Farming Pearls in Cabo Blanco

Baltazar is a fisherman and artisanal diver from Cabo Blanco in northern Peru, a community inhabited and animated by artisanal fishermen. His life is the sea, and the sea provides him and his family with a livelihood. For Baltazar the call of the sea is very strong—he cannot let much time pass between one dive and the next. One could almost say that Baltazar has gills. That’s why when he was offered the opportunity to study and develop an alternative career, he became a fisheries engineer in order to stay close to the coast.

Baltazar has noticed something odd during his dives over the past 10 years. His fishing and hunting activities, as well as those of his fellow fishers, has become less and less productive. The waters of Cabo Blanco, once a famous destination for sport fishing due to the enormous size of the catch that could be obtained, have slowly but surely ceased to proffer their treasures. The reduction in fish populations have been caused by extreme weather phenomena and the depletion of fishery resources by other fishing activities from neighboring communities and international fleets. In coastal communities when livelihoods are lost, elders stop practicing their art, young people decide to leave, and the soul of a community slowly dies out.

For Baltazar, this scenario was unacceptable, and while scanning the seabed for a solution, he found another treasure that the ocean gives us that he realized could be a source of education and livelihood for its people, real jewel: pearls.

About 80 years ago, a rough sea brought hundreds of pearl shells to the beach, signaling to the local inhabitants the presence of an organism that had been forgotten, Pteria Sterna. In fact, local chronicles of fishing in Ancient Peru report that when the Spaniards arrived in these territories, they found not only gold and silver, but also “pearls.” To prevent the conquistadores from depleting their resources, the natives of the area kept the location of the shoals from which they collected their pearls a secret, and this secret has persisted through the centuries. Today it has been discovered that the three main points of this collection were Puná Island in Ecuador and Paita and Cabo Blanco in Peru. What if this ancient legacy is a solution to keep local communities alive and help them decrease overfishing?

Between 2020 and 2022, Baltazar started to develop a pearl cultivation project that would not only help the fishermen of Cabo Blanco carry out their activity without harming the environment but also involve women and youth—the wives, daughters, and sons of the fishermen—and improve their livelihoods, helping them to remain in the community. The project focuses on pearl cultivation in oyster shells and equipping young people with the necessary skills to monitor and maintain the cultures, including adding other species such as oysters and barnacles to the cultivation lines and creating value-added products with their harvest.

Baltazar’s program welcomed Natalie, Mercy, Ruth Noemi, Moises, Lucas, Cesar, Yorely, Sofia, Karla, Genesis, Joahanna, and many other young people from the community, offering them training in the biology of sea resources, diving activities, and many other useful skills concerning the pearl value chain. In December, they go out to sea to install the cultivation lines, and pearl production begins. Once the cultivation is underway, the pearls are harvested and then transformed into artisanal jewelry. Oysters are used for resource repopulation, and barnacles are consumed by the families, as well as sold at local and regional markets where they are in high demand.

The youth of the community are quickly embracing their roles as stewards of the ocean and are beginning to see themselves as guardians of the marine environment. They take great pride in their work and have begun to form a sense of community around the project. They are sharing their newfound knowledge with their families and friends, and their passion for preserving the environment is beginning to spread throughout the community.

The initiation of the pearl cultivation project was a challenging endeavor because the main resource, mother-of-pearl shells, had been heavily depleted in the area. This made it hard to scale up the project without sourcing materials from nearby markets. Baltazar and his fellows soon learned that they had to give something back to the ocean in order for it to open up again and share its treasures. They needed to repopulate the local ecosystems for it to thrive once more. Additionally, appropriate structures were needed to withstand the area’s natural conditions. By establishing collaborative networks with other communities in Central America and persevering through these challenges, the project is slowly making progress. This path will require time and support from local institutions to grow on a larger scale.

Baltazar views pearl cultivation as an opportunity to empower his community, particularly its youth, and teach them valuable skills that foster self-sufficiency. He believes that with the right training and support, the community can develop new livelihoods that not only sustain them but also preserve their oceans for future generations, and invite fish back in Cabo Blanco’s waters.