CeDePesca – a Buenos Aires, Argentina-headquartered NGO that aims to help fisheries in Latin America work toward implementing more sustainable practices – has made advancements with fishery improvement projects (FIP) for hake in Chile and red snapper in Mexico, the organization announced in separate reports.
Regarding the former FIP, the Chilean hake (Merluccius gayi gayi) fishery has entered into the full assessment process to obtain the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) sustainable fisheries standard certification.
The FIP for that fishery began in 2007, with CeDePesca working together with the company PacificBlu, the Chilean National Fisheries Society (Sonapesca), fisheries authorities, and other stakeholders to drive improvements required to achieve the certifiable status of this fishery.
CeDePesca Deputy Executive Director Gabriela McLean has overseen the FIP’s advancement directly during the last few years.
“There were moments of great difficulty, such as the process of promoting dialogue between the industrial and artisanal sectors or defining the proportion of unreported fishing by the latter sector so that it is officially taken into account in stock assessments,” she said. “There was a great deal of work to reduce the proportion of [bycatch] and keep discarding to a minimum. In the [latest] period, the work focused on improving catch control rules to get the fishery ready to enter full evaluation.”
The Chilean hake fishery “has become, through the process of improvements, a model fishery in the region, in every sense,” McLean said.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, CeDePesca signed an agreement with local firm Caribbean Garden and U.S. firm Deep Sea Atlantic for the launch of a FIP on the red snapper fishery (Lutjanus campechanus) in the southeast state of Tabasco, where about 12 percent of snapper caught on the Mexican coast of the Gulf of Mexico is landed.
“We are in the first prospective stages, which have to do with understanding the supply chain, who are the actors involved, making a pre-evaluation of the fishery against the MSC standard, and, based on the results, designing a proposal for a project action plan,” McLean said.
The latest FIP marks Mexico’s fifth such improvement project, following a grouper FIP in the Gulf of Mexico, one in the brown shrimp fishery off the coast of Tamaulipas, another in the blue crab fishery in the Yucatan Peninsula, and a Pacific geoduck saltwater clam FIP in the Gulf of California.
According to information from the Mexican government, red snapper ranks as the fifth-most commercially relevant product in the country’s fishing sector.
