World Aquacluture Magazine - September 2020

62 SEP TEMBER 2020 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WA S.ORG poverty rates in the country: 29.8 percent in the Central Pacific region (Puntarenas), 30.3 percent in the Brunca region (Puntarenas) and 29.2 percent in Huetar Caribe (Limón) (INEC 2019). The Puntarenas region is experiencing the biggest economic contraction in the country (PEN 2019). Commercial fisheries plays an important role in the economy of Puntarenas. This activity began 70 years ago with an aggressive and quick extraction of the fishery stocks and, by the 1980s, fisheries production levels reached their peak but then started to decline in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the lack of scientific data and the presence of information gaps regarding the situation of fishery stocks has caused a lot of difficulty in making the best management decisions (Sancho 2018). This has been a major issue between the government and Puntarenas fishermen, especially since the prohibition of trolling fishing by the Constitutional Court in 2013. This prohibition was based on the negative impact of trolling fishing in the ocean and the need to use bycatch reduction devices A quaculture began in Costa Rica in 1963 with two freshwater fish species brought to the country by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (FAO 2016). More than 50 years later, the contribution of aquaculture to the gross domestic product of Costa Rica is a barely perceptible 1 percent (Mora 2019). According to the National Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture of Costa Rica (INCOPESCA), aquacul- ture is mainly focused inland, with species like tilapia (80 percent) and white shrimp (13 percent), while production of marine species like snappers is small (3 percent) (Peña and Chacón 2019). Although the Exclusive Economic Zone of Costa Rica is almost ten times the conti- nental extent, there is minimal production of marine species. The two provinces with the largest marine ports (Puntarenas and Limón) have severe social and economic issues. According to The Report of the Nation for 2019, in regards to education, despite a good index of educational opportunities, both Puntarenas and Limón have educational issues. These provinces have some of the highest Aquaculture Training to Improve the Socioeconomic Development of Coastal Communities in Costa Rica Juan Esteban Barquero-Chanto, Guillermo Hurtado Cam and Nelson Peña Navarro FIGURE 1. Fishermen designing an aquaculture system with a senior student of aquaculture engineering of Universidad Técnica Nacional de Costa Rica (UTN) at a community center in Costa de Pájaros, Puntarenas, Costa Rica.