Document(s) 5 de 5

Environmental groups that protest against industrial food fish farming because of its environmental impacts may throw their support behind the culture of ornamental fish, assuming that it can help save wild fish populations. As this case study illustrates, the opposite may be true – but not for the reasons one might expect.

One of the difficulties with setting policy for managing aquatic genetic resources is the wide variety of local cultural and ecological circumstances that need to be taken into account. In the 1990s, following the passage of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), some airlines prohibited the transportation of live ornamental fish.³ Some environmental groups have also pushed for the culturing of ornamental fish to relieve pressure on wild stocks. At the 22nd Professional Fish Show held by the Florida Tropical Fish Farms Association (FTFFA), Aquatica Tropicals took the Best in Show award for the cardinal tetra.

These seemingly unrelated events shared one thing in common – the potential to damage a thriving Amazon Basin subsistence fishery, the survival of which may be crucial to the protection of riverine ecosystems from industrial development. The airlines eventually rescinded their ban on the transportation of live ornamentals. FTFFA members, meanwhile, have high hopes that successful culture of the cardinal tetra will lead to a commercial industry that, operating without high handling and transportation costs, could compete so well that the wild cardinal tetra fishery might follow the example of the neon tetra fishery and become merely a historical footnote.

Links between the ornamental trade, the local economy, and ecosystem conservation

The diversity of fish in Amazonia is such that more than 3000 species have already been identified. The middle Rio Negro – the primary fishing grounds for live ornamental fish in the Amazon Basin – exports approximately 20 million live fish annually, generating about US$3 million for the local economy (Chao et al, 2001). The cardinal tetra accounts for over 80 per cent of ornamental fish exports from Brazil (Chao, 1998). The trade in ornamentals (primarily cardinal tetra and discus) contributes at least 60 per cent of total revenues in Barcelos, a community 400 km upriver from Manaus with a population of 16,000. An estimated 1000 local fishermen make their living from the fishery, with entire families, including women and children, typically being involved in collection, sorting, handling and transportation (Prang, 2001).

The collection of cardinal tetras has a short history compared to most traditional fisheries. It was only in the mid-1950s that the aquarist Herbert Axelrod discovered the existence of the cardinal tetra after hearing stories from local fishermen about a species similar to the neon tetra but larger and more brightly coloured (Axelrod, 2001). The cardinal tetra became an instant hit in the world of aquarium hobbyists and within a few years the trade had grown to millions of specimens, providing a new and steady source of income for villagers along the river near Barcelos, which had languished since the end of the rubber trade earlier in the century.

Cardinal tetras are highly prolific, but the health of their populations largely depends on pristine river and forest conditions. The fish are vulnerable to turbidity and pollution in the Rio Negro, the waters of which are highly acidic and ionic – one of the main reasons why cardinal tetras are so difficult to breed in aquaria. During the rainy season, when the river rises more than 9m, the tetras migrate from shallow streams into vast areas of the flooded forest to breed. In most countries, protection of fish habitat is secondary to the needs of industries with greater economic value. The reverse is true in the Rio Negro basin. Barcelos, which covers an area of 122,490 km ² of largely intact jungle (and is geographically the largest municipality in the world), has passed bylaws prohibiting both industrial logging and gold mining in order to protect the ornamental fishery.

As development pressures throughout the Amazon Basin continue to increase, Barcelos has the potential to act as a buffer zone – provided that the municipal and higher levels of government are able to cooperate and that the ornamental fish industry continues to provide satisfactory livelihoods for local people. It is ironic that one of the most serious threats to the continuation of the fishery has come from efforts to protect Amazon ecosystems by curbing the trade in live animals. Blanket conservation policies can have unintended and counterproductive consequences if they’re made without an adequate understanding of variations in local uses of species and in economic and cultural circumstances.

The threat of aquaculture to the wild fishery

If the Barcelos fishery is hurt by competition from a new aquaculture industry in another country, that too will be an unintended consequence of not understanding or acknowledging local conditions. The Florida aquaculture industry would simply be following the law of supply and demand. If hobbyists want cultured tetras because they’re cheaper and less fragile and there’s a willing seller, why should governments intervene? Already, over 90 per cent of freshwater ornamental sales are farmed fish. Popular home aquarium species such as guppies, mollies and neon tetras have been bred for decades. Advances in breeding technologies are simply making it possible to culture species once thought impossible to farm – the cardinal tetra being one of the most recent examples. Barcelos is by no means unique in its concern about the impact of the continuing expansion of ornamental aquaculture on the capture industry. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the ornamental fishery represents 8 per cent of the volume of exported fish but accounts for 70 per cent of its value, and supports so many people that few fishers are willing to support aquaculture (Bartley, 2000; Watson, 2000, cited in Tlusty, 2002).

