CEDO is excited to announce Mar a Mesa, a non-profit alliance of bi-national (Mexican and American) private, governmental, and scientific entities dedicated to bringing sustainable seafood from the Sea of Cortéz to Arizona and beyond!

This means following up with CEDO’s work engaging 6 coastal communities and thousands of small scale fishermen in integrated ecosystem-management, and establishing Fisheries Improvement Projects(FIP’s) in a special area of the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortéz) known as the Puerto Peñasco to Puerto Lobos Corridor (below in black outline).

A FIP is a publicly registered project to improve the sustainability of a fishery, which the public can help support in a number of ways.

To date, CEDO has a registered a FIP for the Cortéz blue crab (Callinectes bellicosus), and is in the process of registering more species such as the murex snail.

By introducing local seafood products that are on the road to sustainability to consumers in Tucson – a UNESCO World Heritage Gastronomy Site, Mar a Mesa hopes to incentivize fishermen with premium market prices. These are willingly offered by informed consumers in return for the fishing industry’s best efforts and most delicious products.

This blossoming collaboration includes fishermen & producers, local Tucson restaurants like Downtown KItchen and Fini’s Landing, farmer’s-markets like the Heirloom Market at Rillito Park, environmental NGO’s like CEDO & The Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum, as well as the Municipal Governments of Puerto Peñasco – Caborca (Son, MX), and Tucson (AZ, USA).

All Alliance partners are committed to fulfilling the many rigorous requirements that are needed to achieve sustainable fisheries, and to uphold an effective system for monitoring these along the entire chain of production, from the ocean to the table, or as we would say in Spanish…

“desde el Mar a la Mesa”