WHRC's Sustainable Science Speaker Series - Dr. Toby McGrath speaks on Sustainable Fisheries

So today Toby McGrath is an associate scientist here at the Woods Hole Research Center. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1989, I believe it was. And he's worked pretty much all of his career in Brazil and to some extent in, yeah, pretty much all in Brazil. And he's worked as a professor at the Federal University of Para. Para is one of the states in the Brazilian Amazon. But as you're going to see here today, what he's going to present is by no means academia. This is not hypothetical stuff. This is real on the ground working with fishers and fisher communities. And that's really what he's been doing most of his career. He was also one of the founders of two very important Brazilian NGO organizations. One is called imazon and the other one is called epom, which stands for the, roughly translated, the Institute for Research of the Amazon. And we work very closely with them and have ever since they were founded. So that's really. Toby's work is to be involved with organizations on the ground and communities and with the government to try to find ways of merging the multiple interests to find pathways to sustainability, which is one of those holy grails that we're all still searching for, like equality and equity. But maybe Toby will give us some insights as to where we can find it. Fisheries.

Thank you, Eric. Thank you all for coming. Is that too loud or is that okay? I think I hear my own echo. But it's really a pleasure to be here and it's especially a pleasure to be able to talk about what I've been doing for the last 20 years and sort of, as you'd say in Portuguese, do prestas undi contas, which is to sort of explain, show, give your, you know, show what you've been doing and what you've done over those years. And so this is an opportunity for me really, and it's been enjoyable putting together this talk to sort of bring together the elements of a very long term process. And I should say right at the beginning that a lot of this is due to the kind of support institutions, Woods Hole, Palm and donor organizations like WWF especially, that were in there for the long haul. And that's increasingly not the case with the perception of funding and strategies. And I think, I hope that this will show something about the importance of, of that kind of long, long term support which is beyond the horizons of most donors and many other institutions. So what I will be talking about then is about the developing a long process, starting with grassroots movements and through their collective Agreements, developing formal management systems for floodplain fisheries in the Amazon and then dealing with the other elements that come that are part of that puzzle and also taking advantage of policy changes to strengthen sustainable management in the fisheries. And I'll say at the beginning, we're not there yet by a long shot. There's more to go, maybe another 20 years. But that's less and less my job. But I will describe this process and we can discuss then any further implications that you may have. So I will start trying to ground us a little bit here by talking about the crisis in world fisheries. Get on to talk a little bit about inland versus marine fisheries, a little bit about the differences, the importance of inland fisheries, which don't get, is my view, anywhere near the attention they deserve from a conservation perspective or from a social perspective, rats the inland fisheries. Then the bulk of the talk will be about the whole process of developing community management based management of floodplains fisheries and some final considerations. So we are now in the midst of a global crisis in the world capture fisheries. Some people have asked me what I mean by that. I mean, as opposed to aquaculture, where you're cultivating fish, capture fisheries are where you're going after wild fish, wild fish stocks. We have major decline of the regional fisheries throughout the world. Problems being overfishing, pollution of coastal inland waters, climate change increasingly a problem, temperature changes, acidification and other factors that are associated with climate change. Habitat degradation, both marine, coastal and inland. And all of these the threats they represent to the livelihoods of the populations that depend on these fisheries. Here in New England we have witnessing now the crisis in the cod fisheries, once one of the most abundant fisheries in the world a couple of hundred years ago today, as you can see here, stocks reduction of 77% in the catch for the Gulf of Maine. Fishermen rightly complaining that these measures may save the fish, but they're going to kill off the fishermen in the process. And I added this bumper sticker that I bumped into, so to speak, recently because it sort of captures that polarization of perspectives and the importance then of co management, ironically, to address this kind of polarization, and I'll get back to that. We look at graphs of trends in the fisheries. You can see then that the global marine fisheries have peaked sometime in the 80s and have bounced along since then, never quite making it to 90 million tons per year. Inland fisheries have been much more stable, somewhere around 7 or 8 million million tons there. And this difference then is the fantastic growth of aquaculture. We could discuss this later. The role of aquaculture. The, the role of aquaculture in undermining management is what I would say about that for inland fisheries at any rate. But if we look at it in a more global perspective, then you can see these are collapsed, this fisheries here from 1950 to 2000, these are the overexploited fisheries growing, these are the exploited, that is to the limit. And these are the ones that still have some margin in. And you can see then that from 1950 to 2000 we've gone