What role is our Fisheries Department playing in all this? After all, isn?t our Fisheries Department supposed to be the boss of all that goes on in our waters when it comes to fisheries management and exploitation? Or have things changed?

Pay close attention to this section of the ad and tell me that I?m paranoid:

?A very important feature of this Congress will be the establishment of capacity-building mechanisms to improve the management of the participating organizations and their ability to implement fisheries policies in the face of the challenges which exist.

?One of these challenges is to agree on the harmonization of regional regulations for the use of coastal resources.?

That sounds like some very diplomatic language to me. And, it may not matter much to some people, but there are no Garifuna or ?Creole? looking brothers in the pictures in the ad, either.

My second reason for being skeptical started a while back. About ten years ago, when the Mesoamerican Biodiversity Project was first introduced to a group of representatives of industry stakeholders in a meeting at the B.F.C.A. (Belize Fishermen Cooperative Association) office in Belize City, our workshop group took exception to a part of the preamble to the document as it was presented, and which, it was agreed, would be changed.

The words we were concerned about, and had changed, were words that implied that our Barrier Reef was also owned by Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Honduras and Mexico, we all know, do share a small portion of the northern and southern extremities of what is perhaps our greatest national treasure – the largest barrier reef in this hemisphere and the largest living barrier reef in the world. But where does Guatemala fit into all this?

I would have felt much better if these discussions/meetings were held on Belizean soil, in the presence of our local fishermen, and with the full official participation of our own Belize Fisheries Unit.

A concerned Belizean fisherman

Charles X