El Golfo fishermen agree to corvina ban

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO, Son. – As the only remaining holdouts, commercial fishermen in El Golfo de Santa Clara have agreed to comply with an extended ban on catching corvina during the remainder of the current fishing season.

In return, the fisherman will receive financial compensation from the Mexican government in an amount equal to what they expected to receive from harvesting their annual quota of 4,300 tons of fish.

The government imposed the ban on what is the fishermen’s most profitable catch as part of efforts to head off the extinction of two endangered species that are particular to the gulf: the vaquita, a tiny snub-nosed dolphin, and the totoaba.

That ban was imposed on a two-year basis in 2015, and the government recently extended it.

Baja California fishermen previously signed an agreement with the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to adhere to extension of the fishing ban in the upper gulf. El Golfo fisherman had held out until late March.

“We are accepting those agreements, even though we don’t like them,” said Carlos Tirado, president of a cooperative of El Golfo fishermen. “We hope that by not going out to fish, it will end up demonstrating that we, the legal fishermen, are not responsible for the environmental situation.”

The El Golfo fishermen contend they have had no effect on the population of either endangered species, since they don’t use nets for totoaba that also manage to snag the vaquita.

To try to support that claim, Tirado notes that the vaquita numbers continued to decline dramatically even after the first two-year ban was imposed.

Under the agreement, the Mexican environmental agency, known by its Spanish acronym SEMARNAT, will pay the fishermen 25 pesos for every kilo they otherwise would have been authorized to catch during the season that began in February and concludes April 30.

The fishermen were already under a government ban imposed on fishing for shrimp as part of efforts to save the vaquita. The shrimp ban, imposed in 2015, is scheduled to expire April 10.

“We don’t know what is going to happen with that ban,” Tirado said. “The federal government has not made any announcement about whether it will be lifted.”

Adding to the fishermen’s woes was a ban imposed in February on the commercial harvesting of clams, a prohibition prompted by concerns about a bloom of toxic algae in the gulf.