Mustafa Sari

Starting in southeast Turkey near Lake Van—the country’s largest lake—Mustafa Sari is demonstrating a new and promising approach to protecting fish populations while sustaining the communities they support.

Mustafa is addressing the critical problem of depletion of Pearl Mullet stock from Lake Van due to overfishing and other destructive fishing practices. In a comprehensive effort that incorporates the wisdom of local people, the expertise of scientists and the attention of policymakers and enforcement agencies—convening these groups and orienting them toward a common goal based on input from all sides—Mustafa has engineered protective measures that will sustain the environment and the fishing communities it supports. Introducing sustainable practices in fishing is one outcome of his effort; enabling a new understanding of how citizens, policymakers, police, and academics collaborate to meet environmental challenges is another. Mustafa is sharing his strategies and lessons learned with the international community for use in environments that face a similar threat.

Turkey’s hundreds of inland rivers and lakes are home to many freshwater species of fish and birds. They also support the livelihoods of thousands of people. The ecology of the lakes vary, depending on a number of factors including depth, climate, pollutants, relationship to human communities, and water properties such as salinity and pH. But most of the resource management challenges that lake communities face are the same. As human populations grow, and more and more strain is put on fishing communities, the need for a conservation model adaptable to multiple regions is greater than ever.

Lake Van in southeastern Turkey is where Mustafa has begun his work. Called a “sea” by the people who live there, Lake Van is the country’s largest lake, with a vast surface area and great depths. Rare water properties (high-alkaline, high-saline) make this lake suitable for one fish species only: the Pearl Mullet, which in 2001 constituted 36 percent of the nationwide catch from inland waters. Pearl Mullet is the primary income source for the 35 communities living along Lake Van’s shores—for people who build and operate the boats, net the fish, and clean, package and transport them. The livelihoods of most working people in these poor and predominantly Kurdish communities are tied to fishing in some way or another.

Yet overfishing and imprudent fishing practices doom the Lake Van Pearl Mullet to decline and eventual extinction. According to Mustafa, whose research dates to 1992, the lake and the fish population can sustainability support a maximum annual harvest of 8,500 tons of Pearl Mullet. In 2001, 12,000 tons were harvested. Moreover, the fishing industry gears up for high season at exactly the wrong time. Primarily because roe is prized among buyers, fisherman work around the clock during the two months of spawning season, when the female’s body swells with eggs and fisherman can harvest two products (fish and eggs) per one female caught in their nets. The fish are caught as they head up the twelve rivers to spawn, which causes depletion not only in the current generation of fish, but future generations as well.

Mustafa sees that conservation efforts, including the introduction of a sustainable approach to fishing, are plagued on several fronts. The people with one set of information (the scientists, for example, who chart fish populations and their growth or decline over time) are not communicating with other groups (the fishermen, for example, who understand and respond to market trends). Lack of coordination among the people and groups with a vested interest means that responses to the conservation challenge are one-sided and promote the agenda of a particular person or group. With no clear, integrated understanding of the landscape—socioeconomic, social, historical, and environmental—corrective measures will not work because disparate groups do not see the whole picture and thus cannot agree on what exactly needs to be done. Mustafa, who is a scientist and an ambassador from the world of academia, recognized that most scientists work and study in a vacuum separate from the world of practical needs. The misalignment of their perceived role with what is needed to sustain the environment is striking. For the survival of inland lake fish and fishing communities, who desperately need the help from the scientific community—but also the cooperation of the fishing community—this poses a huge dilemma.

Mustafa believes that fishing communities must first own the problem of depletion before they will want to play a role in solving it. Two questions therefore guide the strategy of his Association of Nature Observers. The first is, What is the problem exactly? The second, Why own it?

Mustafa uses the tools and resources of science to define the problem clearly and suggest a sustainable way forward. This element of his strategy encourages a new role for scientists: as educators of the public—in this case of the people whose livelihoods are linked to fishing, and those who devise and enforce regulatory measures for the fishing industry. Mustafa reaches the public not with exhaustive charts and calculations, but with simple, uncluttered brochures and curriculum aids. He sees the promise of technology as well to delineate threats and guide solutions. For example, in coordination with the University of Van, he has set up a facility for satellite imagery. Aerial photographs give fishermen new perspectives that help them see the problems (effluents leaking into the lake from a factory, significantly diminished fish populations over a ten-year period). These images also show comparative water depth and fish concentrations at given times of the season or lunar cycle. Mustafa and his campaign informs rather than blames, and armed with clear information, guides villagers to see for themselves the problems they’re up against, as well as the solutions that may help them all by saving money and time.

