Development of a Formal Co-Management System for Floodplain Fisheries in the Lower Amazon Region of Brazil

Abstract

"A major trend in the global trade in tropical forest products is the implementation of importation policies to promote the sustainable management of natural resources in the countries of origin. In many cases, efforts to ensure sustainable origins involve requirements that small scale rural producers and managers cannot meet. These agro-extractivist groups are often only partially integrated into the formal economy. Many lack the basic documents required to engage the government bureaucracy, and most production, local processing and marketing take place through informal channels that are outside government regulatory frameworks. This is especially true of small scale extractive activities such as artisanal fisheries. They face four major problems: 1) community management systems rarely produce the verifiable information on the sustainability of resource use required by import regulations; 2) The small scale, diffuse and informal nature of local fisheries means that there is minimal documentation of origins and the networks through which products pass before entering formal markets; 3) extraction, storage and processing technologies rarely meet government sanitary requirements , and 4) government regulatory processes impose excruciating costs on those attempting to comply with bureaucratic requirements. Given this situation, importing countries' efforts to ensure the sustainable origins of products entering their markets are likely to have the unintended consequence of accelerating the exclusion of these community fisheries from access to all but local markets. Rather than helping artisanal fishers, these policies could simply contribute to their demise. This paper examines the evolution of community managed floodplain fisheries in the Lower Amazon and parallel processes of formalization of floodplain households, their communities and management systems, in order to evaluate the extent to which the ongoing process of formalization strengthens the ability of artisanal fishers to participate in national and international markets."