essentially to a situation where 45% of marine fisheries are overexploited or collapsed. Another 40% are at the limit and we have very, very little margin in terms of marine fisheries. And I would say that the situation, inland fisheries is certainly at least as bad, if not far worse. One of the dynamics that we have is this process that I call the fishing down, where you start with high value large species and as these get selectively removed, you begin to move to smaller and smaller value species. And as that process goes, you move along this gradient here, more and more effort, less smaller and smaller fish. Looking at, going back to that graph, you end up with something that looks like this, looks like you're fairly stable over here, but that's high. Hiding this complete destruction of the fish communities that are being exploited. And you get into a situation that is increasingly unstable as you depend on short lived, fast growing species that are often very sensitive to environmental conditions for spawning. And the result then is at some point collapse in the Amazon. Now we are in a better situation with this regard. Large species like the piraruku and the manatee are endangered. Other important species like large migratory catfish, that's the fibuace, the juveniles are 30 kilos. They're not mature until they're over 30 kilos. The tambaqui, an important species, these are growth species then that are overfished. But there's still a large number of commercially important species who seem to have fairly healthy stock. So the process is begud. It's fairly well advanced in the Amazon, but nothing to that extent. We compare here small scale fisheries. Now marine inland, you see that while marine is about two thirds of catch compared to the inland ones. Inland is more focused on domestic consumption. That's to say it's more subsistence oriented, meeting the food needs of the population. Both small scale are. In that case, the catch per fisherman is smaller, about a third that of the Marine, about 0.77 tons. You look at numbers of fishers, however, you'll see that of the 33 million estimated fishers in the small scale fishers, 63% are inland. In post harvest numbers, 54% are 50, 55% of women are in the inland fisheries. And overall total employment is higher in the inland fisheries than the marine fisheries. Another example then of the importance of these fisheries socially throughout especially the third World. The inland fisheries have another problem. That is to say, they are extremely vulnerable to a range of impacts within the their basins. You can't just separate. So here we have fishing. You can manage the fishery. But if you don't have some mechanism of dealing with this whole range of threats that are affecting areas within the basin, then it may not matter what you do with the fishery. For example, deforestation, either for agro industry or for ranching then is affecting the interfluvial areas of the entire basin. That will affect runoff, it will affect pollution of agrotoxins and nutrients that are going into the water, and it will affect the flood regime. Dams are blocking the rivers, affecting migration, movement of fish up and down. Urbanization also important sources of pollution in a place like the Amazon. There are no sewage treatments in any of the urban centers in the Amazon. So you can see you've got a lot of water and you have the potential to pollute a lot of water in the case of the Amazon. So overall, when we talk about managing inland fisheries, their enormous vulnerability to this whole range of impacts is the problem. Because managing fisheries, as we've seen here in New England, is difficult. If you also have to be dealing with a range of other impacts and the enormous interests that are behind any one of these, then you can see that inland fisheries are really quite vulnerable. Just to give an example, here's a map of current and future impacts on the Amazon basin. The yellow are areas that have been deforested. The red lines here are planned waterways or existing waterways. The circles are dams. The red ones exist, the orange ones are under construction and the white ones are planned. All in the Andes, all through the Brazilian plateau regions, and a few up here. And these hatched areas are all petroleum leases, either planned or existing. The mining activity is in here. When you take this to a small scale and look here at a little tiny place here, these are all the little check dams that ranchers have placed in. So the stream network is of kind completely fragmented by these kinds of actions. So we can see that in the Amazon, while the fisheries are okay so far, we can see already that the potential for massive transformation is huge here. So what I'm going to talk about is really what I would consider to be a 20 year experiment in developing community based management systems for the lower Amazon floodplain. These are areas that are not parks, they're not reserves. These are what we call the closest thing to sort of privately owned floodplain lands and collective efforts to conserve these. And this is work that is involved combining, as Eric mentioned, science and policy, doing the research on commercial fisheries, the ecology of floodplain fisheries, the impacts of floodplain land use, both fishing, ranching, forest clearing, studying community management systems and analyzing policies. It also involves community initiatives, partnerships with grassroots organizations, community organizations to develop fisheries management agreements and capacity at the local level, organize communities, environmental education and mobilize in support of policies in support of, of community management. Key actors in this work have been the varzia communities themselves. Varzia I haven't defined yet. Sorry, I thought I had. Varzia refers to floodplains of the Amazon. I'll give you another definition