Published on Monday, 19 December 2011 22:22
- Written by Super User
Thirty-eight environmental organizations warned in an official manifesto about the serious environmental, social and economic implications the authorization of commercial fishing in the national parks would cause, because last July 7 the Commission of Puntarenas Affairs ruled affirmatively for draft law No. 17715, which is highly detrimental to the environment, the country and our society.
The organizations oppose the draft law for these reasons:
1. By definition, national parks are incompatible with extractive activities.
2. Marine areas of national parks represent only 0.64% of Costa Rica’s jurisdictional waters.
3. National parks are the last refuges of many overfished species.
4. Marine protected areas have helped improve important biological parameters.
5. Species that live in marine areas of national parks, later migrate to areas where they can be exploited commercially.
6. Social problems are not resolved by legalizing illegal actions, they are worsened.
7. There is no technical basis or expertise to promote this kind of law project.
8. The draft bill violates international environmental obligations that Costa Rica has assumed.
The official manifesto states: “We urge the State and its institutions to enter into an open debate on the Costa Rican fishing issue, allowing the participation of all stakeholders and laying the groundwork for a national fisheries policy that fully addresses the problem for Costa Rican fishing communities.”
For centuries, human activities at sea have been made with little or no restrictions; not until recent years have Marine Protected Areas (MPA) been promoted as spaces where it is possible to protect, conserve and above all restore species and ecological processes.
Only 0.64% of Costa Rica’s ocean waters have national park status. This bill intends to eliminate that tiny percentage of areas in national parks where no fishing is allowed and which constitute a space for the recovery of of marine biodiversity.
Current Costa Rican law rightly stipulates that commercial fishing activity is prohibited in national parks, nature monuments and biological reserves. However, the Special Investigative Commission of Puntarenas Province has affirmatively ruled for a project that would create responsible fishing areas within the national parks.
"This is nothing more than opening Marine Protected Areas in national parks to commercial fishing. There isn’t one single study in the legislative record that substantiates the desirability or necessity of such an initiative," said Patricia Vega, MarViva National Director.
Liberation party deputy Agnes Gómez, who has been promoting this bill, justifies its actions because “it will no longer affect artisanal fishers who fish in the waters of marine protected areas; having entered these areas involuntarily because they didn’t know the boundaries of the park, they are seriously affected by the application of sanctions under Article 153 of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Law.”
However, the MarViva representative said that “promoting the breaking of the law is the basis of this unfortunate project. The draft bill in question offers a simplistic and absurd solution to a complex problem that requires much more serious analysis.”
Allowing fishing in national parks is not going to solve the social and economic problems the Puntarenas fishers are facing but it will affect the regeneration of marine life, since the conservation of these important spaces is needed for the reproduction, feeding and breeding of species, precisely to enable sustainable fishing outside of these Marine Protected Areas.
It is a fact that national parks provide protection to vulnerable ecosystems and they allow fish populations, commercial as well as non-commercial, to recover from fishing. Furthermore, they fulfill a role for the benefit of commercial fishing that takes place on the coast, since these areas are hotbeds of life. “Opening these territories to fishing would be one step more toward a collapse of the coastal fish populations and their fisheries,” said Erick Ross, biologist for the MarViva Foundation.
“The deputies of the Puntarenas Commission have not been capable of seeing this contradiction, with a bill that supposedly benefits fishers but in the end it will only finish off the fish and condemn the fishers to ever more difficult situations,” concluded MarViva’s National Director.
