| Conch being taken illegally from parks | | Print | |
| Written by Richard Green/richard@fptci.com | |||
| Thursday, 21 July 2011 09:27 | |||
 Tourists love it. A crew member dives off a watersports boat into the crystal clear water in Half Moon Bay and comes up with several live conch. Onshore the crew shows the creatures to the tourists, then knocks, cleans and prepares the conch for a tasty treat on the beach. There’s only one problem — the conch are being taken illegally in the Princess Alexandra National Land and Sea Park. Even worse, the Department of Environment and Coastal Resources is severely limited in what it can do because of the government’s budget tightening measures, says Director Wesley Clerveaux. His frustration shows in the footnote of his e-mails: “The department is currently operating at 50 percent staff capacity. Seventy-five percent of the senior management positions within the department are vacant. All I can do now is simply beg your indulgence and hope that in time we can get back to where we used to be.” On a recent Sunday, the fp witnessed conch being taken off Half Moon Bay in the national park. When asked where they got the conch, a crew member and tourists pointed into the waters just offshore. Elsewhere on the beach, piles of freshly knocked conch were clearly undersized juveniles, which are illegal to take anywhere in the TCI. One tourist told the fp that operators said they were allowed to take one conch per person on the boat while in the park. “This is not true,” Clerveaux said. “It is illegal, and it is false marketing.” He has heard the stories before. In one instance, operators told the department that they buy live conch legally and drop them into the park’s waters, then pick them right back up for the tourists. This is illegal too because the National Park Ordinance prohibits anyone from removing anything from a national park. Of course DECR isn’t the only victim of belt-tightening by the government, but the department is the steward of the Turks and Caicos Islands “Beautiful by Nature” environment that tourists come to see and on which local fishermen rely for their livelihood. DECR’s current budget for staff has been slashed 27 percent from 2008-09 levels, and money for repairing and operating boats has been cut even more. The department has only six enforcement officers to patrol the waters around the entire Caicos Banks from Providenciales to French Cay. Two of those officers are currently on leave. Three of the top management positions are vacant, including deputy director. For the past five years, the department has been without a fisheries manager/chief conservation officer, and there has been no parks manager for the past 30 months. “Given the resources at hand, we have been trying our utmost best,” Clerveaux said. So what’s the big deal about taking a few conch from the park? Marine protected areas like the Princess Alexandra are set aside to allow for regeneration of marine resources like conch and lobster, the backbone of the TCI fisheries and the livelihood of many. Without the pressures of fishing, these protected areas can allow a normal balanced population of any species to survive and thrive. When a protected area reaches its ecological equilibrium, conch and lobster will spill over into and repopulate adjacent legal fishing areas. So interfering with protected areas can deplete an important source of legal catches. And all is not well in the country’s fisheries. When the official conch export season ended July 15, the country was barely more than halfway to its annual quota, indicating a very poor catch. The governor has extended exports until Aug. 15. The governor’s Advisory Council recently expressed concern about the sustainability of the conch fishery and has asked DECR to make recommendations on how to improve collection of data and monitoring in the conch fishing industry.
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