Appetite for Sea Cucumbers Connects Far East With the Caribbean

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The illegal fishing of this marine animal, considered a delicacy in China but crucial for maintaining the seabed’s ecological balance, has proliferated along the Venezuelan Caribbean coast with the approval of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Pedro R., a 49-year-old man, prepares to dive into the sea off Boca del Río, on the Macanao Peninsula in the western part of Margarita Island. Equipped with a snorkel and two flippers patched with wire and glue, he is an improvised diver, a father of two, who relies on his strength and lung capacity to fish. Holding his breath, he reaches the seabed. He counts his strokes to gauge his depth, knowing his limit is 10 strokes, just enough to touch the bottom.

Once at the bottom, he uses his palms to sift through the sand in search of his target. He resurfaces, floats for a few seconds, and breathes through his worn-out snorkel. He repeats this effort up to 50 times a day to make a living.

Pedro R. owes his current livelihood to a catch: the sea cucumber, a repulsive-looking marine invertebrate, cylindrical and elongated like an oversized worm, with a slimy texture and a brownish-green color.

This animal is crucial for conserving marine ecosystems because it recycles nutrients, aerates the sediment, controls water acidity, and complements biodiversity. Its demand threatens populations in all oceans, including the Caribbean waters.

Despite being under a permanent fishing ban in Venezuela for 27 years and its harvesting damaging the environment, these details have not deterred Nicolás Maduro’s government, which now aims to satisfy the appetite of Chinese consumers while generating new revenue for the government’s coffers.

In Puerto Rico, fishing for this animal was not regulated until 2016. After a small company named Vermesco requested and was granted a permit for commercial extraction in 2011, the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources commissioned an independent study in 2013 to assess the state of this species’ fishing. Researchers then recommended prohibiting fishing and continuing research on the status of populations in surrounding waters. This latter part never happened, and to this day, the government agency lacks data on the species.

“The populations of sea cucumbers are under intense fishing pressure worldwide. Most high-value commercial species have been depleted,” warned the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in a 2009 report. Another report from 2015 found that the number of sea cucumber exporting countries increased from 35 to 83 between 1996 and 2011. However, only nine of those countries had succeeded in breeding them in hatcheries: Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, Saudi Arabia, New Caledonia, and Vietnam.

The expanding wave of demand for sea cucumbers in Asian markets also reached Margarita Island, a tourist mecca in the Caribbean, part of the Nueva Esparta state, northeast of mainland Venezuela. The Chinese demand changed the lives of local fishermen, some 14,000 kilometers from Beijing.

Pedro R. is one of them. In each outing, he spends about six hours at sea to harvest 60 specimens, the minimum needed to make the effort worthwhile. At the end of the day, he will have about $30 in his pocket, an amount equivalent to the monthly minimum wage in Venezuela.

He is not the only one risking so much for so little. Dozens of divers perform the same daily task. Although the activity is illegal, given the official ban established in 1997, it is the only source of foreign currency income that Margarita fishermen currently have to survive amid the country’s and the island’s economic collapse.

Since 1999, the Venezuelan government has become another predator of the creature.

During a national radio and television broadcast from Beijing on September 14, 2023, Maduro held a press conference for Chinese journalists, where he mentioned for the first time the sea cucumber as a product that could become a hope for trade with China, a political, commercial, and financial ally of his government.

“The protocols were signed to immediately start exporting fish in its various forms from Venezuelan seas to China. Healthy fish, because they are healthy seas, not contaminated with nuclear energy, fortunately… We will bring sea cucumbers, which the Chinese love in their cuisine. Venezuelan sea cucumbers!”, said Maduro.

He did not mention that Venezuela had been trying to breed sea cucumbers in aquaculture farms, unsuccessfully, nor that these failed ventures had been managed by people close to his high-ranking officials.

Plugged into the Attack

Four years before the new business between Venezuela and China, some entrepreneurs obtained permits to extract the marine species. The ultimate goal was to find a model that would allow controlled breeding of sea cucumbers to meet international demand, circumventing the ban and the potential environmental consequences of industrial-scale exploitation of this species.

The first was Inversiones Island Fisher C.A, established in 2012. It was an almost clandestine factory, whose facilities are now abandoned in the South of the island.

In 2019, Brahim Yamal El Maaz Bahssas, brother-in-law of former Venezuelan Vice President Tarek El Aissami, bought all the shares with another partner when El Aissami was already the target of U.S. sanctions and a criminal investigation for drug trafficking.

Although El Aissami rose in Maduro’s hierarchy, he was dismissed in September 2023 and imprisoned in March of this year as part of a corruption crackdown.

Maaz Bahssas also faces allegations of a million-dollar fraud against the Venezuelan Ministry of Mining. According to sources consulted for this story, Maaz managed to extract and then dry 840 kilos of sea cucumbers, equivalent to nearly 55,000 specimens. However, there is no customs record of the export. Once removed from the sea, the cucumbers are cleaned and dried before being sold.