in a little bit, but that's what varzia means. So floodplain communities, the local fishers unions that represent all the fishermen in the municipalities, NGOs. The two key ones for this work have been Woods Hole Research center, of course, and epam, our key partner in Brazil for a lot of this work. Government agencies, a number of different agencies, important at different times. And then of course especially international, but also national donors that have supported the various phases of this work. And as Eric mentioned, the important thing here for me at least is, is to see this as an experiment, to be making interventions, see what happens, try something else, see and learning through that process. It's a long term collective process of learning. This is my favorite name for the Amazon Hur the river sea. And I think it captures better than any other name the size of the Amazon river. It provides almost 20 of the river water entering the oceans is provided by the Amazon River. There are holes 300ft deep in the Amazon here in Manaus, along in there, there are holes that are 300ft deep, they're below sea level. The bottoms of the river in that section and enough other areas are. So it's a huge volume of water, the largest basin. I think it's the largest basin in the world. I'm not sure about that. I didn't look it up. 40% of the South American continent, you're here, the headwaters, you're within 100 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean, all the way across to the Atlantic Ocean. Going vessels could go up 3,000 miles or more to Iquitos here. And there are something 3,000 documented, perhaps probably as many as 5,000 species of fish in the the Amazon system. So huge diversity of fish species, not to mention other species, just a huge system. The key thing about this from a fisheries perspective is these rivers, these rivers have their origins in the Andes, geologically active, dynamic region, a lot of erosion and they then are providing the sediment that creates the floodplains of the Amazon. And it's these fertile floodplains and sediment, nutrient rich rivers, waters that are responsible for a great part of the productivity of, excuse me, am I blocking of the Amazon system. And so Varzia then refers to the floodplains of these rivers, these rivers that originate in the Andes and are filled with sediment. Our work I'll be describing is mostly taking place in the region called the Lower Amazon. This is the Tapajoz river here, Xingu here, the Madeira, which the Madeira all by itself, if you were to take it to the ocean, would be one of the two or three largest rivers in the world. And it's only one of three major tributaries here. So this is the area that we'll.

Be working.

For most people. Their notion of the Amazon is basically a result of the events of the last couple of decades. As these highways were built into the Amazon and ranching, colonization and logging followed them and cleared these areas. But this has been the focus of Amazon settlement for the previous 400 years. Since the early 1600s, settlement has moved up the navigable rivers and into the Amazon basin. So this is the pre existing traditional Amazonia and the fisheries and the movements that I'll be talking about have their origins in this traditional Amazonia. So here's the area that this talk will be focused on. If we were to take a cross section of the Amazon river at the Lower Amazon, from the river, the main stem of the river, through to the uplands, you'd have a series of roughly four main zones. The river itself, the levees here that are originally forested. These grade into a natural seasonally inundated grasslands and finally into the permanent lakes that occupy the interior of the floodplain. You would repeat that sequence on the other side and there might be then a narrow channel separating that island of floodplain from the mainland. Economic activities on the Amazon floodplain follow that same logic. People put their houses on the highest levees where the duration of floods is shortest. They plant their annual crops and some perennials around their houses up on these high points. They graze cattle on these grasslands during the low water season. And they fish in the lakes and in the river year long. The river fishery tends to be seasonal when the large Schools of fish are migrating upstream the lake. Fisheries are more productive in the floods in the dry season, but are fished all season long. So what we have are economic strategies that seek to take advantage of the key resources and habitats of the floodplain. So there are diverse strategies of which fisheries is a critical. Critical, but not the only one. If we were to look at this from above and look at it, you can see then three concentric zones. In terms of land tenure, properties are defined in terms of meters of frontage and then back to the middle of the lake. As far as they're concerned, nobody knows how much their land in terms of area, they just know how many meters of frontage they have. Small holders typically have 40 to 100 meters of frontage. So they're small, small properties, ranchers far more. Okay, these then have different property rights associated with them. The levies are clearly individual properties. Lateral boundaries are demarcated. Housements are concentrated there the house agricultural activities. Beyond that you have this commons of common grassland. And households then may, if they have cattle, will graze their cattle in these areas. They have the right to fence it, but few do because those who have cattle usually have more cattle than land. So they prefer to take advantage of this larger grassland. And then they also inside that is the lake. So these two zones, grasslands and the lakes, tend to be treated as a commons and used collectively and managed collectively. And the management initiatives that I'll be talking about here