Bull Mar Sci. 93(1):69–81. 2017 Mote Symposium invited paper https://doi.org/10.5343/bms.2015.1091
Territorial use rights in fisheries of the northern Pacific coast of Mexico
Rutgers University, Human Bonnie J McCay Ecology, 55 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901. Email:
The study of territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs) requires attention to how humans are incorporated into the analysis, which can be framed in terms of dramas of the commons (Ostrom et al. 2002). The interdisciplinary framework of “sustain- ability science” adds a perspective on people as active “learners” and “responders,” sometimes also as effective stewards and managers. TURFs are of particular interest as institutions that may help people take on these roles, as exemplified by a group of fishing cooperatives in Mexico. The emphasis in marine and environmental science and conservation biology is on people as sources of perturbation to natural phenomena. People are relegated mainly to the role of villains causing troubles at sea, and ultimately the transforma- tion of the globe in the era of the Anthropocene. Overfishing, polluting the waters, draining the marshes, dredging the reefs, striking whales with ships are among the many anthropogenic activities threatening marine ecosystems and the populations dependent on them. Conflicting uses and careless behaviors are at play, but above all the incen- tive structure of an open-access commons sets up the institutional framework for
Bulletin of Marine Science 69 © 2017 Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science of the University of Miami 70 Bulletin of Marine Science. Vol 93, No 1. 2017 anthropogenesis. Where access is open to common pool resources (that is, resources that are shared but also subtractible, in that one person’s use can affect what is avail- able to another), the dominant incentive is to take all one can because there is no way to stop others from taking what one does not take. The result is a suboptimal out- come for everyone. This “tragedy of the open access commons” (Hardin 1968, 1994) is particularly clear in ocean fisheries, leading one scholar to call it “the fisherman’s problem” (McEvoy 1986). It is also fundamentally a socio-ecological systems problem (Folke et al. 2005, Ostrom 2009), where critical junctures between the natural envi- ronment and human behaviors—such as the property rights institutions involved— lead to outcomes that reduce the productivity and/or resilience of the system (McCay et al. 2011). Three remedies arise. The first two were emphasized by Hardin (1968): either- re move the condition of open access, making access exclusive to one or more owners; i.e., privatize what had been commonly owned or shared; or rely on government to impose rules that mitigate the tendencies toward resource degradation and overcapi- talization. A third is to find ways that the resource users, the commoners, can come to agreement on effective ways of managing the resource, a more community-based approach. This idea of a third remedy arises from research on small-scale fisheries and other resource systems that identifies the existence of local-level systems for regulating common pastures, forests, fisheries, and other common pool resources and explores their causes and consequences (McCay and Acheson 1987, Berkes 1989, Ostrom 1990).
TURFs
Policy and academic interest in TURFs comes out of all three approaches to the challenges of managing common pool resources: governments are engaged or enlist- ed to provide legal frameworks, enforcement, scientific, and other resources; access is limited and reserved for members of a designated community; and the stage is set for bottom-up and community-driven transition to sustainability and stewardship. With care in avoiding the temptation to romanticize the “local” and the “traditional” (McCay 2001), and with some concern about the “engaging simplifications” that oc- cur as such systems get elevated to law and policy (Li 2002), it is worthwhile to ex- amine the capacity of TURFs to help people manage the commons. To that end, I present a case study of the TURFs of the northern Pacific coast of Mexico. The term TURF is an acronym for territorial use rights in fisheries, a broad de- scriptor of formal or informal arrangements whereby a spatial territory is identified, and some people hold privileged rights to fish—either in general or for certain spe- cies—in that place. These are exclusive territories. Typically, the term is reserved for relatively small-scale, often artisanal fishing systems, rather than the large marine territories controlled by nation-states and other political units. TURFs are among the many innovations in marine fisheries that have taken hold in small but growing ways, through local initiatives and partnerships among fishing groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and benefactors, and government, to avoid tragedies of both the commons and the commoners, the latter including the loss of access to livelihoods. TURFs are of particular interest as providing the basis for improved resource governance, particularly in the directions of more effec- tive community-based management and co-management with government agencies. McCay: TURFs of the Mexican Pacific 71
