A sustainable joint-venture

A government office and a radio station joined to protect a natural area.

 

SULLANA, peru – A trendy cumbia song sounds aloud in the radio receivers of the second largest city in the department. Suddenly, the usual commercials, but one that, not using the hackney back music and only with birds sound effects, warns us on the existentce of el Angolo Hunting.

 

It wasn’t a spot else in the break of every half-hour but the alliance to promote a protected natural area in Sullana Province, and the only one of its kind across Piura Department

. Through an agreement signed by Peru’s National service of Protected Natural Areas (SERNANP, as in Spanish) and Radio Nuevo Norte LLP (RNN), the audience had an advertisement pack explaining what a protected natural area is, and what El Angolo is

 

“The SERNANP gives us the contents  and we produce the ads,” RNN’s manager Jose Carlos Carrasco Flores explained us.

 

Reservation of Biosphere

El Angolo Hunting mostly locates in Marcavelica District and a little portion in Talara Province. The territory was formerly managed by Negociación Agrícola Mallarés (NAM), a subsidiary ccompany of Romero Family, one of the most powerful in Peru.

 

In 1950, that family’s patriarch Calixto Romero had reserved El Angolo as a space to do sport hunting, activity wwhich sometimes third parties joined, many abroad Peru. In 1970, NAM decided to give the 25,365 acres  to the Peruvian State purposed to preserve it and to use it rationally as sport hunting center and ecotouristic resource, much before the concept became trending.

 

The Hunting, as a reserve area in charge of the state, was formally created on July 1^st, 1975, occupying 160,619 acres, for what it was integrated the area of former surrounding estates. It’s located about 37 miles away the northwest of Sullana City and its predominant ecosystem is the Equatorial Dry Forest.

 

This one, which function is dosing the humidity of the coastal underground and catching carbon from the atmosphere, is the shelter of a large flora and fauna –mainly white-tailed deer, anteater, and coastal fox—as well as human people who perform some forestall activities although informally.

 

Next to Cerros de Amotapé National Park (that share Sullana, Talara, and Contralmirante Villar in Tumbés) and the National Reservation of Tumbés, El Angolo forms the Peruvian North-western Biosphere Reservation, the largest in this part of Peru.  The predominant ecosystem of this cluster is, precisely, the Equatorial Dry Forest. It’s under the administration and care of SERNANP.

 

Saving footprints

Although it wasn’t widely developed, the RNN’s ecologist vocation is not a fruit of spontaneous generation. In March 1994, when the company had the Sullana City’s first FM radio station on the air, the missed Doble 9 Punto 3, the Department of Advertising & Marketing proposed to launch a campaign called Ecologic Style.

 

The proposal included to renew the whole programming with alternative music (the station broadcast commercial rock, pop, and  latin-pop), and adding spots with messages about ecology and protected natural areas in the region during the commercial breaks.

 

Former departments chief Juan Carlos Guillén also took the risk of rebranding the radio, just three years on the air – Doble 9 Light. The name and the style held on until 2000 when its sister station, Nuevo Norte 860 AM, overwhelmed with its success, and forced the management to unify the programming based on Peruvian popular music, news,sports, and esotericists.

 

Today, it fights the share wit RPP Noticias, Radio Panamericana, Moda FM (launched from Lima City by satellite), Radio Bellavista, Radio san Francisco (both in Sullana), and Radio Cutivalu (in Castilla, Piura).

 

Joining efforts

Amid all that offer, SERNANP chose RNN to broadcast the campaign because it’s the most tuned one by the people living around El Angolo, as that government office’s specialist Biologist Cinthia Vergaray explained uss. “The ads are broadcast for free,” she remarked.

 

Aside marketing considerations, the decision was influenced by several threats detected around El Angolo. The most urgent of all was the unadequate use of forestall resources, what can generate an uncontrolled cut-off that unbalances the whole local ecosystem and activates the desertization.

 

Another threat was the furtive hunting and the trafficking of wild species, many of which are offered in certain local bus terminals along the coast of the region, not too clandestinely as thought. The SERNANP also wanted to rescue a volunteer park rangers programme, locals around El Angolo turning in the defense frontline against this potential predation.

 

The results may multiply if the media try to ease their platforms and signals, as much as public services, to promote the knowledge and the protection for the citizenship of this and other protected areas in the region and everywhere in the world. So the Earth is unique, and meanwhile its our only home.

 

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