In the Guaymas shipyard, underneath towering cranes that resemble machines out of a sci-fi movie, employees of the company Pesquera Delly are busy constructing small (27-foot diameter) geodesic spheres known as MicroPods.
Walking among the handful of men, who are attaching triangular panel after triangular panel onto the forming sphere, is a young man wearing jeans and a gray striped polo shirt. A black sunhat hides his face from the sun. Gustavo Valdez is the son of Oscar Valdez, the owner of Pesquera Delly, and operations manager for the company's nascent aquaculture division. I pulled Gustavo under one of the towering cranes for a quick conversation about Pesquera Delly's pioneering attempts at farming shrimp offshore, the future of the company and how changes in the fishing and aquaculture industry will impact the coastal communities of Sonora, Mexico. An edited transcript is below.
What is Pesquera Delly attempting with this project?
Gustavo: Pesquera Delly, as you may know by now, has been in the shrimp fishing industry and finfish industry for the last 15 years. Over the last five years we have seen the decline of the wild stocks and a weakening of the markets for wild species. So, we see this as a reconversion project. It's just a logical step in a policy that the company has undertaken to produce in a more sustainable way.
Do you think this transition from fishing to aquaculture will be seen everywhere as the next logical step?
I think so. I think it will be a necessary change. And we're seeing it already. I think in this region of the country, we're the first company that's doing it, but I don't think it will be long before more companies start doing it. This year, this [shrimp fishing] season, which just started a couple months ago ... usually the best part of a season is the first three or four months of a six-month season, and here we are two months down the road from the start and half the fleet is already tied to the docks because it's just not economically viable to continue fishing. So, it's a matter of whether you sit around and leave your boats, your assets, to do nothing for the rest of the year or you find a way to keep producing in a way that allows you to be economically viable. I don't think it is going to be a matter of realizing we have to do things more sustainably or friendlier to the environment. It's a fact of economic viability. If you've been involved in fishing your whole life and you have all your experience in that type of business, the next logical step is aquaculture. There's not going to be any other business ... I mean it's going to be a lot harder for a fishing business to go to another sector, for example, a construction business or into the tourist business, than from fishing to the aquaculture business, which are really related and that's exactly what we're doing.
You mentioned you're the first company in the region to make this transition. If more companies follow your lead and the offshore aquaculture industry takes off, what impact will this transition have on the coastal communities here?
It depends a lot on what these first companies that start venturing in the new industry will do. For instance, we have been trying to move the people we have hired in the [shrimp] boats to work on the offshore farm. For some people it has worked. For some others, it hasn't. So I think there will be a portion of the communities that do fishing that are going to get involved. It's going to be to a certain point because some people are just so used to going out to fish they are going to find a way to keep going after the fish. For some others, it is going to be easier to make this transition labor-wise. So, it really depends on the companies that start doing it first. How they approach that, their willingness to train the people to change their perspectives, because for a fishermen the perspective on individual economics is very different than anybody else's, because the mindset of a fisherman is you get most of your income at one point in the year then you plan on. That can't be possible if you plan to hire them as workers of a fish farm. You can't advance pay them for the whole year or for the whole harvest. So it's really up to the company to try and train those people not just operational-wise on the farm, but also try to change their mindset.
So, I think the short answer is it's not going to be one uniform change that can be seen throughout the region. It's just going to be so, so different. And it can also depend on region to region. Fishermen from Guaymas are very different from fishermen from Puerto Penasco.
What do you think the younger generation's role will be? You said some people have spent their entire lives fishing, but what about their sons? Like you and your father?
That's a different story. From my own experience, I think it's a lot easier to work with younger people because they're very open to new experiences and learning new stuff. So, they're just more interested than older people. In my particular case, I started working with a group of former fishermen trying to be offshore farm workers and it didn't turn out so well. From a group of five, I could get one or two and the rest I had to hire, just young guys, new people that were interested in learning to dive and really learn offshore farm operations.
Did you always expect you'd be a shrimp fisherman?
No. As a matter of fact, I went to law school. But, I think I never saw myself as a lawyer, which is probably what my dad wanted to see. I think, because we're also in the processing business, before this project came along I saw myself more involved in the processing business. But this project, I've taken such a great interest in it that this is where I'm going to stay. Now I don't see myself doing anything else. This is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.
Talking about the future, right now you're still in experimental mode, you have one AquaPod in the water, putting in the MicroPods. In the future, maybe five years from now, 10 years from now, what will Pesquera Delly's aquaculture business look like?
Well, I think we'll probably undergo an expansion phase. Our plans for the long term are to establish a series of three offshore farms: One here in San Carlos, where [the AquaPod] is now, another nearby and we're very likely going to expand down to Puerto Vallarta. We're already prospecting some sites there and started to do the paperwork to apply for a lease in that area. So, I think it's going to be a little more commercial scale. Probably near to 500 hectares, around 60 cages, 60 3,600 [cubic meter cages], divided in those three sites. Those are the plans for the future.
