A Contract With a Reef
In 1994 the fishers, dive operators and hotels of Soufrière stopped fighting over the same reef and drew a map instead, closing roughly a third of the fishing ground. Five years later the boats working the water next to it were landing between 46 and 90 per cent more fish.
The boats moored under Petit Piton are tied to buoys rather than anchored, and the reason is a fight that started in the 1980s. A dive boat drops a hook onto a reef and drags it; a fishing boat sets a trap on the same coral and a diver lifts it to look inside; a hotel builds down to the waterline and the fishermen who have pulled seine nets onto that beach for two generations are told to land somewhere else. Soufrière is a small town wedged between two volcanic domes with very little flat ground, and by the end of the 1980s every economic interest it had was competing for the same eleven kilometres of shallow water.
What happened next is the reason this stretch of the Caribbean turns up in scientific papers far more often than its size would suggest. The parties did not go to court and the government did not simply gazette a park over the top of them. They spent two years in a room, and the thing they produced in 1994 was less like a protected area than like a treaty.
What the argument was actually about
It was not conservation, at least not at first. Reef fish were declining and everybody could see it, but the immediate grievances were about access and money. Trap fishers were losing gear. Dive operators were losing the reef they sold. Yachts anchored wherever was convenient. Hotels had appropriated beaches that were, in law, public. And the fishers were correctly suspicious that any conservation scheme would consist of them giving something up so that visitors could enjoy something better — which, in the short term and by design, is exactly what a marine reserve is.
Two years of meetings
The Department of Fisheries brought in the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute, a regional body then working out of Vieux Fort at the island's own southern tip, to run a negotiation rather than a consultation. From 1992 the fishers' cooperative, the dive shops, the hotels, the yacht interests and the town's development foundation went through the coast metre by metre. The output was a zoning map with five categories: marine reserves closed to all extraction, fishing priority areas where nets and traps had precedence, recreational areas, yacht mooring areas, and multiple-use water where everything was permitted. It was signed in 1994 and given legal force under the fisheries regulations the following year. Four reserves accounted for something close to a third of the reef fishing ground in the agreement area.
A reserve imposed on a fishery is a rule. A reserve agreed with a fishery is a contract, and the difference shows up the first time somebody wants to renegotiate it.
What the numbers did
Soufrière became one of the most closely measured pieces of tropical coast in the world, largely because a team led by Callum Roberts had begun surveying it before the closures went in and kept going afterwards. Inside the reserves the biomass of commercially important fish roughly tripled within three years, and it doubled in the fishing grounds next door — the fish did not respect the line any more than the fishers wanted to. The finding that mattered politically was published in Science in 2001: within five years of the closures, landings by the artisanal trap boats working adjacent to the reserves had risen by between 46 and 90 per cent, depending on the size of boat. That is one of the few field demonstrations anywhere that a reserve can pay for itself in the catch of the people it excludes.
The part that gets left out
Those gains took years to arrive and the losses arrived immediately. By 1997 the fishers were saying, accurately, that they had given up ground on a promise and were still waiting to be paid. There were protests. Boundaries were fished in defiance of the map. What saved the arrangement was that it had been built as something that could be reopened: a review process, again facilitated from outside, redrew parts of the zoning, restored access in places and enlarged the fishing priority areas. A management association funded by user fees — a few dollars on every dive, a charge on every mooring — took over the wardens and the day-to-day enforcement at the end of the decade. The map that exists today is not the map signed in 1994, and that is the point rather than a failure.
What a line in the water cannot do
A reserve controls one variable. In November 1999 Hurricane Lenny crossed the Caribbean from west to east, which almost nothing does, and put a swell into the leeward coasts of the entire island chain — the exact side that had never needed to be built for it. Reef structure at Soufrière was smashed regardless of who had been fishing it. The regional bleaching event of 2005 did further damage, and the sediment washing down off cleared slopes behind the town arrives on the coral whatever the zoning map says about the water. Nobody in the agreement had jurisdiction over any of that.
Which is the honest way to read the place. The Pitons Management Area, including this coast, went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004, and the postcard version of the story is that a beautiful piece of sea was protected. The useful version is narrower and more transferable: a town with four economies and one reef worked out how to allocate it, wrote the allocation down, measured what happened, and changed the document when the measurement embarrassed it. The reef is not in the condition it was in 1994. The institution that governs it is in considerably better condition than most, and it is the institution that other islands have come to copy.