have to do with controlling grazing on the grasslands and fishing in the lakes. We were to look at these habitats, this would be a typical house. On the levee you can see virtually no forest left, some trees and then agricultural activities in this area. Inland from that you'd get these low, long flat grasslands. This is the dry season that are used then for cattle. And inland from that, these lakes here's the same lake in the flood season. So we have problems. Forest degradation is the problem on the levees. Much of that critical forest habitat is gone over grazing of these grasslands. We'll get into that later. And problems with overfishing in the lakes. Fishing is very important in the household economy. And it's very important for couple of reasons. The main reason is that it basically supplies the subsistence, the high quality animal protein that families need. Any money, any fish left over could be sold to a local fish buyer. And that then is cash for subsistence, for weekly purchases of household needs. And any money that's left over from that can be invested either in buying cattle, small animals like chickens or ducks, or planting crops. So fishing is fundamental. And when we talk about the importance of fishing in inland fisheries, we often don't recognize that that fishery is making possible a whole lot of other activities and productive activities that are important. So another key element here is the productivity of fishing. If you have to spend all day fishing, you don't have time to plan. So they manage a fishery. We'll get to that. Now, a community management strategy seeks rather productivity more than production. They would prefer to limit production and make sure that they can go out in a short period of time, meet their needs fishing and come back. And they don't want to have to compete with other fishermen and buy new gear and do the whole process of capitalizing to compete more effectively. The other different element of their management system is that they prefer to protect the lakes and the fisheries in the low water season, when fish are concentrated in small lakes and are much more vulnerable to somebody coming along with a big net and just scooping the lake out. So they tend to prohibit gill nets in low water in terms of controlling catch. They don't have the means to monitor how many fish people caught. But they can restrict gear. They can say, okay, no gill dust at this time of year. They can say, no Styrofoam ice boxes so that people can't store fish on the lake. They have to go back home. And these kinds of restrictions then will help to reduce the pressure on the fishery. And when they can, they will restrict access of outsiders and keep that outside pressure off. So these are traditionally. These would be the original basis of original community agreements for the fisheries. Another element is what we call the flood pulse, the slow rise and fall of the river. The Amazon river rises slowly from the end of November to June, the beginning of June, and then falls more and more rapidly until the end of October, the beginning of November. That essentially follows the rainfall pattern, except that you need. This is the rainfall in Santareg. And this is the collective result of 40% of the South American continent. So there is not necessarily any relationship between the local rainfall pattern and what the river is doing. But they do coincide in this case. And so they give you a dry season of falling water levels where agricultural activities and cattle grazing take place. And then a rainy season of rising water levels where life seems to slow down a little bit. You harvest your crops, move your cattle off, and fishing becomes less productive as water levels rise. This would be the same place site in both different periods of the year. Just to give you an idea of the dynamic nature of this landscape, Key element is what we call the Fish in the forest, that flood pulse, that water rising and slowly moving in for several months of the year into the vegetation. The forests and grasslands of the floodplain provides important nursery habitat for young juvenile species and also an important food source. Many Varzia tree species are adapted to fruit and their fruit and nuts, seeds that fall into the water sustain some of the most delicious fish in the world. This here is a tambaki, a fruit eating species of kerosene. And he is probably using fruit nuts that he picked from these trees. And he went to a tree that was dropping fruit into the river, into the water and fished right there to catch his tamba ki. So this relationship is important. And what that means is the quality of that habitat is fundamental to the productivity of the fishery. If you degrade that habitat, deforest overgraze, then the productivity of that lake fishery will be affected. This just to give you a brief sort of rundown of the time. So you have from the 60s and the 80s the development of the commercial fisheries. And with that growing number of conflicts as commercial fisheries begin to move into lakes up and down the Amazon and use their nets to completely scoop out the lake. In the 80s, grassroots mobilization and community agreements to basically define rules for fishing in lakes and local NGOs. And this is where we began to get involved, began to then to evaluate the extent to which these community agreements can be transformed into legal instruments for controlling the fisheries. And by 1996 and from 2002 this system was put into place. And I'll describe that then. From 2006 to 2000 land tenure policies were put into place. And I will describe then what impact that has on the development of the continuing development of this management system. And the neat thing here is that this whole process has been driven by, by grassroots movements. Many of you have probably heard of the rubber tappers and the shikumendis and