Monday, September 2, 2013

Velondriake – To Live With The Sea

Hersister is 70. He has been a fisherman for 41 years in Andavadoaka. As a Vezo, his skin is dark from the sun and hands calloused from throwing thousands of lines and weaving hundreds of nets. When he was younger, fish and octopus were plentiful and he could easily spend a day at sea catching breakfast, lunch, and dinner for himself and his family. One day in 2002, a commercial trader arrived in town and offered to pay money to fishers for the octopus they caught. These octopuses would end up on menus in far-flung places like Europe and Asia for a pretty penny. Hersister and the rest of the fishers were not stupid – they saw an opportunity to make money for their families, and so they started to catch more octopus than necessary.

Fast-forward almost 10 years to 2013. Gina and I sat in a dark room veiled by a shifting pink curtain that hung in the doorway. In front of us sat a man in the center of a couch with a stuffed animal tucked in at his side. Behind him the wall was covered with posters of pop stars and Asian baby calendars, and a small, dirty plastic Christmas tree sat in the corner of the room to his right. This was Madagascar chic and sitting in the middle of it all was President Roger, the leader of the Velondriake LMMA and our first interviewee. (As a reminder, an LMMA is a Locally Managed Marine Area - an area of coastal ocean where resources are managed bottom-up from the local level.) Roger, a local Malagasy man, has been so successful in rallying regional community support for Velondriake that when he tried to retire from his role as president last year his followers threatened to quit the LMMA and their sustainable fishing practices. He was the perfect place to start with our questions.

As he fiddled with the toy by his side, President Roger shared that Velondriake was started in 2006 to “protect the future for young people because everything in their ocean has been pulled out” by fishers. At one time, the people in this region were migrant fishers, never staying in one place for long as they followed their catch along the coast. But when fishers like Heristser began to settle, village populations began to grow and fishing pressure grew high in certain areas. Gina and I learned how Blue Ventures introduced the idea of fisheries management to this region in 2006 with an octopus closure in Andavadoaka - the first of its kind in Madagascar. After just 6 months of closing off an area to octopus fishing, fishers were seeing a significant increase in octopus size and numbers (due in part to how quickly octopus naturally reproduce). The closure success generated interest in fisheries management up and down the coast and today, there are over 20 octopus closures in Velondriake! President Roger helps to coordinate the management of all the closures and to help educate communities on why conservation is so important.

Around 7,250 people live within the 25 villages managed by Velondriake, many of which helped to write the Dina (or fishery management Bible) for the LMMA. After President Roger, we interviewed Velondriake regional presidents (north, central, and south), some leaders of village-level Velondriake committees and committee members - all of them are fishermen. For a place like the southwestern region of Madagascar where the land is too dry for agriculture and most villages are extremely isolated, fishing is their main source of income and food – they all understand that without the ocean, life is not possible here.

Hersister thinks that Velondriake is working to protect resources, but he is concerned because he knows people are still stealing from the closed areas; people are still breaking the rules. There will always be rules broken when people are so poor.

Gina and I visited a different LMMA, Teariake, just north of Velondriake in the town of Morombe. Management efforts have been less successful in Teariake, where it is common to steal from octopus closures and banned fishing methods (like beach seining and poison fishing) still occur. In its defense, Teariake is in its infancy, started just two years ago by an NGO call Cout. We were excited for this visit because it celebrated the opening of an octopus closure. Opening days were always exciting because fishers were rewarded for their patience by catching fat and plentiful octopus given two months to ripen. However, our first interview in Teariake told us that so much stealing occurred that most fishers would visit Velondriake’s octopus opening instead – no one expected to catch anything special.

Come opening day, Gina and I were elbow deep in buckets of octopus, helping to weigh and sex the catch. Not many fishers had shown up that day and the catch was nothing exceptional, but we were still impressed when handling the gooey, dead, alien-like creatures that support thousands of livelihoods. Whether or not it was the most successful octopus closure in the region, people were happy because there are still octopus in the sea. We found ourselves that night celebrating the day’s bounty in a local Malagasy karaoke bar learning local dance moves and acquiring a taste for watered-down rum. Here’s one to Hersister.

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