Armando.info: Even Tarek El Aissami’s brother-in-law had something to do with sea cucumbers

Pedro R., a 49-year-old man, prepares to dive into the sea, off Boca del Río, on the Macanao Peninsula, western portion of Margaret Island. He carries a snorkel and two fins patched together with wires and glue. He is an improvised diver, father of two children, who practices fishing thanks to the strength and endurance of his lungs. With bated breath he reaches the seabed. In strokes he keeps track of how much he has lost. He knows that the limit he can resist is 10 strokes, just to hit rock bottom.

Once at the bottom, stir the sand with the palms of your hands to locate your target. Return to the surface. He floats for a few seconds and takes a breath through the deteriorated snorkel. It sinks again. He repeats the effort up to 50 times a day to earn a living. Pedro R. owes his current livelihood to a prey: the sea cucumber, a disgusting-looking marine invertebrate, with a cylindrical and elongated shape, like a grown worm, with a slimy texture and a greenish-brown color. To finish describing it, it is enough to say that one of its most sought-after species, Holothuria mexicana, is also known as Mojón de burro. This animal from the Holothuroidea class is crucial for the conservation of marine ecosystems because it recycles nutrients, aerates sediment, controls water acidity and assimilates biodiversity. But in certain Asian latitudes it is considered an exquisite delicacy. So with the frenetic economic growth of that region, its demand undermines and continues to threaten sea cucumber populations in all oceans, including the sacred vicinity of the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.

That sea cucumber has been permanently banned in Venezuela for 27 years and that its fishing mutilates the environment are details that have not stopped the Nicolás Maduro regime, which now aims to satisfy the appetite of consumers in China, at the same time to generate new income for the State coffers, battered after the collapse of production in the oil industry and the effect of international sanctions. The holothurians – as these beings are also known in scientific fields – were thus incorporated into the same basket where gold, coltan and scrap metal are, among other export items that the government encourages to balance the accounts.

“Sea cucumber populations are under intense fishing pressure around the world. Most high-value commercial species have been depleted,” warned the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in a 2009 report. Another 2015 report found that exporting countries of sea cucumbers went from 35 to 83 between 1996 and 2011. But only nine of those countries had achieved their reproduction in hatcheries: Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, Saudi Arabia, New Caledonia and Vietnam. The expansive wave of voracity for sea cucumbers in Asian markets also reached the island of Margarita, a tourist mecca in the Caribbean of the state of Nueva Esparta, northeast of the Venezuelan mainland. And the Chinese requirement, above all, changed the lives of local fishermen, some 14,000 kilometers from Beijing.

By Isayén Herrera

More details in Armando.info.

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