To foster local ownership, Mustafa considers the social, economic, and historical factors in ways that enrich and build on the cultural heritage of the villagers. He identifies promising leaders in the villages from among his former students. He also works with the elders in the community, many of whom learned to fish using methods more sustainable than those used today. Mustafa has uncovered fishermen who, for 25 or more years, have tracked the information he gathers today. One Kurdish man showed him his journal, with daily entries chronicling climate, water table, catch sizes, average weights of fish. Finding these people, and steering changes through them, is proving effective; linking the old generation—complete with folklore and village legends—with today’s news makes conservation messages stick.

In the Lake Van communities, which are predominantly poor and Kurdish, the adoption of alternatives to overfishing must make economic sense. Therefore, Mustafa is exploring a number of alternative income sources for fishermen. He has strengthened the existing cooperatives, of which there are twelve, boosting membership to 365 members around the lake. Each cooperative has a leadership structure: a president, and board of directors, all of them villagers. The reinvigoration of cooperatives means more money for the fishermen by cutting out the middlemen and achieving economies of scale. Even the smallest adjustments can make a difference. Mustafa has called attention to the techniques of slicing and deboning the fish, for example. He shows fisherman that greater care in cutting the fish may mean significant increases to the cooperative’s yield. Enlarging the eye size of nets is another change that yields important results; the little fish that don’t have much meat and are next year’s catch anyway swim free, and then fisherman only pull in mature fish of significant size and weight. To enable deep water fishing, he has arranged financing for the boats that are required to fish on the lake as opposed to fishing at the mouths of the rivers during spawning season. Over the last six years, the number of boats has risen from 90 to 160. Most importantly, villagers are beginning to show initiative in problem-solving and drum up their own solutions to the depletion problem.

Getting the regulatory framework right is also critical. Mustafa discovered, for example, that by law, fishermen could legally catch fish during a portion of the spawning period. In many parts of the country, fish start laying eggs in mid-April, yet the blocked off dates started May 15, a month later. Using data he had gathered over years, Mustafa mobilized national environmental organizations to change the law, and in 2000, was successful in moving back the date to restrict fishing during the entire spawning period nation-wide. While Mustafa knows that laws don’t work unless they are enforced, using scientific data to shape the federal law is an important step. Fortunately, social pressure from within the fishing villages is beginning to force compliance among stubborn fisherman, now in the minority.

Demonstrating results from one of the most visible and difficult environments in Turkey is an important achievement—some say a small miracle. Lake Van Pearl Mullet are bigger today than six years ago: 19.5 centimeters long on average, up 3 centimeters from 1997. The changes in public opinion are striking: Mustafa had no local support when he began working with these communities; he estimates that now, 70 percent of Lake Van villagers work with him and trust him.

Mustafa documents his methodology and believes his work at Lake Van can help guide similar solutions elsewhere. He shares what he has learned with networks of citizen organizations and with the scientific community. In addition, he teaches a few classes in fishery management at Van University, an effort that enables technical credibility for potential replicators nationwide, provides a continual stream of fresh volunteers who are present or former students, and offers a strategic opportunity to influence the next generation of scientists.

Mustafa is the youngest of six children born to illiterate farmers who raised their family in a inland village of the Middle Black Sea region. The nearest town of any size is Tokat. Getting to school every day was a journey for Mustafa and his brother and sisters—30 minutes walking just to the bus stop. He was an excellent student who showed an early interest in science, and so was pushed to pursue a university education. Taking the entrance exam required him to travel to the seaside town of Trabzon in the north, a trip that marked his first time away from home. There, he set eyes on the Black Sea and on the miracle of so much water.

As a student at Ankara University in the 1980s, his interests were influenced by the then-nascent field of sustainable fishery management. But the disconnect between theory and real-life conservation challenges in Turkey was striking, he thought, and while he excelled academically and always got top scores, Mustafa’s perspective was often at odds with what he saw as the insular, detached culture of academia. For this reason, he told himself upon graduating that he would rather tie rocks to his ankles and cast himself into the sea than pursue further studies.

Following a few years of military service, working odd jobs, and marrying his wife, Mustafa determined that he would find a suitable environment to continue his research. He returned to school and was the first PhD candidate in Turkey to focus on fishery management. His graduate work exposed him to fishing communities near Lake Van, and introduced the challenges of energizing people and arranging expertise to meet shared goals of economic sustainability and species preservation. He began to see the influence of many factors on the populations of fish and other water life: Some were sociological, others were related to human population trends, still others were grounded in basic economic needs. The textbook perfect models he had studied began to blur, and into focus came the complex realities of people’s desires, competing interests and claims, and the very natural, very human tendency to resist change.