The impact of marine conservation processes on local fishing communities was highlighted at a press conference at the ongoing 11th Session of the Committee of the Parties (COP11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at Hyderabad, India, on 10 October, 2012.
The press meet was organized by the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF), the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) and the National Fishworkers’ Forum (NFF).
The panelists included Pradip Chatterjee from NFF; Nico Waldeck, from WFFP; Riza Damanik from KIARA (an Indonesia-based NGO working with fishing communities); and Vivienne Solis Rivera from CoopeSoliDar R.L, (an NGO in Central America working with fishing communities). V Vivekanandan from ICSF moderated the session.
Chatterjee stressed the need to protect the marine and coastal natural resources and the livelihoods of millions of small-scale and traditional fishers dependent on those resources. “Do not destroy us in the name of development, and kill us in the name of conservation. Fishing communities across the coast are being displaced by developmental activities’ and their livelihoods are being destroyed. Even as communities are struggling to protect coastal and marine resources from such developmental onslaughts, ironically, in the name of conservation, the very same small-scale fishing communities are being denied access to resources they have traditionally fished,” he said, summing up the driving point of the panel.
Communities in South Africa are facing a second wave of dispossession, said Waldeck, capturing in a nutshell the consequences of marine conservation on the indigenous people. Many of them lost their rights to coastal land and marine resources under the Apartheid regime and now many of them are facing a second Apartheid. This is a wave of dispossession that is driven by the international conservation agenda, he elaborated.
Damanik took the opportunity to remind his (Indonesian) government that COP X (in Aichi Targets 2011-2020) agreed upon recognizing fishers and indigenous knowledge during the process of conservation. But, in contradiction, Damanik pointed out, Indonesia is massively expanding marine conservation by excluding the fishing community. Human-rights violations are committed in the name of marine conservation. The fishers are asked to pay for use of what they have for so long considered their own. Our fishers are known to have included methods of conservation in their livelihood as early as from the 13th century. The government should ensure that the indigenous people are part of the conservation process instead of exploiting them through it, he said.
Solis said that the Costa Rican government is making commitments at the international level to increase the marine protected areas and that this needs to include the participation of small-scale fishing communities in these conservation efforts. Solis also suggested alternatives to bridge this gap. Only human-rights-based marine conservation and community-based governance models, which recognize the importance of small-scale fishing, will result in equitable distribution of the benefits from conservation, she said.
Solis quoted a Honduran fisherman, who was interviewed in a regional study, to further illustrate the point: We do not want to have tourist development akin to Roatan (Honduras, Central America), where fishermen cannot fish anymore and there are prohibitions on local communities (with regards to use of the sea). We would like to conserve the marine area because we make our livelihood from marine resources. We do not want them to disappear.
ICSF, WFFP, and NFF will be organizing a Side Event at COP 11, “Solving the Puzzle: Social and Cultural Dimensions of MPAs”, on 11 October, along with UNU-IAS and ICCA, while ICSF will be organizing another Side Event on “Traditional Knowledge and Area-based Management Measures in Marine and Coastal Ecosystems” on 15 October.
2012 ICSF