New ban threatens traditional fishers in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state

CÁCERES, Brazil — Fisher and bait seller Enilza Silva, 52, is a daughter of Pantanal fishers. When she was younger, Silva tried to keep a job in the municipality of Cáceres, in Mato Grosso state, but the river always called her back.

She decided to return to the banks of the Paraguay River to live among fish, tuiuiú birds (Jabiru mycteria), alligators and jaguars. Silva has been fishing for 15 years and is worried about the approval of a new bill that banned commercial fishing in Mato Grosso on Jan. 1 for five years. Authored by the state’s governor, Mauro Mendes, the law, known in Brazil as Cota Zero (Zero Quota), was approved under an environmentalist rhetoric of protecting fishing stocks.

“A true professional fisherman respects the law and the quantity of fish he can take from the river,” Silva told Mongabay. “We respect the environment in which we live. The bait we catch if it is too small, we select and take it back to the place where we fished the bait. That’s respect.”

The law exempts subsistence fishing by Quilombola, Indigenous and other Native peoples from restrictions and catching fish on river banks for local consumption. However, the transport, storage and sale of fish are prohibited.

Experts and locals like Silva say the law was tailored to boost sport fishing since catch-and-release activities remain permitted — a tourism modality that Mendes wants to encourage in Mato Grosso. “I’m tired of seeing tourists who catch the fish, come with it inside the boat, put it on the beach and show off with the fish, lay it down on the sand to measure the fish, and only then do they release it. Do you think this fish will survive? It won’t.” Silva wants the government to have more severe oversight of sport fishing.

Mato Grosso’s territory is divided among the Amazon (53%), the Cerrado (40%), and the Pantanal (7%), and the bill will affect fishers in all biomes.

Major rivers pass through the state, such as the Paraguay, the Xingu, and the Araguaia, and   of them are responsible for flooding the Pantanal, the world’s largest floodplain.

Along those rivers, communities developed with the fishing trade as an essential part of their living. Now, experts say that the five-year ban poses a threat to those traditional fishers.

“Cota Zero is more than a government bill to prohibit fishing in Mato Grosso, it is a project to extinguish the way of life of more than 15 thousand families in the state, to serve the economic interests of groups allied with governor Mauro Mendes”, said the Mato Grosso Socio-Environmental People’s Forum (Formad), an NGO that has been working in the region since 1992. “Environmental racism is clear when the main people affected by the fishing ban are the riverside communities of the state, formed mostly by black women and men, while those benefiting from the proposal tend to be groups with greater economic privileges,” the organization wrote in a statement.

Silvio Francisco Cardoso is a professional fisher who became a legend on the rivers of Mato Grosso and Amazonas states. He started fishing at age 20 and now, at 81, is known as the “Old Man of the River.” Cardoso has lived on the banks of the Paraguay River his entire life but, after developing lung issues, moved to the municipality of Cáceres.

Cardoso said that he misses life on the riverbanks of Pantanal and his pets: a jaguar called Michel and an alligator, Cascão, who spent most of his time inside Cardoso’s house searching for food.

“When Michel arrived at my shack, he was a cub, and I was going to kill him,” Cardoso told Mongabay. “But then I thought better of it and thought his mother might come and take revenge on me.”

Back then, Cardoso liked to fish species such as the pintado, the pacu, and the dorado (Salminus brasiliensis).

“They think that the fisherman wipes out the fish, but it’s not the fisherman,” Cardoso told Mongabay. “I’ve never seen a fisherman fishing during the piracema [reproduction] season; they respect it.”

Insufficient support

The Cota Zero law established aid to professional artisanal fishers for three years, starting in 2024, with values ​​equivalent to the Brazilian minimum wage. The amount will not be paid during the piracema, the reproduction season, when fishing is already forbidden.

“It’s complicated because this aid he [the governor] talks about paying, there’s no way we can survive on it,” fisher Silvano Ramos da Silva told Mongabay. Silvano has lived in the state of Mato Grosso for more than 15 years and professional fishing is his only source of income and survival. He said he believes that the Zero Cota will harm the entire class of fishers.

“It doesn’t pay our expenses. We have children at school, and they say in the social program that they’re going to give courses, but how are they going to give courses to someone who can’t even read? Where are they going to engage in the tourism service? When these tourists come here, everything comes with a closed package, with a cook, with a pilot, the food, the drinks; everything comes from outside, so practically this has no benefit for us,” Silvano said.

If caught practicing the activity during the five-year ban, fishers like Silvano Silva can face fines, equipment seizures, and license cancellation.

The Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture told Mongabay through a statement that it opposes the new legislation.

Two political parties and the National Confederation of Fishers and Aquaculturists are challenging the bill in the Brazilian Supreme Court. They say that the law contradicts federal legislation, risks compromising the continuity of traditional life and threatens the survival of fishers’ communities in the state.

The appeal is being reviewed by Justice André Mendonça, who set up a conciliation hearing in early April but ended with no agreements.

The legal dispute led the Mato Grosso Assembly to approve additions to the bill in March, restricting the ban to 12 fish species.

The law also provides training courses for traditional fishers to work in the tourism trade, for example. According to the bill, they may only receive financial aid only if they attend the course. “I can’t read,” Silvano Silva said. “Fishermen there don’t read either. They’re people who didn’t manage to get to high school. Most of them don’t have the reading skills to register there,” Silvano Silva said.

River’s protectors

Fishers are considered guardians of rivers, especially in the Pantanal, according to biologists Uirandí Faria Artioli and Claumir César Muniz. They protect the biome by taking their livelihood from it and making the Pantanal their home. Fishers are the ones who report most environmental violations, such as illegal hunting and fishing. They also report the contamination of rivers caused by ranchers who use poison on vegetation to create pasture, which eventually flows into the water.

In addition to protecting rivers, they also favor native vegetation by planting local seedlings such as pacu’s orange, which serves as bait for fish but also helps to protect springs and improves the soil through planting.

Pacu’s orange is popular in Mato Grosso, and it is known for its sour and tasty jelly. Fishers often buy seedlings to plant in the springs of the Paraguay River and its slopes, which helps protect the ravines from silting.

“The little orange helps protect the banks of the river,” Artioli, who studies pacu’s orange seedlings for his master’s degree at Mato Grosso State University (UNEMAT), told Mongabay. “And those who distribute them on the banks of the river are usually fishermen, planting them in camps and on the banks.”

Muniz, a professor and coordinator of UNEMAT’s fisheries laboratory, said that punishing fishers while ignoring other environmental issues is unfair and will not positively respond to nature’s conservation.

“We have been working on reproductive monitoring of fish of economic interest for 20 years, always with the support of professional fishermen and the tourist trade,” he told Mongabay. “The new provisions of the fishing law only penalize the fisherman. The problems observed in our rivers are varied, from poor use of the soil leading to siltation and loss of vegetation to dams, which interrupt the reproductive flow of fish.”

According to historian Luciano Pereira da Silva, the legislation will depopulate the riverbanks and harm the traditional fishing culture in Mato Grosso.

“Fishermen and fisherwomen are by ancestry, Indigenous people, impoverished Blacks and whites. This is the idea of a generic and widely accepted conception of pantaneiros [Pantanal people]; they are holders of knowledge that portrays the continuity of ancient adaptive processes. The world also loses as a result, in especially in this context of the climate crisis,” he told Mongabay. Luciano is president of the commission for registering intangible knowledge of traditional fishermen and fisherwomen of Cáceres municipality.

Banner image: Boat on the banks of the Paraguay River. Many fishermen stopped taking their boats out to fish out of being fined by the new law. Image by João Paulo Guimarães. 

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