struggles against ranchers and loggers. Beginning in the late 80s. He was assassinated, I think in 88 or 89. And after that there was enormously powerful alliance between grassroots movements and environmental movements, environmental organizations in the Amazon. This is essentially the same process, the same origins, the same kind of process. But it wasn't about upland forests. It was about floodplain lake fisheries and protecting those fisheries. And it was all up and down the Amazon, the Peruvian Amazon, Brazilian Amazon. And what we have in the lower Amazon and in other parts of the Brazilian Amazon is that it kick started and put into place a process of formalization and formal recognition, recognition of the rights of these people. We have Basically, in the 70s, we had a transformation in the commercial fisheries that set all this process going. And that was a process that I think at different times went all the way around the world. In the traditional fisheries, first of all, you had synthetic fibers and gill nets that replaced cast nets and harpoons, diesel engines and outboards replaced, replacing paddle and sail as the main form of movement, ice and Styrofoam ice chests replacing salt as the main mechanism for preserving fish. The product then changed from dried and salted fish to fresh and frozen fish. Earlier pattern of localized fishing basically in the area around individual communities was essentially displaced partially by long distance urban based commercial fishers that could go hundreds or thousands of kilometers up river to fish. And at that same process you had then the partial eclipse of part time commercial fishers and their replacement by full time commercial fishers who are dedicated to fishing 24 hours a day. And so the conflicts that were generated by this growing confrontation between this new technology, fishermen that are coming in with gill nets and bigger boats and larger storage capacity and taking the fish that sustain local populations, was the source then of this whole process that we're describing. And we have here then the origins of what we can call co management. Go here. First, let's define co management. Co management refers to some middle ground there where you have a partnership of varying kinds between the fishers and the government agencies responsible for regulating the fisheries. And that implies some sort of decentralized institutional structure so that local government agencies and local community groups of fishers can negotiate. More or less. It involves then a collaborative decision making in which not just the government agencies are not dictating the rules, but fishermen and governments are negotiating the rules. This varies. It also implies some integration and combination of scientific knowledge and local experience and knowledge of the fishery. And it also involves some collaboration between government agencies and communities in both monitoring the status of the fishery and enforcing whatever regulations have been made up. So in the case of the Amazon, typically you have co management arising in the developed world as a result of the polarization and conflict taking place between government agencies trying to impose regulations on fishers that feel like the regulations are unjust and unnecessary and that they have not been properly consulted in the process. And co management then developed in the 80s as a way of diffusing this polarization and seeking or trying to find some common ground and some way that together they could find solutions to the problem. In the Amazon, there was another situation. It was the complete absence of the government, the conflicts between commercial fishers and communities, and nobody there to mediate, nobody there to defend the interests of communities or of commercial fishers. And so the communities took it upon themselves then to begin to impose rules and regulations and try and keep out outsiders. But they did this not to eliminate the government, but to try and get the government involved. So in both cases, for reasons that were quite different, they end up seeking some sort of middle ground where there is some form of collaboration between the communities, the user groups, officials, and the relevant government agencies. So in our work in the floodplain, what have we been doing? What are the key elements? I would say that there are three elements, broadly speaking. Governance, managing key species, and habitat restoration as three main focus foci of our work. And then for that, first of all, the question of how do we take these community agreements that communities have come up with and turn them into legal instruments that the government will recognize? Secondly, how do we deal with the problem of the classic trade tragedy of the commons unfolding on the grasslands, where more and more cattle are degrading habitat? And how do we deal with a very ambiguous and conflicting land tenure situation where the communities had no property rights and individuals had no property rights? And how could we recognize the existing traditional system that was in place? And then for key species, there are a number of them. The piraruku is one. I will describe a little bit of the work. My colleague Leandro Castello, who may or may not be here, pioneered a system for managing piraru. Cool. Which is a wonderful fish, that is probably the most successful management system in the Amazon and great potential to bring a fish back from the brink of extinction. Other species that are important commercially, that have the potential for. For management are river turtles, Cayman and capybara. We have some work with these, but we're not to the point of proposing management regulations for them. And the government won't let you manage them anyway. So first we have to deal with that problem and then habitat restoration, reforestation, recovery of grassland. So