Riviera Maya, Q.R. — Officials from Cancun to Tulum continue to fight the issue of sargasso that has begun to arrive on state beaches.
The continual abundance of the sea weed remains a critical issue for the state as the sargasso slowly returns to the region.
Playa del Carmen mayor Laura Beristain is one of the officials who participated in a recent meeting with businessmen and environmental scientists to discuss alternative methods to control the sargasso.
Governor Carlos Joaquín González was also at the meeting along with the Federal Secretary of Tourism, Miguel Torruco, to discuss the problem and attempt to find a solution.
“The management of sargasso is an issue that concerns us all. It is important to establish better control strategies every day for this environmental phenomenon,” Torruco explained.
Laura Beristain also stressed the importance of maintaining constant communication and meetings to find solutions that can be effective in the short, medium and long terms as well as financially feasible.
She says that the municipality of Solidaridad has participated in the analysts of 13 projects which were presented in January to counteract the seaweed reaching municipal shores.
Councilor of the Hotel Association of Cancun, José Chapur emphasized that what is definitive is that there will not be one single company that can take care of the sargasso from Tulum to Punta Cancun.
“You have to see which companies can qualify and which are open to guarantee results because there are many that have come and put a mesh in the sea and the mesh cannot support the amount of arriving sargasso,” he explained.
Officials from Puerto Morelos have also been discussing ways to win the battle against the unwanted seaweed. President of the Hotel Association of Cancun and Puerto Morelos, Roberto Cintrón says that they continue to work on ways to deal with the sargasso, and that all the experiments done in the zone were presented based on trial and error.
Meetings are being held between all levels of government after an environmental forecast foresaw a larger amount of sargasso heading for the region this season.
The latest anti-sargasso meeting was headed by Secretary Miguel Torruco who presented and approved an action plan that sustains short, medium and long term measures to face this problem, noting that the arrival of seaweed affects not only tourism, but also the marine and coastal ecosystems since decaying sargasso is very acidic.