A marine biologist, who requested anonymity, admits that Island Fisher paid him $500 in Margarita for advice on how to clean and dry the cucumbers. He and the other employees were always told that the company had permits to extract the cucumbers from the sea. But no one ever saw those documents.

The biologist recalls that in 2019, overnight, the company laid off all its employees and shut down operations. Two of the laid-off workers now work at the Marine Species Foundation (Fundemar), a private entity created in November 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic that then paralyzed all public institutions.

Fundemar began working four years ago in partnership with the state-run University of Oriente (UDO), at the Marine Research Institute of this educational center. As a sign of its promising start, Fundemar painted the institution’s external facade, located in Boca de Río, one of the largest towns in western Margarita Island. It also provided jobs to UDO professors and secured practical internships for students.

However, Fundemar, which opened its doors just a year after Island Fisher’s closure in 2019, was part of a scheme to blend commercial interests in exploiting sea cucumbers with academic and scientific activities.

A tour of its breeding room reveals that the project failed concerning sea cucumbers. The breeding attempt only managed to produce larvae, but no specimen matured from juvenile to adult in the experiments.

The failure of Island Fisher and Fundemar has left no alternative in Margarita but to continue in open waters with the direct exploitation of sea cucumber habitats. There is neither regulation nor counting. No authority — no one, in fact — can report how many specimens are extracted in a given period.

Fundemar itself hires fishermen to extract as many as possible for a dollar per captured specimen. That’s it. The foundation company does not provide them with diving equipment. And the deterioration of the biome is already beginning to be felt on Margarita’s coasts, especially fertile for all kinds of fish banks.

“There are fewer and fewer good-sized specimens we find, and the objectives [of industrializing mass production] have not been achieved. This business is a facade,” fisherman Pedro R. claimed.

Fundemar employees admitted for this investigation that the cucumbers that die in the unsuccessful attempts to condition reproduction in pools, as well as those deliberately collected for commercialization, are dried and processed elsewhere. That place is the El Dátil Industrial Park, another venture by Reyes in Margarita. The website hreyesgroup.com, showed that it intended to process and market sea cucumbers, but the information was removed from the web, although a screenshot documented the claim.

According to sources consulted at the Ministry for Ecosocialism, the frustrations of attempts to breed sea cucumbers did not deter Zhuo Huan Zheng Wu, a Chinese nationalized Venezuelan, 52 years old, nor Wolfgang Contreras, a local. The commercial registry documents confirmed that in 2022 they created Inversiones Manglares with a capital of just $9,000, according to the exchange rate at the time of its registration. The company, which today consists of little more than two refrigerators and a display counter, claims it will be able to convert Fundemar’s larvae into adult specimens in captivity.

Despite attempts to contact both the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture and Fundemar’s management through different methods, no responses were obtained.

Species Collection Involves Other Dangers

Rosa Salazar maintains an altar in her run-down house located in Punta de Piedras, a fishing village on the central-southern coast of Margarita Island. The memorial evokes her son, who would now be 25 years old. He was a fisherman, like his father and grandfather, but died on the job. A heart attack struck him while extracting sea cucumbers. His mother did not need medical and physiological knowledge to intuit that diving with a hose and a gasoline compressor, at 10 meters deep, entailed many risks. Unfortunately, her premonition came true with her son. But even this fatal outcome does not serve as a warning for other fishermen, who daily face the dilemma between poverty and underwater dangers.

Several fishermen have been arrested since 2016, according to sources and other fishermen.  Official bulletins from Minec often report on the seizure of sea cucumber shipments and the reintegration of specimens into the sea.

With practice and advice from some Asian clients, Margarita fishermen have learned ways to process sea cucumbers that retain their appeal to end consumers.

For example, Pedro R., the fisherman from Boca del Río, knows a particular way to cut his catches to remove their viscera. He then boils them in water for 45 minutes, coats them with salt, and lets them dry in the sun for six days.

He fears being arrested if caught extracting sea cucumbers not committed to Fundemar, the company which holds an extracting permit. As a personal initiative, he separates three dried specimens each day and carries them with him, wrapped in a plastic bag, as samples for potential buyers.

There are few job opportunities in Margarita, and even the competition for sea cucumbers is starting to wane. However, not due to market trends. The chronic fuel shortage limits fishing trips.

Nevertheless, the People’s Power Council of Fishermen and Aquaculturists (Connpa), a group of fishermen formalized by the Presidency in 2014, does not lose hope that the exploitation of sea cucumbers will be organized and generate new permanent jobs in legal work.

“It’s a harmless animal that keeps the seabed clean,” comments one of its members, advocating for rational fishing. “But I alone cannot change the world,” he laments, powerless.

Amanda Pérez Pintado and Guillermo Suárez contributed to this story