That has been a major focus of research on them in widely diverse areas. Arguably, TURFs also can provide the institutional basis for further innovation in areas such as gear improvement, eco-certification, community-supported fish marketing, and marine protected areas. TURFs are found mainly in small-scale coastal fisheries for shellfish and relatively sedentary finfish, as in lagoons or coral reefs. They are often generated from the -bot tom up and informal in the sense that the local rules and boundaries claimed and defended are not recognized or supported by government or formal law. In some cases, informal territoriality is based on isolated circumstance, as in a Costa Rican community engaged in efforts to co-manage beach-nesting sea turtles (Campbell et al. 2007). In others, it is the outcome of competition over highly localized resources, as in the case of the lobster “fiefs” of the Gulf of Maine (Acheson 1988, Wilson 1996). Informal TURFS can gain formal recognition; some aspects of the often fiercely de- fended territoriality of Maine lobstermen have been taken up into area-based co- management with the state (JM Acheson, unpubl data). Formal designation of the rights and privileges associated with TURFs either grows out of the more bottom-up systems or is created anew by NGOs and governments seeking improvements. Latin America has considerable experience with TURFs, particularly in highly- localized shellfish fisheries (Defeo and Castilla 2005), and some of these are now -en abled by formal laws and policies (Castilla and Defeo 2001, Defeo and Castilla 2005, Gelcich et al. 2010, 2017). Formally-recognized TURF-like systems have evolved from fishing cooperatives, which were established in post-revolutionary Mexico (Rojas Coria 1982, Cudney-Bueno and Basurto 2009)—the case study considered here—as well as in post–World War II Japan (Ruddle 1989, Makino and Matsuda 2005, Takahashi et al. 2006, Cancino et al. 2007). Fishing cooperatives in both Japan and Mexico have long held exclusive fishing rights either to particular species or to adjacent fishing territories, or both. An advantage in this arrangement is the exis- tence of an organized body, situated within a larger framework of governance, which can take on the challenges of management.
TURFs from a Baja California Perspective
An important example of TURF-like fisheries that show both strong co-manage- ment and the capacity for innovations is found on the Vizcaino peninsula of the north Pacific region of Mexico, in the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur, Mexico. As elsewhere in Mexico, there is a long legacy of both the use of coop- eratives in small-scale artisanal fisheries and the use of exclusive concessions to al- locate access to commercially valuable marine resources. In the case to be described, the cooperatives (organized into a regional federation) cooperate with government agencies in the management of benthic invertebrate fisheries (Pedroza and Salas 2011, McCay et al. 2014). They are successful by the measure of having achieved cer- tification by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). The fishery for California spiny lobster, Panulirus interruptus (Randall, 1840), that is prosecuted by members of nine cooperatives on the Pacific coast of Baja California was certified by the MSC in 2004 as the first artisanal fishery and first developing nation fishery to be certified as meeting MSC standards. The group’s MSC certification was renewed in 2011 when a 10th cooperative was added as well as a distant offshore island (Marine Stewardship Council 2011). More than 500 fishers from 10 cooperatives participate in the fishery. 72 Bulletin of Marine Science. Vol 93, No 1. 2017
Details about the structure, functioning, and histories of the cooperatives, which are on the coast and islands of a desert region known as the Vizcaino Peninsula, can be found elsewhere (Ponce-Díaz et al. 1998, Young 2001, Shester 2008, Ponce-Díaz et al. 2009, McCay et al. 2011, 2014, Ramirez-Sanchez et al. 2011, Foley and McCay 2014). Briefly, the lobster fishery is managed through annual quotas (total allowable catch), a minimum legal size, restrictions on gear, protection of gravid females, and area closures. The formal managers are government agencies (the National Fisheries Institute, a Sub-Delegation of Fisheries, and government research bodies), but actual management relies heavily on the local cooperatives, which limit entry to the fishery, enact and enforce additional regulations, and play major roles in monitoring and enforce the boundaries of their territorial concessions. Through the technicians em- ployed by the cooperatives and their federation, they also interact with government scientists in stock assessment. Within this context, the Vizcaino cooperatives take their own resource manage- ment initiatives. For