On July 18, 2023, a dozen cheetah fish floating on the surface of the sea were collected after two fishermen dropped a bomb from the shore in the rocky area of Carhuaz Beach, located inside the Paraca National Reserve in Peru.
The park rangers filmed the event for the first time that an illegal fishing operation, considered to be one of the most destructive, has been documented, according to Fabio Castagnino, a fisheries consultant at the Peruvian Society of Environmental Law (SPDA).
The case proceeded criminally as an environmental crime considered in the Peruvian Criminal Code (title XIII), but despite the evidence, it did not go beyond the expected deterrent effect and evidenced the failures to punish those who, through fishing with explosives, do a great deal of damage not only in the Reserve but on the entire coast of Peru, Castagnino said.
Impacts of fishing with explosives
Practically, any type of fishing that violates a standard is considered illegal fishing, however, fishing with explosives is the illegal fishing with the greatest impact on the ecosystem and resources, and is therefore considered an unsustainable long-term practice for fishing resources by organizations such as The Coral Reef Alliance (Coral).
“When fish or other marine animals are extracted at faster rates than it takes them to reproduce, it's called overfishing. When fishing, whatever the type of technique, destroys the fish habitat, it is considered destructive fishing, and the most common is with dynamite or homemade bombs with locally available materials. The fish die from the shock waves generated by the explosion and are then collected on the surface or at the bottom by fishermen or divers,” said the organization Coral in 2014.
The detonation of a dynamite 14 meters deep kills 100% of the fish at a distance of 7 meters (m), 64% of the fish within 107 m and 10% of the fish within 207 m of the explosion. In other words, the effect of explosives can have a radius of action of more than 200 m where fish are affected by damage to gills and internal organs.
These data were obtained through the SPDA report entitled Evaluation of two areas affected by explosive fishing in Peru: a diagnosis on underwater communities (July, 2023) carried out by Castagnino and Yuri Hooker with the objective of evaluating the impacts of this type of fishing in terms of biodiversity and species richness and abundance.
Castagnino explained that calculations based on reports from the National Service for Protected Natural Areas (Sernanp), the institution that manages the system of protected natural areas in Peru, indicated that approximately every six days a dynamite cartridge explodes in the sea of the Paracas Reserves.
However, this number does not represent the real number of incidents, according to Castagnino, since surveillance is insufficient to record all explosive fishing in the entire protected marine area of the Reserve, which represents 65% of the 335 thousand hectares of total protected area.
According to Fernando Gonzalo Quiroz, head of the protected area, the Reserve has 24 official park rangers and there are 45 other artisanal fishermen who serve as volunteer community rangers who are equipped with portable radios, uniforms and identification to report illegal activities in the area where they fish sustainably.
Through these collaborations and special patrols, he assured that explosive fishing events have been significantly reduced within the Reserve.
In this case, the park rangers were able to capture the fishermen on video and presented this as evidence, however, after pleading guilty, they were granted an early termination agreement and a suspended sentence in exchange for the payment of ten thousand soles (2,681 dollars), meaning that they are only required to go and sign in court for three years and four months.
However, Castagnino opined that this case, which was so publicized and which was so pushed by civil society, received a sanction that doubts that it will fulfill the role of deterrence generated by criminal judgments.
“It was the first time that we had such clear evidence of a problem that has bled Paracas out for decades. It was the opportunity to actually have a sanction that actually had a general deterrent effect, which means that it not only seeks to dissuade the person from not doing what he did again, but the rest of them, so that they would not commit the crime. The question really is, is the general deterrent effect achieved with this ruling? It's like trying to put out a fire with a glass of water, it's not going to work. So that's what worries us,” he said.
Environmental impact of illegal fishing
“One of the problems that exist in the justice system, especially when it comes to prosecuting these crimes through criminal channels, because it is a crime against the environment, against natural resources, we find that justice operators are not aware of the seriousness of the matter,” Castagnino said.
In this case, he said that the lack of specialized environmental experts in the Ministry of Production, which is the fishing competition entity responsible for carrying out expert tests on the product, was evident and that it was unable to verify the cause and death of the species, but it was through the declaration of the fishermen that he joined.
It was also evident that the calculation methods of the Ministry of the Environment to determine how much it costs to finance the repair of environmental damage do not work, Castagnino said, since the fine imposed is equivalent to the value of the species caught in the market, but these “do not really represent, they do not say with gravity, with the level of impact of the activity”, since the environmental services that are lost and that may take years to recover are not being taken into account.
“What was the captured resource? A box of cheetah. Sure, the first time someone threw an explosion in Paracas, I can imagine the capture they got, but after 15 years of intensive use of explosives, what you get is a box of cheetah. Then that was valued and it wasn't a large sum... There is no exact calculation, it can take years to recover to the point where it was previously or longer if it is used consecutively in a certain space, which is what happens in Paracas,” he said.
Penalties and coercive collection
Currently, the head of the Paracas National Reserve collaborates with organizations such as the SPDA to combat all types of illegal fishing in the area, not just that practiced with explosives.
Recently, the regulation of the Administrative Sanctioning Procedure for affecting protected Natural Areas, which gives Sernanp the power to sanction those who attack the environment, was modified and with this it acquired the power to collect fines through the assets of the offending person or company if it refuses to pay it, Castagnino said.
“Sernanp has the legal capacity to carry out compulsory collection, which means that it can collect the payment of the fine through the seizure or appropriation of the assets of those who do not pay the fine,” he explained.
For Castagnino, this modification represents a light at the end of the tunnel, since it is expected that “this administrative route can be sanctioned in a slightly more effective way and that it generates a more dissuasive effect than the criminal route that has not succeeded definitively,” he explained.
Meanwhile, the SPDA is working on a report that economically quantifies the impacts of fishing with explosives to provide a better tool to justice operators and to assess more fairly the seriousness of the cases that are prosecuted both criminally and administratively.
Comentarios (0)