By Conservation Fellow Perla Angulo and translated from Spanish.

During the past three months, the Loreto Bay campaign, “For a sea full of life,” in the Loreto Bay National Park, Mexico has started its second stage. This campaign has worked on the following: the search for an external consultant to conduct a market study that does not support the establishment of the economic importance of fishing products in the PNBL and describes the market of the three most important fishery products.

The campaign has additionally continued with diffusion activities to give continuity and inertia to the activities that took place in the first stage. We had a beach festival at the Ligüi beach, where community members and members of nearby communities enjoyed several activities; the assistants were presented with our puppet show; water activities were conducted; and the first sand contest was held, where participants had to create figures of sea creatures.

Participants in the sand figures contest.

CONANP’s Rare Pride campaign will protect a habitat of protected species in Loreto Bay National Park by working with local fishers to support and manage no-take zones in order to reduce overfishing. Success for this campaign will involve fishermen and local authorities participating in the creation of new No-Take zones, increasing from .7 percent to 10 percent the no-take territory in the park by 2010.

Fishing consultants have continued the one-on-one work with the fishing cooperatives where they have made progress. Over the past three months we have accomplished the design of a monitoring program in the Federal Property Land of Ligüi, where the participation of fishermen became more evident and they also took responsibility of the costs incurred. At the same time, the cooperative’s group that conform the Ligüi community, formed the first participative vigilance committee which is active and works in coordination with the PROFEPA, PNBL and FONMAR authorities. To this day, there have been 27 of this surveillance services.

Fishermen, who are part of the Federal Property Land of Ligüi, working in collaboration with the authorities during the monitoring work of the Almeja Chocolata area.

Alongside these activities, we achieved, through the RARE Fish Advisory Program, 50 percent of the cost of a high vacuum-packer machine that will support five cooperatives that are part of the Federal Property Ligüi community. The other 50 percent of the cost was assumed by the cooperative group itself. This will help to add value to their fishing products.

Furthermore, in November, a course on monitoring, to students of the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur (UABCS) Campus Loreto, was given from behalf of our campaign. This course aimed on engaging the students in the monitoring activities that are been carried out in the protected area above mentioned. This course was attended by eight students, where only one student completely passed the course and, now, she is ready to incorporate to the activities. For this course to be given successfully, COBI AC staff and one of our most distinguished fishermen helped us.

Students taking the monitoring course.

For the next three months, we are expecting to have results of the marketing analysis which will help us give form to the project’s plan and the creative brief. We will, likewise, continue to spread messages of our campaign with activities such as wall painting, sticker and poster distributions, community festivals, and the preparation of the Second Culinary Competition, “For a sea full of life.” We will also continue giving support on the regularization of the municipality’s cooperatives and with the search for new permits.

The activities above described go accordingly to the objectives set for this second stage. It is important to mention that the fishermen’s response when engaging to the monitoring and surveillance activities guarantee that we can have the best use of the fishing resources in this protected area.

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