example, whereas the federal government establishes the maxi- mum number of lobster traps to be employed in each concession, the cooperatives will decide how to allocate them among members and where to deploy the traps within a concession. The government recognizes boundaries and other rules, but to a large extent, monitoring and enforcement depends on the cooperatives, which are deputized to monitor boundaries and rule compliance. The ability of the cooperatives to successfully co-manage the fisheries, despite many challenges including poaching by outsiders and often dramatic changes in oceanographic conditions, can be analyzed in terms of features that have been theo- rized as contributing to successful management of common pool resources by small communities (Ostrom 1990). In our research we found numerous ways that the co- operatives fit and support the theory (McCay et al. 2014) including smallness of num- bers and spatial scale, accountable leadership, persistent efforts to ensure fairness and transparency, major investments in the ability to learn from and interpret the natural environment, and high levels of internal as well as external monitoring and enforcement, or vigilancia (McCay et al. 2011, 2014, Ramirez-Sanchez et al. 2011). A key to the capacity of cooperatives to manage the fisheries is their TURF quality. Today, each of the fishing cooperatives has exclusive access and use rights to abalone (Haliotis fulgens Philippi, 1845 and Haliotis corrugata W. Wood, 1828), lobster, and a few other species within a concession area usually adjacent or close to the fish- ing settlement that houses the cooperative offices, boats, and packing houses. The concessions are roughly 615–4700 km2 each, the median being about 900 km2 (WL Vázquez Vera, Comunidad y Biodiversidad A.C., pers comm); they extend 30–50 km along the coast and at variable distances around offshore islands (Fig. 1).
Open and Closed Access
The Vizcaino cooperative TURFs deserve study in the context of general un- derstanding about and arguments for TURFs discussed at the Mote workshop of October 2015 (Cinner et al. unpubl data). First is the “tragedy of the commons” thesis that open access is the problem, and closing access is the solution. However, closing access is not necessarily a solution to overharvesting. In Baja California, Mexico, exclusive concessions for pearls, oysters, lobster, abalone, and other highly valued re- sources have a long and complex history, mainly as means for privileged individuals McCay: TURFs of the Mexican Pacific 73
Figure 1. The lobster (Panulirus interruptus) and abalone (Haliotis fulgens and Haliotis corru- gata) cooperatives of Baja California and their TURFs. or companies to extract wealth from the sea with little or no effort at conservation. Resource depletion for the purpose of extracting resources and profits created trag- edies of the privileged commons, and the exclusion involved created tragedies of the “commoners,” whereby the livelihoods and welfare of local people were dimin- ished. Today’s systems can be interpreted as responses to the latter; in 1936, in the reform era after the early 20th century Mexican revolution, fishing cooperatives were granted most of the concessions as tools for redistributing wealth from the sea to the so-called “social sector,” as distinct from an evolving “industrial sector” in the fisher- ies. Nonetheless, along the Pacific coast of Baja California, American and Japanese companies continued to control the concession fisheries, and it was not until the 1970s that Mexican nationals gained control. Linkages with conservation were very late in coming, appearing mainly in the early 1990s. Clearly, creating exclusive prop- erty rights, whether individual or corporate, whether territorial or species-specific, is not enough for conservation. A second criticism of the syllogism about open and closed access and conservation is that it tends to ignore the social facts that access is an intensely political matter (Ribot and Peluso 2003), and that open access is less a natural condition derived from the features of fisheries than a cultural outcome of political decision-making; namely, decisions that some things and activities should remain public (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975). Open access is indeed a problem for fisheries management, but it is also a cherished right of citizens in Mexico, as in many other countries, and thus closing access can be illegal or politically infeasible. Coming out of Mexico’s revolution is the 74 Bulletin of Marine Science. Vol 93, No 1. 2017 law that all citizens have rights to fish freely as pescadores libres. The rights of free fishers remain and are exercised in concession waters in Baja California for finfish species. Arguably, this alleviates some of the socio-economic burden of exclusion from membership in the cooperatives. It also poses a legal constraint on what these TURFs can accomplish from a broad ecosystems perspective, as the cooperatives have no say over finfish within their territories (Micheli et al. 2014).
