Raise Your Hand If You're a Poacher
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EA-12 • RUSSIA • June 2009 ICWA Letters INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS Elena Agarkova is studying management of natural resources and the relationship between Siberia’s natural riches and its people. Previously, Elena was a Legal Fellow at the University of Washington’s School of Law, at the Berman Environmental Law Clinic. She has clerked for Honorable Cynthia M. Rufe of the federal district court in Philadelphia, and has practiced commercial litigation at the New York office of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP. Elena Clear waters of Chivyrkuy Bay, one of the most popular places for fishing on Baikal and the second biggest was born in Moscow, Rus- bay on the lake after Barguzin. Chivyrkuy Bay occupies 270 square kilometers, or 168 square miles. sia, and has volunteered for environmental non-profits in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia. She graduated Raise Your Hand if You’re a Poacher from Georgetown Universi- ty Law Center in 2001, and By Elena Agarkova has received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Barnard College. ST-BARGUZIN, LAKE BAIKAL – “Who almost as much fish as legal fishermen. But why should I contact to talk about poaching has poaching become so blatant on Baikal? Who Uaround here?” I asked. are these people and what drives them to break Institute of Current the law on such a widespread basis? I went to World Affairs “You can start with me,” said N, my friend Ust-Barguzin to take a closer look at fishing The Crane-Rogers Foundation from Ust-Barguzin, the village on the edge of on the lake. It appears that the reasons behind 4545 42nd St. NW, Ste 311 Zabaikalsky National Park (ZNP). poaching run a wide gamut, from a simple need Washington, D.C. 20016 to survive, to a desire to make a quick buck, or to Tel: 202-364-4068 His answer did not surprise me. From my a pure sporting interest. Poachers are more nu- Fax: 202-364-0498 earlier visits and talks with the park inspec- merous and often have better transport than the E-mail: [email protected] tors and locals I got the impression that most of inspectors. Corruption, system-wide failures on Web: www.icwa.org the able villagers, including the people whose the enforcement side, lack of meaningful mar- job involved protecting the park’s resources, ket regulation, and disrespect for what locals poached. Many people did not seem to attach see as arbitrary quotas, sustain the permissive The Information contained in this any moral weight to the issue, or, if they did, atmosphere surrounding poaching. And when publication may not drew a difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ those in power take advantage of their official be reprinted or re- poachers (those who poached ‘a little bit,’ for positions to overfish, for fun or for profit, an av- published without the their personal use and according to traditional erage Baikal villager can easily excuse himself express written con- hunting rules, and those who did it for profit). for breaking what he sees as an unfairly applied sent of the Institute of law, for dire need. Just like in other aspects of Current World Affairs. Local scientists estimate that poachers catch life on Baikal, a distinct sense of freedom, a de- ©2009 Institute of Current World Affairs, The Crane-Rogers Foundation termination to choose right and wrong in a specific situa- delicacy. Nineteenth-century descriptions of omul spawn- tion without following the letter of the law blindly, drives ing times said (with some exaggeration, no doubt) that poaching or allows it to prosper. one could walk from one shore of Barguzin to the other over omul backs. Ust-Barguzin provides plenty of good opportunities to study poaching. Here, enforcement issues get more This fish has served not only as the mainstay of the complicated because the prime fishing grounds lie within local diet but as one of the primary food sources for the national park territory. The village inhabitants have fished people living around Baikal. Omul’s relative abundance since the time of its founding and continue to do so today. and popularity explain the fact that it accounts for more Historical chronicles describe the Barguzin River and the than half of the total Baikal fishery. bays surrounding the Holy Nose Peninsula — Barguzin and Chivyrkuy — as teeming with fish. The Barguzin Riv- But people overfished the Sacred Sea well before our er serves as one of the main spawning grounds for omul, a times. Omul stocks crashed in the middle of the 19th cen- Baikal endemic of the salmon family. Locals — and I agree tury, and then twice in the 20th century, before the Soviet with them — consider omul, in salted or smoked form, a government entered a complete ban on fishing omul in North Sea NORWAY SWEDEN FINLAND Baltic Sea ESTONIA POLAND LATVIA Upper Angara LITHUANIA St.