But I think our role in the whole offshore aquaculture industry here in Mexico, it's going to shift from just producing some stuff in the water to actually offering consulting services for the companies that start developing an interest to move in that direction. Will we still be in the production business? Sure we will. But, I don't think that's where we're going to stay parked. Our activities are going to diversify.
Your father, Oscar Valdez, mentioned taking the MicroPods and trying to get fishermen involved by setting them up with one as their own business. Do you think that's a viable option for the future?
Well, yes. That's an idea we had about six months ago. And interestingly enough we found out there was another group in the Baja trying to do the same thing, just thinking about the same strategy. Their approach is a little different because they're an NGO and so their work is really involved with social impact and environmental impact more than the business scope of the project. So when we found this out, we established contact with them and started developing a way to collaborate with each other to make it happen sooner rather than later. And this is the beginning of it. I think the first thing we have to do is prove the economic viability of that model. If you prove it to be economically viable, you don't have to convince anybody. Everybody will start coming to you and asking you to show them the way to start their own. It's not our goal to talk people into doing it just because of the social impact it will have or the environmental impact it will have, as it is the NGO's goal. From our perspective, it's the economic goal because we would be dealing the MicroPods for these groups and offer technical assistance to set them in place and get the culture going. From my perspective, it's very viable. I don't think it will happen in the very near future. I see it happening over a period of five years to really start taking off.
The most important thing is at the level we have right now, the experimental level, there is already a lot of interest from these communities. There is a community here south of Guaymas. It's a community of Yaqui people and they've been here twice already just to check on the project, see how it is going and talking about their plans to negotiate with the government to get some funds to get a shrimp farm going. And I think they'll get it, we'll help them, but it's not going to happen right now. We have a lot of stuff to test, operationally, biologically, economically before we would take that step with them, but there is a tremendous amount of interest.
What's the response to your project been from the community?
I have to answer that question in two different parts because there are two different communities here in Guaymas. One is the Guaymas community where the traditional fishermen live, and we also have San Carlos where a big community of retired Americans live. The reaction has been really interesting because we thought we'd have a lot of interest from the Guaymas community, because this is related to shrimp and this has been a shrimping community for generations. And we thought we were going to have a reluctance from the San Carlos community to having a shrimp farm right there, in a place where they are supposed to be coming to retire to enjoy nature and have nothing to do with productive activities. And it was the entire other way around. We've had almost no interest here in Guaymas, not even questions asked, and that has been very interesting. Why people are not getting interested in it? I don't know. I mean we've had some interest, but nothing compared to what we thought it would be. And then in San Carlos, on the other hand, there are great expectations from everybody. At one point we were invited to a yacht club meeting and I thought we were going to be rejected by the club and the response was the exact opposite. They were really interested in what's going on. They found it interesting what we were going to raise. There are a lot of requests to go diving on the pods, there is even a group called the Ocean Camp that raises awareness programs for children and people in general that come to Mexico and they've been asking us to do guided tours of the farm to show their students what we're doing, what we're trying to accomplish, so it's coming from every direction. The skippers: We have yachts and boats coming to the site every day to check out what's going on, see if we're doing something to the cage. I've had requests to go help clean the cages, set up stuff, like moorings or new installations. So the response from San Carlos has been really great as opposed to what I thought in the beginning.
What's the Mexican government's position?
It took us 12 months to get the first license for the first site. And to do this for shrimp it's so innovative that even the government is afraid because there is a lot of reluctance to do anything new. For instance, the first time we had a government official to the site to showcase the project, the first reaction was to try to convince us to orient the project back to finfish because that is what is being proven worldwide, finfish culture offshore. While there are some problems there [with finfish aquaculture], starting with hatchery technology, which is practically nonexistent here in Mexico. So, that was their first reaction: a reluctance to support anything that hadn't already been proven somewhere else. Over the last two years we have been able to shift that perspective of the government from a total reluctance to partial support. But I think there's a lot of work to be done in those areas. I think it's a little tricky getting the government involved. I think it takes a lot of planning before you present results, because we have seen how other industries, like the onshore aquaculture industry have gone to a total mess due to a lack of regulation, proper regulation, when those industries have proved to be viable. So, what we're trying to do here is really plan the scope the regulation has to have with the support of the NGO community before we come up to government and make a proposal, or at least a presentation. The government is aware of the project, they have been supportive to some extent of the project. But I think again there's still a lot of work that has to be done in the lobbying with them.
So, regulations. Are there adequate regulations set up for this industry since it is so new?
No. Exactly. Since this is so new there are no regulations that exist at this point. So if we go out there and prove it's a tremendous business, the risk is the government will not have the proper planning for what the industry can become. That's the risk, so you have to be very careful on what the steps are going to be.
* Originally posted to The New Aquaculture on Friday November 20, 2009.
