Woods Hole Research Center

In recent years, Santarém communities have made steady progress in developing co-management policies and institutions to regulate lake fisheries and ranching on floodplain grasslands.  This process entered a new phase in 2006 when the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA), a Brazilian federal agency that manages rural land rights, began implementing a settlement and land tenure policy that transformed clusters of floodplain communities from pre-existing fisheries co-management districts into Agro-extractive settlement projects, known as PAEs. Elsewhere in the Lower Amazon, groups of communities sharing the same lake fisheries were transformed into PAEs, though in most cases the communities had little or no prior experience in collectively managing their shared lake resources.  Since then communities in both kinds of PAEs have been exploring the potential of their new institutional status for managing their fisheries and other natural resources.

Though nominally created in late 2006, implementation of the plans only began in 2008 when INCRA contracted the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) and the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) to work with floodplain communities to develop Utilization and Settlement Development plans (UPs and PDAs, respectively). These are required documents for the environmental licensing of an INCRA settlement, and their preparation sparked a new phase in the development of co-management initiatives in both groups of PAEs. 

Through this process, the members of PAEs with little or no history of collective action are beginning to realize that they now have the right to control community territories and regulate who and how residents fish and raise cattle.  They are discovering that the mere creation of the PAE and approval of a UP are not sufficient in and of themselves to ensure that fishers and ranchers comply with management rules.  While creation of the PAE gives communities the right to develop and enforce rules for managing PAE fisheries, they are coming to understand that without determined effort on their part nothing will change.

WHRC’s and IPAM's work with communities to adaptively manage local pirarucu fisheries is another vehicle for developing community capacity to sustainably manage their lake fisheries. Through participation in pirarucu management initiatives, teams of fishermen are learning how to count the pirarucu in their lakes as they rise to gulp air. As one fishermen put it, they have learned " to see below the water" and make accurate estimates of the number of pirarucu in their lakes.  Motivated by this experience, communities are gaining confidence in their ability to manage their fisheries and recover the abundance that many remember from their childhood. 

The community of Carmo, PAE Salvação, for example, held a meeting in which they decided to start managing their lake fisheries.  Members voted to prohibit use of fine mesh gill nets, set aside some lakes as no fishing reserves and prohibit fishing for pirarucu until stocks recovered.    As one fisherman, S. Lipe, commented after the meeting, "When everyone agreed, then I said, ok now we have what it takes to go ahead with the plan."  They are now organizing teams of fishers to patrol lakes during the low water season when pirarucu are most vulnerable. 

For communities of Santarém PAEs which have a longer history of co-management of lake fisheries and floodplain grasslands, the experience has been somewhat different.  These communities already have functioning management organizations and so are better prepared to take advantage of the potential that PAEs offer to strengthen and improve their management of PAE resources.  The community of San Miguel Island, for example, has for years been forced to submit to the demands of ranchers who claimed control of lakes within their properties and exploited the abundant fisheries that the community has worked so hard to build up disregarding community rules.  One rancher, Luiz Sá Ferreira, and his brother, who frequently broke management rules and fished with gill nests in "their lake" were caught by the community patrol and had their nets confiscated.   To resolve the problem, the community called a General Assembly and invited INCRA and the rancher to discuss the question, in of itself a significant change in community-rancher relations. During the meeting the representative from INCRA confirmed the community's right to impose rules on all PAE residents, smallholders and ranchers alike, and to request the expulsion of those who consistently ignore PAE management regulations.  Finally after much discussion, Mr. Ferreira recognized that the community now had the legal power to enforce the UP and promised to abide by community regulations in the future. 

The meeting was an historic moment in varzea communities' decades long struggle with ranchers and commercial fishers to assert community control over the use of their resources.  As Sr. Oscar Vinhote, president of Ilha de São Miguel, said at the end of the meeting, "Today an unprecedented event took place, for we had never before called the ranchers for a conversation", nor he might have added have they ever been able to force ranchers to submit to the same rules that all other community members must obey.  As the rancher Luiz Ferreira noted, "Based on the clarifications made in this meeting, I can join other community members to construct a new relationship of friendship."