Exclusion and Sustainability
As indicated above, the argument for TURFs is problematic in implying that clos- ing access, excluding others from a territory or resources, provides the basis for adopting measures that lead to sustained use and stewardship, or conservation. In the Vizcaino cases, exclusive concessions have indeed become essential conditions for involvement in local management. However, the measures that support sustain- ability and stewardship did not come about easily nor are they simply due to the ability to draw boundaries and exclude outsiders. Research elsewhere in the region shows great diversity in the capacity of cooperatives and other fisheries institutions to come to grips with challenges of collective action for more sustainable fisheries (Leslie et al. 2015). The emergence of co-management in the case of the Vizcaino cooperative fisheries came about through an El Niño–based crisis that led to a gov- ernment threat of closing the abalone fishery, together with the engagement of out- siders (scientists and NGO personnel), as well as local leaders (McCay et al. 2014). The process took many years during which trust and reciprocity between fisheries agencies and the cooperatives only gradually evolved. Also helping was a major pub- lic policy change in 1992 toward privatization, which resulted in making the con- cessions term-limited and open to competition, even from private firms (Costello and Kaffine 2008). Among the conditions to be awarded a 20-yr concession is the ability to convince the government that the fishery can be sustainably and produc- tively prosecuted. Thus effective incentives for a successful and co-managed TURF may require embeddedness in a larger supportive system, as well as specific histories through which the need for conservation initiatives and relationships of trust and reciprocity could develop.
Commensurate Scales
Another notion embedded in advocacy of TURFs is that they allow for commensu- rate scales of ecological and institutional phenomena. It matters in the present case study that the concession resources are benthic invertebrates and strongly associated with particular places, making it possible to have a relatively close match between the scale of the cooperatives’ concessions and the biology of the lobster, abalone, and other species harvested (Shester 2008, McCay et al. 2014). The small home ranges for the species also provide a degree of predictability, ability to monitor stock levels with confidence, and likelihood that fishers can expect some pay off in future re- turns from present measures (Foley and McCay 2014). The greater visibility afforded by the facts that abalone are harvested by diving in inshore waters and lobsters are routinely surveyed by divers add to these benefits. Members of the cooperatives come to know the resources and their marine communities and habitats at first hand, and this experience-based local knowledge may contribute to the observed willingness McCay: TURFs of the Mexican Pacific 75 and ability of cooperative members to participate in technical meetings about stock assessment. The literature on small-scale commons management often emphasizes the im- portance of small sizes of the resource user communities, as well as the resource base. But institutional scale is created by human action rather than being inherent in the situation. Just as effective co-management took time and political work, so did adjustments in scale. The original concessions were very large, and the process of coming up with concessions that actually fit the resources of cooperatives—that is, that could effectively be harvested and monitored by specific cooperatives, based in specific places along the coast—occurred over many decades. The same applied to the small scale of the resource user base, the numbers of cooperative members/ fishers. The Mexican cooperatives studied are indeed small in size, but their leader- ship controls access to membership, in some cases adjusting the size of membership according to the capacity of the managed fisheries to employ everyone. The facts that lobster migrate and their larvae move even more are addressed somewhat by cooperation among the cooperatives, through their federation. The concessions are side-by-side, encompassing a vast coastal region (Fig. 1). The adja- cency and linkages among the territorial units is thus significant. The cooperatives’ relative success in fisheries also has fed back into their capacity to be recognized for sustainability. As a group, they constitute the largest producer of lobsters in the region, which has made a difference in MSC certification, where the scale of the fishery prosecuted by a “client group” should approximate that of a fish stock (Foley and McCay 2014).
Capacity for Management
The capacity for effective management and enforcement is essential, but neither comes cheaply or easily. The Vizcaino cooperatives studied make huge investments in monitoring and enforcement because poaching is a major problem, especially of abalone (Ponce-Díaz 2007, Borquez Reyes et al. 2009). All members can be asked to play roles in surveillance and enforcement. However, their enforcement rights are limited to citizen’s arrests, and the cooperatives ultimately have to rely on state and federal police, the Navy, and the courts. That they cannot always do so is a major constraint to their effectiveness, adding greatly to the costs of their operations. The cooperatives are noteworthy in the care they give to internal enforcement, not only of the rules about handling and taking abalone and lobster but also rules about proper conduct within the fishery and participation in the cooperative. The coopera- tives are complex business organizations, but they are run by elected members, not outsiders. Term limits are used to reduce the likelihood of excessive control by one or two individuals or families. Rules and other decisions are made fully democratically, at assemblies of the entire membership. Enforcement of the internal rules is done through graduated sanctions, and there are serious consequences for repeated and escalated violation, a major threat being loss of membership and hence of benefits of membership. Benefits of membership in some of the Vizcaino cooperatives include not only the rights to fish for lobster or abalone, but also access to social services and credit and qualification for retirement benefits. The embeddedness of local institutions in larger political, legal, and cultural do- mains can make a major difference to their functioning. Framing and supporting the 76 Bulletin of Marine Science. Vol 93, No 1. 2017 internal capacity for vigilance is the general Law of Cooperatives in Mexico, which is applied very seriously in the cases studied. Beyond the law is a general culture in Mexico that accepts cooperatives as legitimate and desirable forms of business and social organization.