• Petersburg Severobaikalsk BELARUS • Moscow UKRAINE R U S S I A S I B E R I A Area of Detail Kirenga Caspian KAZAKHSTAN Sea TURKMENISTAN UZBEKISTAN CHINA MONGOLIA IRAN CHINA KYRGYZSTAN Ivda Bolshoy Bratsk Ushkany Island Reservoir Lena Barguzin Chivyrkuysky Bay Ilga Kurbulik Holy Nose • Peninsula Barguzin Bay •Ust’-Barguzin IRKUTSK Olkhon Turka Island Anga Angara Kuda Angarsk• Lake Baikal Irkutsk Proval • Bay BURYATIA • Uda •Ulan-Ude • Babushkin • Baikalsk Selenga Snezhnaya EA-1 1969. Other human activity contributed to the decline in fish populations. Logging on the shores of Baikal and along spawning rivers clogged valuable spawning grounds. Con- struction of the Irkutsk Hydroelectric Dam, which raised Baikal’s water level by more than a meter in the 1950s, flooded spawning shoals along with coastal bays and lowlands. Today it is difficult to ascertain the extent of the dam’s damage to Baikal and its fish spawning grounds. According to a famous Russian biologist Felix Shtilmark, this topic was not popular in the scientific literature of the time. For his part, Shtilmark reported that the population of the Baikal sculpin, one of omul’s main food sources, has dropped pre- cipitously since the 1950s. The omul stock has recovered somewhat since the latest crash in the 1960s (although it is nowhere close to its early 19th-century Volodya reads a fishing license in one of the plastic volume), and fishing quotas have taken place bottles we found in Barguzin Bay during the inspection. of the ban. Nonetheless, scientists do not con- sider the omul population to be stable enough to support and our captain decided to turn back. En route, the inspec- commercial fishing on its own. Because of the importance tors checked one-liter plastic soda bottles bobbing in the of fishing around the lake, three government-subsidized water. Fishermen tie them to grounded nets to mark the fish hatcheries work on Baikal, releasing over a billion spot and also use them as waterproof containers for fish- omul larvae into the wild each year. Hatchery specialists ing licenses. During inspections, ZNP inspectors drive estimate that about 30 percent of caught fish comes from up to the bottles, open them and check the documents in- artificial stock. side. Often a fisherman with a legal license will try to get around the law by beginning fishing several days earlier Out of the three omul sub-species that exist on Baikal, or finishing several days later than the period prescribed one comes from Chivyrkuy Bay. I came to Ust-Barguzin by his license, by installing more nets, or using nets longer in early June to talk to the local fishermen and the fishing than the ones authorized. patrol inspectors, and to participate in some patrol raids, if possible. The game of cat and mouse continues all year. In win- ter fishermen try to hide their nets under ice during night- For several days in a row I woke up at dawn only to time. The law prohibits fishing inspectors from working look out the window and see rain or stormy clouds. This outside after dark (and, as the head of ZNP’s patrol divi- meant that the inspectors’ old patrol boat would not be go- sion explained to me, if one of the inspectors died while ing out. The poachers’ boats stayed ashore as well. Baikal on duty, the park would have to pay lifetime salary to the is a dangerous body of water, with unpredictable, rough employee’s family, something the park cannot afford on weather that can change in a matter of minutes. Just one its present budget). So the inspectors go out on ice during week before a boat with two regional inspectors and their daytime, often running into poachers as they leave Bai- guest from Ulan-Ude capsized in Barguzin Bay. The guest kal to come ashore. “Often we waved to each other be- started to swim, hoping to reach the shore. In an ironic fore going in opposite directions,” a friend of mine told twist, a poachers’ boat spotted his orange floating vest in me, a native of Ust-Barguzin who used to fish often in his the water and picked him up. The boat went to retrieve younger days. If the inspectors fail to find poachers’ nets, the inspectors. By the time they arrived, one of the inspec- the poachers return at dusk to check for fish. But, accord- tors, who also tried to swim to shore, had drowned. The ing to my friend, the fishing inspectors put their own nets other had been holding on to the capsized boat for almost out. And if they did not catch enough, they would drive five hours, in frigid water. The poachers barely pried his over to the regular fishermen, to “check their licenses.” fingers loose from the boat.