nature

On August 7 the nation's environmentalists were taken by surprise when Law 56 of August 6, 2008 was published in the Gaceta Oficial. The new law repeals section 11 of Law 44 of 2004, that part of the law creating Coiba Island National Park which prohibited fishing with purse seins in the waters that are part of the park.

Coiba is best known to Panamanians as the site of a notorious penal colony that is almost entirely phased out, but the island is a wildlife refuge that's home to a number of unique species and healthy populations of other plant and animals that are rare elsewhere in Panama. However, the park's richest biodiversity is found in its waters, which are home to the largest coral reef formations on the Pacific side of the Meso-American Isthmus and, because of a Pacific current that runs southwest, has many biological relationships to the marine ecosystems around Ecuador's Galapagos Islands.

Purse seins come in many sizes but the ones in question here are huge nets, about 330 meters long by about 60 meters tall when deployed in the water, which tend to sweep all wildlife --- and not just all fish --- out of the waters they encircle. The United States and a number of other countries have restricted their use for tuna fishing, but international trade tribunal decisions have tended to strike down these regulations, designed primarily to protect dolphins and sea turtles, as a form of trade protectionism. The ban on purse seining in the waters off of Coiba came after years of lobbying not only by environmentalists groups, but also by the area's small-time artesanal fishing industry, whose members object to the massive extraction of fish stocks by highly mechanized and often foreign fishing fleets.

The backdrop of the controversy is the collapse of most of the world's major fisheries due to overfishing with gear like purse seins.

President Torrijos said that the opening of the Coiba protected zone was "an oversight" and at first nobody in the National Assembly would own up to its authorship. (Such is the state of "transparency" with the PRD-controlled legislature that the record of such things is not readily available to the public.) It turned out that the second suplente for PRD legislator Freidi Torres, Jácome Pinzón, inserted the change into a maritime commerce law in the final hours of the last legislative session on June 30 and, after more than a month in which the executive branch could have studied the bill, Martín Torrijos signed it on August 6. Neither Torres nor Pinzón were available for comment to any of the media who sought their side of the story.

(Typically lawmakers send in their suplentes to cast notorious votes with the expectation that in the next election campaign they can tell constituents that they weren't responsible, even though history indicates that this deception rarely works.)

The day after Torrijos declared his signature an oversight, La Prensa reported, there was a meeting at the Palacio de las Garzas in which Vice President and Minister of the Presidencia Ruben Arosemena, PRD legislator Yassir Purcait, Aquatic Resources Authority of Panama (ARAP) director Reynaldo Pérez Guardia and an unidentified representative of the tuna fishing industry at which a deal was cut to allow tuna fishing with purse seins in the protected zone in order to catch immature yellowfin tuna and fatten them up in pens.

This latter proposal further infuriated an alliance of environmentalist, sports fishing, artesanal fishing and animal protection groups led by the Fundacion MarViva, because, it is argued, the capture of immature tuna is especially destructive to fish stocks because it disrupts the reproduction and has repercussions up and down the food chain.