Benefits and Costs
The pay-offs from sustainable fishing depend on major personal and collective- in vestments in both internal and external monitoring and enforcement. Ideally, a suc- cessful TURF generates surplus for boundary maintenance, resource monitoring, and management. For this to occur, it may require considerable subsidization from the outside and/or very high levels of productivity and market value. In the Vizcaino cases studied, there are very high costs of boundary maintenance, internal management, resource monitoring, cooperation with government, and en- gagement in politics, not to mention coping with the challenges and vagaries of fish- ing. What distinguishes the Vizcaino cooperatives from others in the region that have been less successful in sustainable resource use is partly the high market value of lobster and abalone, which are more abundant in the Pacific waters than in the Gulf of California (Ramirez-Sanchez et al. 2011). Permit systems rather than coop- eratives with concessions are more often found in the Gulf of California, reflecting such differences in part (Ramirez-Sanchez et al. 2008, 2011, Basurto et al. 2012). The waters are part of the California current and a high-energy upwelling coastal system, which is highly productive. However, timing and circumstance can make a big dif- ference as well. The Vizcaino cooperatives gained a foothold in co-management and sustainability at a time in the early 1990s when the abalone resource was in serious trouble, due to an El Niño-related die-off and overharvesting, but it was also a time when returns from lobstering were strong. Elsewhere on the Pacific coast, cooperatives are not as effective in management, possibly because the greater isolation of the Vizcaino region has reduced pressure on the cooperatives to open membership and reduced the incidence of poaching (Ramirez-Sanchez et al. 2011, McCay et al. 2014). The other side of isolation, however, is the tight connection between the cooperatives and the coastal communities of the region, which strongly influences the cooperatives’ commitment to effective co- management of their fisheries. The communities are by and large entirely dependent on fishing, located as they are on the coast of an extreme desert. Moreover, although the post-1992 management of fishing concessions by the government treats them as a kind of term-limited private property, the cooperatives, which applied for and were granted their concessions in 1992 and again in 2012, treat them as community prop- erty, conveying the notion that managing access to the lobster and abalone fisheries is for the benefit of cooperative members and the larger community. This is manifest in many social services given to the communities by some of the cooperatives as well as symbols such as cooperative-sponsored sports teams. The histories of struggle for control against outside companies and family histories of emigration to the desert coast under extremely harsh conditions have also played roles in loyalty to the coop- eratives and compliance with the rules of the fisheries. The move to MSC certification for the Vizcaino cooperatives’ lobster fisheries was subsidized by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). Obtaining certification for sustained lobster fishing from the MSC promised additional benefits. The actual McCay: TURFs of the Mexican Pacific 77 market premium from MSC certification is reportedly small and variable, as most of the export is to markets with little premiums for sustainably-caught seafood. Nonetheless, there have been collateral benefits. Local, national, and international attention has helped the cooperatives and the coastal communities dependent on them get political favors and government assistance; for example, in improved roads and the extension of electricity to some of the settlements. MSC review and recertification were enhanced by various outside sources, includ- ing scientific research programs and NGOs. Without subsidization, it can be very difficult to create new TURFs for failed or failing fisheries. Sometimes the subsi- dization is from other components of the local social or ecological system. Several of the Vizcaino cooperatives studied have sizeable finfish fisheries, which, as noted above, are handled as open access fisheries. The management stringency that enables MSC certification for lobster is thus subsidized by potentially unsustainable finfish fishing, an issue that has raised the possibility of developing TURFs, and even certi- fication, for entire place-based marine systems (Micheli et al. 2014). However, such a move in the Mexican context would be constrained by law and culture protecting “free fishing” rights, a reminder of the embeddedness of all systems.
