With respect to Mayumba National Park protecting turtles or valuable fish stocks, the obvious answer is that it is not working.
The local fishermen, who consider the national park waters as protected for president’s personal fishing fleet, share this sentiment. But the park is performing an important function; it provides protection to nesting turtles. During turtle season the parks patrols the beaches every day and night tagging, gathering data and confronting poachers. This effort has practically eliminated nest raiding and poaching of turtle for food. Furthermore although the fish stocks appear to be under pressure from illegal fishing vessels, shore based surveillance has provided the park authorities with names of vessels, gps co-ordinates of fishing activity and photographs, which allow for official reports to be written and submitted to the ministry. Although not much seems to happen, actually nothing happens, the continued report building provides data regarding continued offenders, and publicity to reports creates bad press for the ministry, thereby potentially creating an incentive to stop. It is at this point I would like to highlight what I feel is the underlying problem, governments will not have the incentive to curb illegal fishing when it is the government who is fishing illegally.
Mayumba has an interesting fisheries set up. There is no traditional sea going Gabonese fishermen. According to the local fishermen the government delineated the lagoons for local fishers and the oceans for foreigners. The local sea fishermen in Mayumba, and Gabon generally are from Benin. They are in the most part not forthcoming in providing fisheries data, thus there is no indication of how much fish they catch, and weather these values are increasing or decreasing over time. In trying to understand Mayumba’s fisheries we managed to get an interview and were somewhat quite surprised at our findings. Firstly when asked to highlight the greatest threat to the fish stock in Mayumba, unlike their DRC and Congolese counterparts the sea itself and wind were considered the greatest threat, thereafter it was the trawlers.
The major problem with inshore trawling is that the nets deployed by the villages are scooped up and destroyed by the trawlers; therefore loss of gear was to them a greater problem than the amounts of fish the trawlers were catching. When asked about the importance of passing down fishing traditions to the next generation, there was a unanimous answer in that children should go to school and learn, they should not follow us into the sea to chase disappearing fish. Lastly when asked about the Mayumba Marine park and its ability to protect fish, the villagers laughed and said it was a protected fishing ground for the presidents fishing fleets, and not a solution to increasing fish catches in Mayumba. The Park, through the government and WCS has just employed a fisheries graduate to explore and examine the state of fisheries in Mayumba. The benefit is that she studied in Benin and has the language and respect of the people, thus making it easier to get vital fisheries data from them to aid in further management decisions. Interestingly when asked who owns the fish in the sea, the villagers agreed it was the presidents fish, and only after some discussions did they realize that maybe they, the people of Gabon actually own the fish and therefore have a much right to harvest and a duty to protect and fish stocks as government does.
