In her 22 years as a small-scale fisher in Rio Grande do Sul, Viviane Machado Alves has rarely seen so much fish arriving in the cove that opens a short walk from her doorstep. By heart, she lists an extraordinary amount of mullet, sole, Brazilian silversides and kingfish, but also “several species that I’d never seen or eaten,” she says.
Her husband, who has worked as a fisher for 50 years, even discarded a grouper — a fish of commercial value and highly appreciated in local cuisine — because he didn’t know that animal his net caught in winter. “But when it came for the second time on the same day, I decided to take it home and show it to my uncle, who is in his 80s. He was amazed, because he was still a child when he saw a grouper for the last time,” says Paulo Matias.
They are members of the oldest fishing colony (a union-like association of fishers from a given area) in Rio Grande do Sul state, known as Z1, and they set up their nets around Marinheiros Island, in the municipality of Rio Grande, in the far south of Brazil. They fish in an area of the Marinheiros Lagoon — the largest barrier-lagoon in South America — 20 kilometers (12 miles) away, in a straight line, from the channel that connects it to the Atlantic Ocean.
Similar reports come from the North Coast of the state, including some from fishers who do not use boats because they set up their nets where the waves break. “In what we call beachside cable fishing, we are seeing much larger weakfish catches,” says Ana Spinelli. She heads the Technical Fisheries Chamber of the Rio Grande do Sul Council for Aquaculture and Sustainable Fisheries.
Those who practice high-sea, large-scale fishing are also celebrating abundance. “Since 2018, we’ve had two good seasons for shrimp and whitemouth croaker,” says shipowner João Gonçalves from Rio Grande, while doing maintenance on his vessel Yasmin, which can carry a small fishing crew for several days.
The current situation is totally different from that described in 2018 by then-Governor José Ivo Sartori, when he submitted a bill to the state parliament to establish a sustainable development policy for fishing: “It aims to reverse the current crisis in Rio Grande do Sul’s fishing industry in order to avoid its collapse,” he wrote in a statement to parliament explaining the reasons for the bill.
The bill was passed and achieved its goal. But the fishing industry criticized its ban on “all trawl nets pulled by motorized vessels in Rio Grande do Sul, including the 12-nautical-mile strip off the state’s coast” — a 22-kilometer (14-mile) sea area that was used as the main trawling zone by large vessels from the neighboring state of Santa Catarina.
Among those affected were several members of the powerful Association of Shipowners and the Fishing Industry of Itajaí (SINDIPI). According to the organization, some vessels used to make over 70 percent of their annual income from shrimp fishing (the santana and ferrinho types) in Rio Grande do Sul’s territorial sea.