Community perspective of the fishing activity in El Arenal, Acapulco, Mexico

Abstract

For many communities settled on the coastline of coastal lagoons, fishing is an important activity because of the income it generates from the work they perform.

Objective: To analyze the community perspective of the fishing activity in the community of El Arenal.

Methodology: The research is a mixed case study and its development consisted in seven stages, which were: description of the area where field immersion was carried out and identification of socioenvironmental problems, informal dialogue with the fishermen, information processing, data analysis through descriptive statistics, and deductive analysis of the discourse.

Results: Overfishing is evident, and the breach of closed season and high levels of capture in live weight which was 1275 t in 2022. The 37 cooperatives do not have trade channels and brokers are in charge of trading the product. At the socioenvironmental level, the community of El Arenal does not have residue collection programs or for lagoon or mangrove care.

Conclusions: The production model based on overfishing exhausts the natural resource because there is no planning for the fishing resource and it does not respect the closed season law, resulting in socioenvironmental problems for the community, overfishing, contamination of the lagoon, and social marginalization.