By
Toky Rasolomanana |
Views: 3106 | March 31, 2015
For the past few years, WCS’s investments in Ankivonjy, Ankarea and Soariake sites have fo-cused on establishing the marine parks. As the marine parks evolve into an operational state, WCS recognizes the importance of promoting proper marine surveillance and law enforcement. To this end, in partnership with the Ministry of Fisheries, and Madagascar Fisheries Surveillance Center (CSP), and with the assistance of an in-ternational expert, WCS conducted a comprehen-sive enforcement assessment of the marine parks in June 2014. The recommendations from this assessment include the need to: formalize and train community rangers; establish a list of all of-fenses; draft a template for offenses/incident re-ports; establish and formalize collaboration with law enforcement partners from the government; establish a census and register all fishers, fishing boats, and fishing gears; develop an operational patrolling strategy; install resilient demarcation buoys around the no-take zones in order to sup-port effective surveillance; and purchase patrol-ling equipment. Based on these recommenda-tions, and following consultations with local communities and government authorities, we are currently in the process of developing a pio-neered community-based, collaborative law en-forcement model that ultimately could serve as a model for the growing number of new co-managed marine parks around Madagascar. As part of the collaborative law-enforcement model, a local patrol committee has already been estab-lished in each marine parks with members from each village of the parks. Currently, local rangers are being trained by WCS and Madagascar Fish-eries Surveillance Center. At the end of the train-ing each local ranger receive an official ranger badge from Madagascar Fisheries Surveillance Center.