By Maria L.D. Palomares
Uneven governance is wrecking the co-management model that is supposed to be the pride of Belize conservation.
I’ve been conducting research on Belize’s biodiversity and fisheries on and off since 2010, but since 2023, I’ve been part of a group of researchers that make up the Belize Fisheries Project, which brings together a team of local and international experts in healthy reefs and small-scale fisheries to evaluate new and existing information and facilitate discussions about the current status and management of fisheries in the Central American country.
As part of this project, I traveled to Belize in April 2024, and among the different workshops and activities we were carrying out, we decided to visit the Middle Long Cay, east of the mainland and just at the edge of the Turneffe Atoll, the largest in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System.
With an overcast sky and strong winds, we travelled southeast from Belize City navigating light blue-greenish, mostly shallow waters. An hour into our choppy ride, we passed by the Port Coral development on Stake Bank Cay, whose construction demanded the removal of almost nine hectares of mangrove forest to give way to a resort that can accommodate large cruise vessels. It remains unfinished, and it seems that the development halted because of lack of investors.
A school of snapper, a commercially important fish on the Mesoamerican Reef. Photo by Francesca Diaco / Healthy Reefs Initiative.
The thousand-year-old mangrove forest, however, was changed forever.
The decimation of mangrove forests is not unique to Port Coral. It had already happened to the Pelican Cays and the adjacent Manatee Cay and Twin Cays. There, sand and silt dredged from the bottom during the clear cutting of mangrove trees covered the exposed peat surfaces and suffocated benthic communities living on mangrove roots. It also led to a huge decrease in planktonic algae.
In spite of a comprehensive legal program that is supposed to regulate mangrove alterations, tourist dream cities continue to sprout, most likely because these laws are now outdated. For instance, land owners can introduce alterations to their lands, including those who own mangrove islands. Some of these islands are up for sale to private investors, like Coffee Cay, just a few kilometers off the Belizean capital.
Perhaps interested investors need to be reminded that these mangrove islands are nursery grounds for many species, including the spiny lobster, which, along with the queen conch, is the most important seafood product exported by Belize, mainly to the United States, accounting for over $18 million in 2023. These mangrove islands also protect the Belize coastal area from wave surges during hurricanes. They are important buffer zones for the whole barrier reef.
Not so protected
The Belize National Protected Areas System is meant to safeguard many of these mangrove islands. Its success relies heavily on co-management designed to adapt management options resulting from debates held by the various voices from resident, fisher, conservation and government organizations, and, yes, also of all those investors. This managed access conservation model has been hailed as exemplary.
Yet, only about 6% of the reef area is fully protected (that is, where no fishing or any commercial activities are allowed) of the 6366 km of protected areas making up this system. Some studies suggest that the disturbances suffered by the barrier reef ecosystem are considerable and that the protected areas system and the associated managed access protocol is not enough to reverse the trend, notably in view of climate change.
Our boat continued south, passing by Bannister Cay, then Water Cay and Goff’s Cay to the east and Horseshoe Cay to the west, and finally arriving at Middle Long Cay.
The island looked low, hugging the water tight, with the green leaves of leaning mangrove trees almost touching the water. Underneath this canopy are the netted roots of these plants holding together the sand and the silt that make up this island.
Tangled mangrove roots are a nursery for all kinds of marine life in Belize. Photo by Erik Hoffner for Mongabay.
We were welcomed at the López family fishing outpost. Two brothers, Ishmael and Nestor, and the elder brother’s son, Rodrigo, live there. Their father first worked on this island catching conchs and lobsters and, after three decades of leasing the land from the government, they were able to make it their own.
The trio works hard to keep this outpost operational, staying there for up to nine days and going back to the mainland for three or four days to recover. They tend to the ‘casitas’ or lobster shades to help herd spiny lobsters into the protective shelters that they installed on the soft bottom around their property. The shades function like caverns in between rocks and corals, which is the natural habitat of spiny lobsters. They collect these lobsters during the open season, when they also collect conch from within the seaweed bed.
Sometimes, they fish beyond the shallow area and nearer to the edge of the reef to catch groupers or snappers for lunch or dinner or to take with them back to their village sometimes to sell. Among their preoccupations of life at the outpost is the increasing boat traffic disturbing grazing manatees. They would like to establish signs to warn skiffs, sailboats and tourist boats that manatees are around. But, they need the government or the conservation co-managers to help them with this.