Policies on aquaculture generally focus on environmental impacts where farming operations occur. However, the situation is more complicated than this. Tlusty (2002) suggests that, while aquacultural production of species has many benefits for the aquarium trade, captive cultivation should be avoided when the wild harvest maintains habitat and when a cultural and economic benefit would disappear if collections come to an end. Assuming the government of Brazil took seriously the threat of foreign aquaculture to the Barcelos fishery and, ultimately, the rainforest ecosystem, how should it act? Control over access to cardinal tetras for breeding is one option, but may be virtually impossible in the circumstances under which the trade in live ornamentals operates.

In fact, it’s unlikely that the CBD’s efforts to ensure that provider communities and countries have a say in and receive benefits from new uses of genetic resources are likely to work very well for communities like Barcelos. Emerging access and benefit-sharing laws, including that of Brazil, focus almost exclusively on bioprospecting. Collection for ornamental breeding works very differently. Breeders have no need to make forays deep into the jungle to find promising specimens. For the most part, they can simply gather broodstock by purchasing wild-caught fish that are already shipped abroad for sale to aquaria. In the case of the cardinal tetra, there’s no need to tap into traditional local knowledge at all – that was done 50 years ago when Dr Axelrod first ‘discovered’ the tetra.

Some critics of the effectiveness of the CBD have suggested that importing countries need to take further steps to discourage biopiracy in developing countries and their communities. For instance, patent offices might require applicants to identify the location from which material (or traditional knowledge) used to develop a new strain was collected. While such a requirement could conceivably be useful for the protection of communities providing sea squirts or sponges, it’s hardly likely to be relevant for ornamental breeders who have bought their fish from importers and have no knowledge of the precise origin of their aquarium stock.

Chain of custody certification has been suggested as another way to encourage both conservation and fair play in dealings with aquatic genetic resources. In a recent poll, US hobbyists indicated that they would be prepared to pay as much as 50 per cent more for quality fish from a ‘green’ fishery than for substandard fish from a poorly managed fishery (Dowd, 2001). Certification of wild fish collected along the Rio Negro could help promote the Barcelos fishery, and the work of Project Piaba (discussed below) should help facilitate certification approvals. The Marine Aquarium Council already has a certification programme in place and is planning to extend it to cover the use of aquatic genetic resources.

The relevance of Brazilian access law to the Barcelos fishery

Assuming that collectors do wish to travel to Barcelos to search for and collect populations of cardinal tetras that might lead to a new cultured strain, what protection does the new access and benefit-sharing law (Provisional Act No. 2186–16, August 2001) provide to communities?

Prior to the creation of this controversial law, foreign collectors of ornamental fish needed approval from the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA), the national environmental management agency. Such collections, often made by individuals, have not always proceeded without incident. For example, in 1999, IBAMA officials apprehended a German aquarist who was collecting cichlids in the Rio Negro region to study their feeding habits.⁴ Generally, even if agencies are tipped off by local people, the remoteness of most parts of the Amazon makes enforcement of regulations very difficult. The effect of Provisional Act 2186–16, which covers scientific research, technological development, and bioprospecting, is to limit the issuance of collection permits to national public or private institutions. Individuals can no longer obtain them. Consequently, an aquarist would first have to make an agreement with an accredited Brazilian institution, which in turn would be required to obtain the consent of the indigenous or local community where collections will occur. A local community is defined in the law as ‘a human group . . . differentiated by its cultural conditions, which is, traditionally, organized along successive generations and with its own customs, and conserves its social and economic institutions’.⁵ It’s not clear whether such a definition would apply to a municipality such as Barcelos or to one of the many scattered family villages within its boundaries.

Either way, the consent of a community (other than on indigenous lands) is required only if the collection involves the use of traditional knowledge related to genetic heritage. The original collector of cardinal tetras, Herbert Axelrod, made his find through chance information provided by local people. Once he had established a demand for the species, the fishery began, less than 40 years ago. Assuming a villager provides information to an aquarist today about a previously unknown (to aquarists) subpopulation of cardinal tetras, would that constitute traditional knowledge for the purposes of the act? Is it enough that a villager simply knows about the coloration or markings of a population for which a community has no traditional use? If an aquarist only wishes to collect specimens from populations already fished for the ornamental trade, is it enough that villagers only know how and where to collect them, in order to be eligible for the right to consent? Generally, other national laws are no more clear than Brazil’s about the nature and scope of provisions on traditional knowledge, and the fact that they have been drafted primarily for plant bioprospecting offers considerable room for confusion about their application to aquatic genetic resources.