our work then, and it was all scientists working with communities, and the community initiative was critical to all of this. Very little of that was us saying, hey, let's do this, and more and more, oh, you're doing that. That looks interesting. Let's see if we can help. So the first thing was you had these agreements the communities had come up with, they had no legal validity. However, the government was interested in exploring ways to make them legal or to adapt them so that the government could register. And so we worked with the communities, with the government, to begin to develop agreements that would be acceptable to the government and that the communities then. So the first step was creating what we called regional fisheries councils. And these were inter community councils that represented all the communities that lived around a given lake system. Those communities would get together and come up with a proposed agreement for regulating fisheries in that lake. Their management plan, that management plan, once it was approved by all the communities, would be submitted to the regional office of iboma, which was the agency responsible for managing fisheries at the time. If that agency decided, if that office said, okay, we have no problems with this, it was sent to Brasilia, the main office of Obama, and transformed into what they would call a legal document, sort of, I can't, I don't know how to translate the legal term that's used in Portuguese. That document then comes back officially, IBAMA trains community environmental agents that are then responsible for monitoring the agreement, monitoring fishing, and they work with the Obama regional office agents to enforce that agreement in the community. That's the way this thing was set up to work between 1996 and about 2002. 6 Here, I said, excuse me, we set up seven of these regional fisheries councils here. Santare is here. This is the Amazon river coming down this way. This is the Tapaj coming in from the south. This is not a beautiful blue river, it's a muddy brown river anyway. So these seven councils were set up for these different lake systems. 140 communities on the floodplain and on the adjacent uplands. A population of roughly 35,000 people involved up and more or less function. When we studied, compared, did a study comparing the productivity of fishing in managed and unmanaged lakes that were comparable in terms of their physical characteristics found that roughly 60% the managed lakes fishing was 60% more productive than in the unmanaged lakes. If you take out this outlier here, it drops down to about 45, but half again as productive as the unmanaged lakes. Which was an important thing to show because in a floodplain, the river comes up, covers the whole floodplain, it becomes one lake. Fish move around, fish migrate. Does it matter what you do in an individual lake? And so that was the question. And what we found is that, yes, it does matter, that there are more or less sedentary populations and fish that you can manage and have an effect from one year to the next, and you could improve progressively the productivity of fisheries over time. However, while it worked from a resource perspective, we had a lot of problems from an institutional perspective. First of all, you have one group that manages the resource, but they are generating costs. It costs Them, they have to go out and patrol, they have to have meetings. All of that costs money. They have to go to town and meet with agents and stuff. So they're spending time and money to manage this resource. But the government will not let them exclude outsiders who obey the rules from fishing in the lake. So one group does the work. Everybody can have fun at the party. So that was a problem. There are very few organizations that function effectively when the group that's doing all the work doesn't get the benefit. So that was one problem with the agreements, the government criteria for the greetings. The other problem was that they were not allowed to charge user fees, any kind of a fee. You know, they could have a thing where, okay, everybody who fishes in the lake has to pay some standard fee or something based on the catch towards the management of the lake fishery. They were not allowed to do that. So they had no mechanism for recovering costs that way. Nor were they allowed to control the marketing. They weren't allowed to force people to sell their fish via a community association. So they had no real control over it. So that was a long term problem. In the short term, that might work. In the long term, that could be a problem, especially when the government really didn't do its part to help enforce the agreement. The other major change had to do with ranching on the grasslands. Ranching was something that was as old as settlement on the floodplain. Small amounts of cattle kept there, they were put in raised platforms, like you see these sad cows over here, and they would then be fed cut grass from floodplain grasses every day through the flood season until they could get back off. With the introduction of diesel motors and larger vessels, they had the possibility of taking cattle off the floodplain as water levels rise, put them on upland pastures adjacent to the floodplain and bring them back again when the water levels fall. And so you get this kind of a migration pattern. And what you see then is that the floodplain land use is now being integrated into the upland land use and settlement on the uplands. And families will migrate back and forth with their cattle over the course of the year. This is a problem. The main problem is that when you had this system, you had a natural control on how many cattle a family could maintain on the floodplain. And that was a small number, 35 head. When you go to this system, that control is eliminated. You can now put a lot of cattle in pastures up here and