gulf of california shrimp
fishery improvement partnership
Our developing partnership in Mexico’s Gulf of California shrimp fishery aims to reduce bycatch and habitat impacts through two market-driven programs:
- Linking conscientious seafood buyers to a group of fishermen who are early adopters of low-impact gear and bycatch-reduction devices;
- Enlisting major retailers and users of shrimp from the region in a dialogue with fishermen and processors to identify and pursue feasible improvements in the entire fishery.
November 2007 Update
We are putting buyers, suppliers and producers together in a Fishery Improvement Partnership to press for general improvements in the fishery overall, and supporting the efforts of Grupo Valcer, a progressive Mexican shrimping company using lower-impact trawl gears.
Our focus with Grupo Valcer has been on defining the types of gear modifications to be adopted, testing their effectiveness, and deploying monitoring systems to provide assurances to buyers that the shrimp landed in Mexican ports by these vessels has indeed been caught by these gears. We place private observers on vessels to verify that the gears are being deployed correctly and functioning as intended. We are also deploying – for the first time in the fishery – an electronic catch registration system (or electronic log-book) on the participating boats to monitor their location and catches.
The catch registration system was developed and installed by De Haan Automatisering and is a modification of part of the tried and tested Young’s Trace system. SFP thanks Young’s Seafood for their permission and support to allow us to visit Scottish scampi fisheries and see the system in action.
WWF and CleanFish are key partners in the project, with CleanFish marketing the lower- impact shrimp in the United States under the Fisherman’s Daughter Wild Sonora Coast Shrimp brand.