Peruvian fisheries decline

Peruvian fisheries decline is not an abstract statistic in the novel: it is the empty water beneath Juan Narciso Ucañan’s small reed boat. In Huanchaco, industrial fleets, recurring El Niño events, and a transformed coastal economy have left a traditional fisherman waiting for shoals that do not return. His precarious livelihood makes the damage visible as a slow loss of fish, work, and inherited ways of life, while the wider account connects his local experience to a global marine crisis.

A livelihood at the edge

Ucañan is twenty-eight and, in his own view, one of the last of his kind. His five older brothers have gone to work in Lima and consider him foolish for continuing to fish from a vessel little better than a surfboard. He remains at sea, waiting for mackerel and bonito to return. His father, nearly seventy, had fished every day until a few weeks earlier, when illness left him bedridden. Ucañan clings to the family tradition partly in the hope that continuing it might keep his father alive. Fishing is therefore both an increasingly unreliable source of income and a bond between generations.

The boat embodies the fragility and endurance of that inheritance. A Caballito de totora, or reed pony, is woven from totora reeds and shaped with an upward-curving prow. Usually three or four metres long, light and able to ride the swell, these distinctive craft have served coastal fishers for more than a thousand years. The Yunga and Moche fished from them along the coast, supplying Chan Chan; in that earlier abundance, even a poor catch exceeded what Ucañan could now hope to bring home. The coastal marshes that once supplied the reeds have disappeared, and the surviving boats may disappear with them. A form of fishing adapted to its environment is being squeezed from both ends: the fish are scarce, and the materials and landscapes that sustained the practice are vanishing.

Huanchaco’s reinvention as an international beach resort sharpens the contrast. Tourists see a preserved-looking paradise, with local people fishing in old-fashioned boats; for Ucañan, the same appearance is a sign of how little value his livelihood now holds. Hotels have spread across the coast, while most of his countrymen have moved into factory trawlers or the fishmeal and fish-oil industries. The fishing economy remains among the largest in the world even as Peru’s stocks dwindle. Almost everyone has found some way to benefit from the changed coast, but Ucañan feels left with only his boat and a livelihood increasingly detached from the prosperity built around it.

Industrial pressure and recurring El Niño

The novel sets local scarcity against a fishing industry whose capacity continues to grow. Ucañan sees floating factories and Japanese and Korean trawlers waiting near the 200-mile boundary to take fish away. He has not chosen those fleets or the scale of industrial extraction, yet he has come to feel guilty, as though he too were responsible for removing millions of tonnes of mackerel and tuna. Environmental criticism, as he understands it, has sought a culprit among fishers before turning toward the people and institutions responsible for the larger system. His sense of blame is thus at odds with the limited power he has over the forces changing his livelihood.

El Niño is a different, recurring pressure. Around Christmas every few years, weakening trade winds allow the cool Humboldt Current to warm. The change disrupts the food supply and scatters hungry mackerel, bonito, and sardines. Earlier generations endured episodes marked by extreme rainfall and destructive mudslides; the disturbance came and went, and coastal communities found ways to persist. Ucañan does not treat the familiar cycle as an adequate explanation for the present, however. In his view, even prayer cannot counter the scale of modern fishing nets, which he imagines as wide enough to catch twelve jumbo jets at once. A natural cycle that communities had learned to weather now meets an industrial capacity that relentlessly removes what might otherwise return.

The fishing record gives that pressure a wider scale. The novel reports that seventy of the world’s two hundred most commonly exploited fish species are endangered, while the number of people earning a living from fishing rose from thirteen million in 1970 to thirty million in 1997. Bottom-trawl nets used for species including cod, sand eels, and Alaskan salmon sweep across the seabed and damage ecosystems, depriving marine mammals, seabirds, and other predators of prey. These figures do not describe Peru alone, but they place Ucañan’s wait within a global contradiction: more livelihoods and industrial capacity depend on fisheries even as the ecological base is being diminished.

A connected marine crisis

Other forms of exploitation make the decline part of a broader pattern of marine damage rather than an isolated shortage. The novel describes toxic industrial waste entering coastal waters in other regions, including tens of thousands of tonnes of sludge dumped by Haifa Chemicals in 1999 and continuing phosphogypsum discharge into the Gulf of Gabes. Those examples are not presented as causes of Peru’s depleted stocks; they widen the frame to show how distinct industries can burden the sea with pollutants alongside the pressure of fishing. The account of seabed disturbance off Peru makes the local connection more direct: German researchers simulated commercial manganese-nodule extraction at a depth of 4,000 metres, dragging a harrow across eleven square kilometres. Numerous organisms died, and the area had still not recovered years later. The episode shows that damage to marine life extends beyond the fish taken for market.

The novel also places Ucañan’s experience beside efforts to repair damaged ecosystems elsewhere. On Vancouver Island, the Tla-o-qui-aht initiative Salmon Coming Home responds to logging that has dried forest floors, washed topsoil into waterways, and obstructed salmon spawning grounds. Volunteers clear rivers and restore watercourses, while organic debris and alder plantings help rebuild some of the connections between forest, water, animals, and people. This is not a remedy for Peru’s fisheries, but it offers a meaningful contrast to extraction: ecological restoration requires sustained work and promises no quick return. The juxtaposition makes clear that marine decline can begin far from the sea and that recovering ecological relationships is slower than disrupting them.

Narrative significance

Ucañan’s solitary vigil turns gradual environmental loss into a human-scale condition. After catastrophic El Niño events in the late 1990s, even factory workers lost their jobs, and the large sardine shoals never returned. On the day the novel follows him, the shoals still do not come; he cannot afford another day without a catch. The crisis is measured not only in endangered species or industrial statistics but in the narrowing of his choices and the persistence of waiting.

His disappearance later occurs amid disturbances reported around the world, but his name is not mentioned when the broader crisis enters a more serious phase. He becomes one statistic among many, even though he alone knows what he experienced that morning. That narrative contrast preserves the difference between a global pattern and the individual life it absorbs: the worldwide emergency can make connections visible, yet it can also erase the people whose livelihoods had already been disappearing from view. Through Ucañan, Peruvian fisheries decline becomes both an ecological warning and a story about who bears the cost of a changing sea.