bring them onto the floodplain in the dry season. So you have the capacity Then to put a lot more cattle on the floodplain than you could do previously. Now, the constraint for smallholders is the amount of pasture that they can afford to rent on the uplift. But overall it meant much greater pressure on the floodplain. And that then led to more conflicts. Cattle moving about, not properly taken care of or fenced, invading fields, damaging crops, wading in the lake, damaging nets. So you had a lot of conflict around cattle in floodplain communities. And so they came together and adapted the idea of a collective agreement to what they call the terms of adjustment of conduct. And these collective agreements then were used to organize cattle, use cattle, manage cattle grazing on the floodplain. Again, these provided mechanisms for compensating farmers. Members perceived some improvement. Rules were when cattle could be on the floodplain, when they could not. But again, there were no rules limiting cattle densities and minimal government support for enforcement. So, like the other one problem, the third element then was land tenure policy on the floodplain. Here we have an island, and this is the way the property informal properties on the floodplain look. These concentrated areas are communities. Back to that zone then. So we, what we have is a system of sort of varied property rights, properties, as I described before, but with different zones of use and community individual control. How do we develop a formal system that recognizes this diversity of rights and economic activities? And the government settled on what they called the agro extractive settlement project. That is comparable to an extractive reserve, some of you may know of that, for rubber tappers. And it was a collective settlement system that was designed to recognize traditional rights and use of resources on the floodplain. And so it offered an opportunity then for residents to live long term in these size, recognizing their territories rights. They were required to have a utilization plan which essentially incorporated the collective agreements they'd already made and provided that a more unified regulatory framework. And in theory, those rights to live on those pies were conditioned on compliance with the agreement. So in theory, they had a system that looked more effective, was certainly more coherent. In the Santa in the lower Amazon, 41 of these pies were created, many of them based on the original co management systems that have been described. 41 pies, 500,000 hectares, 14,000 families, about 70,000 people, all told in this system, from our perspective, this looked like something interesting. This looked like it had potential to address the problems in the previous agreements. And it had potential then to give communities formal control over significant territory. Also, we thought that the utilization plans and then the other required document was the settlement development document were interesting mechanisms then for not just controlling land and resource use on the floodplain, but also for promoting the sustainable development of the floodplain. So the utilization plans regulate all land and resource use. They integrate pre existing agreements. They give the lake fish, the communities, exclusive control over the lake fisheries, which was not the case in the past. And the communities then have a development plan that is based on the sustainable management of their resource base, in which has incorporated all this collective learning that is going on about how communities can manage their resources. So we now have a way of dealing in an integrated fashion with the floodplain ecosystem as a whole. All the main habitats, all the main resources and economic activities, informal territory. And so there is then the potential now to move to a new step, new phase in managing the floodplain. It then integrates these three levels, the property, the community and the lake system in a way that the previous agreements had not had left these sort of fractures. And it also then provided the base for beginning to then address the problem of managing key species. Here's the pirad, they're called in the Amazon, the bacalhao of the Amazon. Why? Because for several centuries they were caught, they were fileted so that you just no bones, just the flesh and they were dried, salted. They were basically basic animal protein for rural labor, rubber tappers and the urban poor. Nowadays the urban poor can afford get out of the cool. But up until recently they could. And the fish had many characteristics that were very adaptable to management. They have to come up to breathe air every periodically. So Leandro Castello developed a system for counting how many piraruku were in a lake. We never been able to do that with another fish. And that then enabled teams of fishers to know how many adults and. And juveniles they had and developed quotas and managed the fishery in a way that would be very difficult to do with any other species. They grow their reach maturity at a meter and a half long and they grow to 3 meters if you let them. And some individuals larger than that have been found. So this is just pictures from a collective fishery in a community near where Santare. And then we estimate then these here are community territories in the region around Santarein. And these colors then represent the density of pirarucu in the lakes in that region. And they go from 34 per km squared to zero, essentially the white area. These areas were not surveyed at the time this map was made. So you have some areas where you have some kind of reasonable management and densities. Are Fairly high, about 34 adults per km squared. Overall, though, the average density is about 1.5 km of individuals per kilometer. On that basis, the sustainable catch for this network of communities would be