Ecuador: Se­cur­ing a more COVID-19-re­si­li­ent cir­cu­lar eco­nomy in the Galapa­gos Is­lands

The Galapa­gos Ar­chipelago is one of the most biod­i­verse places on the planet. Wellknown for hav­ing in­spired Charles Dar­win’s the­ory of evol­u­tion throught nat­ural se­lec­tion, the Galapa­gos Is­lands con­tain some of the highest levels of endemism on Earth. The long-term pre­ser­va­tion of the United Na­tions World Her­it­age site de­pends crit­ic­ally on the abil­ity of its rough 25,000 res­id­ents to co-ex­ist with their nat­ural en­vir­on­ment.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pan­demic res­ul­ted in a com­plete clos­ure of the tour­ism in­dustry. The main eco­nomic en­gine in the is­lands that ac­count for up to 70% of the province’s GDP. The pan­demic also dis­rup­ted sup­ply chains that are crit­ical to the local ag­ri­cul­ture and fish­ery sec­tors, which in-turn sup­port hun­dreds of live­li­hoods and food se­cur­ity in Galapa­gos. The lat­ter cob­ver­gence of is­sues promp­ted a polit­ical re­sponse from the highest levels in gov­ern­ment to pri­or­it­ize the cre­ation of new sus­tain­able jobs within the COVID-19-re­si­li­ent cir­cu­lar eco­nomy in Galapa­gos.

Shortly there­after, Con­ser­va­tion In­ter­na­tional (CI) and the pro­vin­cial gov­ern­ment ini­ti­ated a Pi­lot Pro­ject to de­velop and test in­nov­at­ive ap­proaches to in­crease the util­iz­a­tion of sea­food waste in Galapa­gos. Cur­rently, around 2.2 Tons of sea­food waste are gen­er­ated each week by the local fish­er­ies sec­tor, which are sub­sequently dis­posed of in pol­lut­ing land­fills in Galapa­gos. Find­ing op­por­tun­it­ies to util­ize this waste, such as through the cre­ation of an or­ganic fer­til­izer known as ‘sil­age’, could cre­ate new jobs while dir­ectly re­du­cing the pol­lut­ing ef­fects of fish waste be­ing dis­carded in land­fills. The pro­ject was there­fore de­signed to sim­ul­tan­eously ad­dress key en­vir­on­mental is­sues that have plagued the fish­er­ies and ag­ri­cul­ture sec­tors in re­cent years, while also gen­er­at­ing new sozio-eco­nomic be­ne­fits for local Galapaguenos.

Next steps: Build­ing on suc­cesses of the sea­food waste util­iz­a­tion Pi­lot Pro­ject ini­ti­ated in 2020, there is now an op­por­tun­ity to sup­port some crit­ical nex steps of the ini­ti­at­ive, in­clud­ing:

1. Developing a 3-5-minutes high quality project video that summarizes the project results, which can help raise the vivibility of these types of sustainable seafood waste utilization strategies.
2. Testing a broader set of applications for sustainable fish waste utilization, such as for livestock feed.

In Decem­ber 2020, CI com­pleted the first tri­als to trans­form sea­food waste into fish sil­age in Gal­lapa­gos.

The fish sil­age solu­tion con­tained im­port­ant nu­tri­ents that can be used as fer­til­izer – such as ni­tro­gen (2.96%) and cal­cium (1.13 %) – as well as 21.93% of or­ganic mat­ter, which can sig­ni­fic­antly im­prove soil health.

The study team sub­sequently ap­plied the fish sil­age in a local to­mato farm, and con­firmed the ef­fect­ive­ness of the product as a loc­ally-made fer­til­izer. The ag­ri­cul­tural tri­als also high­lighted the com­pet­it­ive ad­vant­age of us­ing fish sil­age com­pared to the con­trol an syn­thetic fer­til­izer treat­ment.

For in­stance, the total to­mato fruit yield by weight was highest for the fish sil­age treat­ment (131 lbs), pro­du­cing an es­tim­ated 9-19% more to­mato fruit than both the con­trol and syn­thetic fer­til­izer treat­ments (110 lbs and 120 lbs, re­spect­ively). Fish sil­age also con­tains many dif­fer­ent nu­tri­ents that are not present in syn­thetic fer­til­izers, such als cal­cium, and there­fore dis­played a bet­ter per­form­ance in terms of plant health.

In or­der to ac­cess the taste and other culin­ary at­trib­utesof the to­ma­toes pro­duced us­ing fish sil­age, samples were provided to eight local chefs in Galapa­gos to eval­u­ate five dif­fer­ent taste pro­files: sweet, salty, acid­ity, bit­ter and um­ami. The blind tests for six of the chiefs in­dic­ated that the to­ma­toes treated with fish sil­age were sweeter, juicier and bet­ter­tast­ing than those pro­duced us­ing agro­chem­ical fer­til­izers.