Innovation and TURFs
Increasingly recognized measures of success are whether the TURF systems have resilience in the face of environmental change and, closely related, whether they are equipped to experiment. One of the Vizcaino cooperatives, based on an offshore island, has experimented with marine no-take zones, using its secure tenure over its concession, which enabled the cooperative to make rules that apply to everyone, the diving skills of its members, and its overall economic capacity to forego harvest opportunities. In 2006, the local cooperative collaborated with non-governmen- tal groups and university scientists to create no-take zones in two major abalone reefs and to use scientific tools to monitor and assess the results, as well as study the economic costs and benefits of closing abalone reefs to harvest (Comunidad y Biodiversidad 2016). This proved to be a test of both biological and social resiliencies. In 2009 and 2010, climate-related hypoxia resulted in high pink abalone (H. corru- gata) mortality, but inside and at the edges of the reserves, reproduction and recruit- ment were increased or maintained (Micheli et al. 2012). The cooperative members, who had been fully involved in the research, elected to continue the no-take reserves despite the huge losses experienced.
Conclusion
TURFS are examples of institutions that allow and require people who use com- mon pool resources to take important roles in studying and protecting them. The TURFs of the fishing cooperatives of the Vizcaino area, along the northern Pacific coast of Mexico, are relatively successful institutions for local management of the commons, particularly the lobster resource of the region. Factors that clearly matter to the success of these TURFs include: reliance on benthic invertebrates; small and commensurate scales; high productivity; visibility and legibility of the resources and fishing activities involved; clarity of social and territorial boundaries; adjacency and linkages among territorial units; a federated superstructure; the tight embeddedness 78 Bulletin of Marine Science. Vol 93, No 1. 2017 of the fisheries within communities; and supportive structures of law, governance, and culture. Added are the investments that people have made over many decades in develop- ing institutions that place high premiums on close monitoring and enforcement not only of the excluding rules and boundaries, but also the internal workings of the cooperatives. They have invested a great deal in creating knowledge about their fish- eries, together with government and academic scientists, and have developed highly transparent and democratic modes of decision making. It is important to avoid romanticizing the “local” (McCay 2001). To be sure, the people involved in the Vizcaino cooperatives have not escaped being villains of the commons; from time to time and in different places and ways they have overfished and depleted valuable resources. Nor have they avoided being victims of poorly man- aged and unmanageable commons. Yet, examined through the lens of their expe- riences preceding, during, and after the MSC certification process, they have also been adaptive, resilient, and creative actors, and the story of the northern Pacific cooperatives is impressive. Members of the cooperatives travel about sharing their stories with fishers in other areas seeking such success just as academic scientists do. However, there is a need to be wary of the “engaging simplifications” that occur as such systems get elevated to law and policy (Li 2002). Reproducing the Vizcaino TURFs would be difficult elsewhere. Studying them supports generalizations con- cerning “design principles” of small-scale commons management systems and the benefits of community-based systems of territorial use rights in fisheries. But one needs to be sensitive to the particulars and contingencies of each case. Essential fea- tures of the cooperatives and their management systems took much time and experi- mentation to emerge. Some came about during times of crisis that required costly, risky, and brave decisions, and could have gone in entirely different ways. Some are supported by external agents and reinforced by national laws or international in- centive programs. There are many variables that have played significant roles in the evolution and success of the Vizcaino TURFs, including: the very high productivity of the marine environment, a high-energy upwelling system; the isolation of the co- operatives, but close linkages with global markets through their federation; the enor- mous market values of key invertebrate species; and aspects of Mexican culture, law, and politics that underpin the functioning of the cooperatives. Efforts to explain the workings of TURF systems, and especially, to establish criteria needed for creating successful new TURFs, thus require in-depth and interdisciplinary research.
Acknowledgments
The paper is based on a presentation given at the 9th Florida State University Mote Symposium, Propagating TURFs into the 21st century: the value constraints and limitations to territorial use rights in fisheries. Research in Mexico was supported by National Science Foundation OCE-0410439. Particular thanks to M Ramade, F Micheli, W Weisman, G Ponce- Diaz, G Murray, G Shester, and S Ramirez-Sanchez, and to officers of the Fedecoop coopera- tives who participated in aspects of the research but bear no responsibility for errors of fact or judgment in this essay. McCay: TURFs of the Mexican Pacific 79
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