around 44 tons with a value of about 200,000 reais. If we follow the management initiatives approach that was developed by Leandro and adopted by some of these communities, you can bring that up to an average of around 31 individuals per km. Almost a million tons of million tons. A thousand tons of pirarukul flesh. I mean, you know, fillet 4 million reais. So you have here a management system that can lead off and basically provide the basis for managing other species, because it is a species that lends itself to management those characteristics. So we are now working with about 30 communities in this area to train teams of fishers and get them sustainably managing their local fisheries and conducting research on the piraruku and on the fisheries to monitor the evolution of the fisheries and the impacts on other species as well, and the conditions that influence the productivity of lake fisheries. The second question is deforestation. This region saw a jute boom in the 50s, 60s and 70s, where jute was introduced from Bangladesh by Japanese colonists and spread through the region. Shoot was planted on the levees where the forests were. So over between 50 and 2008. This study was done from 75 to 2008 found a 50% forest loss. The red areas on here, you can pretty much be sure that a considerable amount of that forest was already gone in 75. So somewhere between 50 and 75% of the forest forest cover has been lost from this area. And I know of no old growth forest kind of reasonable management. And densities are Fairly high. About 34 adults per on the floodplain in this region. So what they're calling forest is already a fairly degraded secondary forest. So another key thing is how do we recover this forest and restore its role in the productivity of the floodplain. And once again, communities interested in recovering their forests on the lakes, Especially interested in it as habitat and food for fish. So they sought out species that provided seeds, nuts and fruits that they knew fish ate. So here are five, six, seven years later. They grow fast. It's wonderful planting floodplain trees. They grow very quickly. And here under that canopy of trees, is someone taking fruit from the trees that were planted and catching tamaki, which is a very fruit eating species. So this is a model that we have developed. We know it works. We know which species have reasonable survival rates that would make this viable option. And we hope to be able to go and expand this to deal with the whole area of the floodplain and the communities that we are now working with. The third area is grasslands. How do we recover grasslands, especially this species, which of Canarena, which is important for cattle. It is also used in the flood season to feed cattle. And incidentally, it forms large floating mats that can protect the community. This is the dry season, but this is all lake here, that's all lake there. Houses are located along here. And in the flood season, this all floods, and then waves and big storms will come blasting across and bang into the houses that are located here. So the community is planting large expanses of these floating grasses on either side to form buffers to protect the community from the action of waves. Here's an example of communities addressing the problems related to climate change. Large floods, violent storms on their own initiative. They're not worried about what's going on in the rest of the basin in South America. They're figuring, what can we do to address the problem that we face, the threats in our community, and what do we have at hand? And this was their initiative that we have been supporting. The final element is building up an organizational base that represents these pies and can help them both, giving them bargaining power to negotiate with government agencies and also help them sort of to organize sustainable management and marketing of pie fisheries on a larger scale and give them market power. So early on, we work with a few of these leaders to form what we call the Forum of Varzia pies. Here's one of their meetings. They would meet once a month. Leaders would come to town, and typically their concerns were, you know, problems. They had to deal with different government agencies, which agency, who should they talk to, what should they go about? And these meetings then were very important to them, and they gained credibility with the government agencies as well. Now the government agencies treat the forum as the representative of these conditions, and it's a model that could be spread to other settlements on the floodplain. We now want, through the work with the Pirarukul, we want to then spread that organizational capacity to begin to manage on a large scale the fisheries of individual communities. So where are we 20 years later? This process began with communities mobilizing to protect their resources. They have achieved government recognition of their collective agreements. They've gained formal recognition of community territories, and they have made considerable progress in sustainably managing key resources. What are the challenges ahead? They have formal control over their territories, but there are a lot of ranchers that still have properties within those territories. That's one issue that needs to be resolved. They need to continue to improve the management of their resources. We need there is a complete absence of policies in support of sustainable management or support of the development of markets for sustainably produced fish and other floodplain products. And we need long term mechanisms for capacity building and technical assistance that will ensure that each new generation develops the skills, the understanding, the to be able to sustainably manage their resources and improve progressively livelihoods while improving ecological sustainability and health of these floodplains. So thank you.