Mangroves du littoral paraense (Brésil) : de la préservation théorique à la gestion-protection participative

Résumé En

Wide areas of mangrove swamps stretch on the coast of Pará state (Brazil). Like all Brazilian mangals, they are protected by law, considered as “permanent protected areas” and “ecological reserves”. But the way of the protection must be made but is not very clearly defined in law. The finality is preservation of natural ecosystems and regulation of their use so as to make it compatible with this finality. But protection's implementation often stays theoretical. The lack of information, education and control leads to an anarchistic and sometimes conflictual use of these areas. Impacts of human activities in Pará State are rather limited. As a matter of fact the main activity linked to mangrove consists in collect the Ucides cordatus crab. In the beginning this fishing was essentially made for family consumption, but it is now a commercial activity, becoming the main financial resource for many families of coastal villages, entailing sometimes locally an overexploitation of the resource. This overexploitation can lead to conflicts between communities of fishermen, particularly when fishing areas are invaded by non professional fishermen and when appears use of predatory fishing technics. When traditionally exists in an ecosystem an activity who permits the living of thousands of people, we cannot neither consider only the economic value of the natural resources exploited, nor consider only the conservative point of view whose objective is an integral preservation of the environnement. The appropriation of natural resources must take into account the local population and guarantee the conservation of the stock of renewable natural resource, in agreement with economic development. The present tendency is to integrate local populations in the management of natural milieu. The experience showed that this integration not only allows a better efficiency in the preservation but also a fairest distribution of benefits related to exploitation of environment as the case may be. It’s with this objective that extractive reserves have been created in Brazil. Nine are now being implemented on the Pará State coast. Their objective is at the same time the preservation of environment, in this case mangal and its fauna, and his sustainable exploitation self-managed by local populations.