Management Strategies for Marine & Coastal Fisheries Around Buenaventura: Piangua

The fishery is characterized by a single species, Anadara tuberculosa, which is harvested by hand from mangrove estuaries. The piangua fishery is predominantly women-oriented, with groups of women foraging for piangua together, often accompanied by their children. The importance of the piangua fishery lies in its ability to provide a low-cost source of high-quality protein to families and supplemental income to coastal communities. The collection and consumption of piangua provide an important nutritional safety net, particularly in areas where other fishing activities may not be sufficient to meet the needs of families. The piangua fishery also plays a significant role in the region's culinary heritage, with many local dishes featuring piangua as a key ingredient. The piangua fishery has been framed as a fishery in need of urgent attention due to concerns of overexploitation to supply high demand in Ecuador. However, a top-down management approach may be difficult and prohibitively expensive, with management costs potentially exceeding the total revenue from the fishery. Instead, a bottom-up, participative framework that aligns economic incentives with sustainable fisheries objectives may be more effective. The BIOREDD data suggest that there are strong connections between individual fishing communities and their collection grounds, with clear separation among communities. This provides a foundation for fostering rights-based management at a community level. Rights-based management, which provides individuals or groups secure rights to a defined resource, has been shown to deliver better results for conservation, fisheries, and ecosystem management than an open-access fishery. Establishing rights-based management for the piangua fishery involves defining socially relevant spatial scales, which can be done by mapping the connections between communities and their collection grounds. Understanding the "natural" boundaries among neighboring communities in terms of their existing use of mangrove areas contributes to defining suitable spatial management units for exclusive use agreements. The ecologically relevant spatial scale for the piangua fishery can be defined by mapping the presence of intertidal mud around Rhizophora mangle, as piangua are obligate to mangroves and do not live in areas without Rhizophora mangroves. The piangua fishery presents an unusual opportunity to reverse the management emphasis from top-down control to a bottom-up, participative framework. By working to formalize connections between individual fishing communities and their collection grounds under a rights-based-management framework, there is an incentive for local groups to provide the management oversight necessary to ensure both a sustainable fishery and improved long-term productivity.