Their lives were made even harder when a category 4 hurricane destroyed most of the outpost’s wooden structures. On top of this, pirates ransacked and burned what was left after the hurricane. Up to this day, the perpetrators have not been caught nor sought after. With the help from their community, the family rebuilt the outpost after a couple of years of gathering the resources they needed in the absence of government support.
See related: Sharing a marine reserve with fishers: Q&A with Belize Fisheries’ Adriel Castañeda
A spiny lobster (Panulirus argus). Image by Kevin Bryant via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
While I was listening to their story, my attention was momentarily captured by a few large blue drums placed outside of the covered living area of the outpost, albeit within easy reach. These drums collect rainwater, as there is no clean running freshwater in these outposts.
Although this is not an easy way to live, they have made it work. However, there’s another threat lurking around: a proposal to make Middle Long Cay part of another protected area.
Belize continues its quest to push its marine protected areas (MPAs) to be included in the IUCN Green List by 2027. The goal is to enforce the Belize Marine Spatial Plan that designates up to 30 per cent of Belize’s EEZ as Biodiversity Protected Zones. This is part of a ‘blue bond’ debt conversion agreement between the government of Belize and the Nature Conservancy, called ‘debt-for-nature swap’.
This, no doubt, puts Belize in the forefront of marine conservation, at least on paper.
But fishers feel that they are being bypassed by the government and conservation organizations because they have not been consulted about which island will be included in this program. They question the very nature of co-management and its open debates between resource users, which seem to be confined to a favored group of actors.
Fishing outpost on Middle Long Cay. Photo courtesy of Maria Palomares.
Declining resources
Like fishers in outposts, those that operate skiffs and sailboats and fish by skin diving are also in a dire situation. These fishers bear the brunt of declining resources that are more pronounced outside protected areas. They are assigned to specific fishing areas according to their licenses, but these areas seem to decrease in size each time a protected area is designated.
There are about 4,000 commercial fishing licenses issued to artisanal fishers in Belize in 2023, about an eight-fold increase from the number of fishers in the 1960s. Fishers sell their catch to fisher cooperatives, which assure the equitable distribution of export earnings. These cooperatives have enabled financial support to fishers via loans to buy boats with outboard motors or to build lobster shades. The cooperatives made lobster fishing lucrative in the 1980s, so much so that fishers made 5x more than civil servants at the time.
But this business model suffered from its own success. Younger fishers came into the industry lured by the high revenues. Older traditional fishers were retiring. The fisher composition changed over time. Younger fishers respected the system less, were less inclined to pay their debts to the cooperatives and more likely to jump from one cooperative to the next or shift to the tourism industry. Younger fishers know less about the stocks they exploit and, as tourist guides, tend to disregard protected area regulations.
Tourist operators are not monitored nor sanctioned and are able to take tourists to visit protected areas. Tourists often collect conch or lobster as they snorkel or line fish for delectable specimens to be consumed on their boat. More often than not, however, tourists take more than they need and the catch and release rule has become a catch and take operation. Tourist guides often end up with the catch, which they sell to hotels and restaurants.
In response, many fishers now have also chosen to sell their catch directly to hotels or restaurants, often for a higher price than offered by cooperatives. All of this has prompted the failure of the cooperative system, with only a handful of them remaining. Recent news of fund mismanagement by one cooperative seems to be the nail that is closing the coffin. The equity model is abandoned.
Belize fishing guide Abner Marin with a satisfied client about to release a bonefish. Photo by Erik Hoffner for Mongabay.
Exasperated traditional fishers feel that all these conditions are pushing them into ruin. There are more fishers now per square kilometer of fishing area who are competing for the same resources. This means less catch per fisher, even if the resources were staying in the same levels year by year. But the reality is that what is left of the resources in the water is also on the decline.
Fishers in Belize are unhappy. In fact, many of them would like their kids to take up a different job altogether.
This hard life without many alternatives may, in effect, push these fishers to poach in protected areas or engage in illegal fishing.
The egalitarian and environmentally forward management model that has been so bragged about in international fora may not be so just after all.
If Belize is to live up to its image of a conservation-forward country and blue economy maven, both fisheries and marine protected areas management decisions must be made based on sound scientific advice and on the feedback of the communities witnessing resource decline firsthand, not on the neocolonial interests of a few ‘deep-pockets.’
In addition to being the Sea Around Us project manager, Dr. Maria Palomares serves as science director and board of trustees member of Quantitative Aquatics, the umbrella NGO that hosts the databases of all marine living organisms, FishBase and SeaLifeBase.
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This article was originally published on Mongabay
