It was one of those days that the peasant fisherman on this tributary of Amazon River dream about. With water levels falling rapidly at the peak of the dry season, a giant school of bass, a tasty fish that fetches a good prices at markets, was swimming right into the nets being cast from a dozen small canoes here.
"With a bit of luck, you can make $ 350 on a day like this," Lauro Souza Almedia, a leader of the local fishermen"s cooperative, exulted as he moved into position. "That is a fortune for people like us," he said, the equivalent of four months at the minimum wage earned by those fortunate enough to find work.
A symbol of abundance to the rest of the world, the Amazon is experiencing a crisis of overfishing. As stocks of the most popular species diminish to worrisome levels, tensions are growing between subsistence fishermen and their commercial rivals, who are eager to enrich their bottom line and satisfy the growing appetite for fish of city-dwellers in Brazil and abroad.