Assuming the knowledge of local fishermen confers the right to informed consent, then what? The Brazilian act provides that any traditional knowledge related to genetic heritage may be deemed to be held by the community even if only one member of the community holds this knowledge (Article 9). The community then has the right to receive benefits from the economic use of their traditional knowledge by third parties (eg a fish farm outside Brazil). Presumably, those benefits would be negotiated by the aquarist and a Brazilian national institution, as the act does not appear to contemplate direct negotiations of benefits with a community, which only has the right to decide on the use of its traditional knowledge (Article 8). A share of royalties is the most likely benefit to be negotiated. The big Catch 22 is that any Rio Negro community that consents to the use of ornamental broodstock for aquaculture outside its own area is likely to be quickly blacklisted, creating serious divisions among local groups.

In short, what the Barcelos fishery most needs is assistance with maintaining a sustainable and reasonably profitable capture fishery, and the only benefit that matters is keeping the aquaculture industry at bay. Are aquatic genetic resources blue gold? Perhaps in the minds of the national government and national institutions, but certainly not to Barcelos – or to similar communities in other countries that rely on capture fisheries for wild ornamentals. This is precisely the reason why makers of access and benefit-sharing laws need to have a clear understanding of the implications of legislative provisions for aquatic as well as plant genetic resources and of variations in local circumstances that have a direct bearing on conservation objectives.

Maintaining a sustainable fishery: The work of Project Piaba

The real profits in the Amazon ornamental industry are made by the exporters in Manaus and importers in Florida and elsewhere. The earnings of a Barcelos fisherman roughly approximate the minimum wage in Brazil. However, as Prang (2001) points out, the ornamental fishery provides greater returns than other extractive activities in the Amazon and provides one of the few opportunities to earn enough for basic necessities and consumer goods. The ornamentals trade makes it possible for peasant fishers to remain in the interior rather than emigrating to urban centres like Manaus. Without the trade, local people would likely be driven to find alternative work in logging and gold mining, and the municipality would have less incentive to try to keep environmentally destructive industries out.

While higher returns to local fishers would be desirable, their most important need is assurance that a sustainable fishery can continue indefinitely. To this end, Project Piaba, based at the University of the Amazon and primarily funded through the Herbert Axelrod Foundation, has undertaken a variety of activities aimed at maintaining the live ornamental fishery at commercially feasible and ecologically sustainable levels. Its objectives are to:

• Collect baseline data on the ecosystem, socio-economy and diversity of fishes in order to analyse the impact of the ornamental fish trade on social and natural environments.
• Diagnose diseases and reduce mortality of captive fish, introduce fish care techniques to improve the survival and quality of fishes and turtles, and eventually establish protocols for export quarantine.
• Provide environmental education and socio-cultural history to local children, fishermen, distributors and public, and promote career development in aquarium science and conservation.
• Create community-based fishery management strategies for managed harvest levels, stock enhancement of fishes and turtles and the development of aquaculture of native species where appropriate.
• Assist in the revision of policies by regulatory agencies in order to protect vulnerable species and enhance the economic viability of the region.
• Encourage local entrepreneurship, ecotourism, the production of local crafts and the commercialization of other sustainable natural resources.

Project Piaba objectives are based on the premise that sustainable fisheries require a scientific basis for management together with support for community management strategies. So little is known about the Rio Negro ecosystem that extensive baseline data are required before developing integrated management strategies. During its first ten years (1989–1999), in addition to conducting baseline surveys of fish diversity and socio-cultural implications of the ornamental fishery, Project Piaba established a public aquarium and environmental education programmes in Barcelos and worked with local people to define issues that need to be addressed if community-based management strategies are to be effective (Chao et al, 2001). The Project has also provided training in handling and transportation techniques to reduce mortalities and increase the quality of the fish catch.

The Barcelos fishery illustrates the complexity of developing complementary policies for the management of and access to aquatic genetic resources, and the importance of taking into account local economies and ecologies. In the Barcelos case, these include the following:

• Policies for the collection of aquatic genetic resources need to take into account both direct and indirect environmental and social impacts of different uses in different locations.
• Policies for access to aquatic genetic resources need to go hand in hand with aquatic resources management policies that recognize a complementary relationship between science-based and community-based management. They also need to ensure coordination between municipal and higher levels of government in implementing policies that promote sustainable uses.
• Access laws and regulations need to clearly identify communities having rights to prior informed consent. Laws that restrict that right to communities providing traditional knowledge need to clearly define the nature of traditional knowledge to which the laws apply.
• Benefits to communities may be most usefully directed to maintaining sustainable livelihoods that in turn contribute to conservation of aquatic ecosystems.

Document(s) 5 de 5