Fight goes on to safeguard Bunaken's riches<\/p>\n
Maria Lisa K., Contributor, Bunaken, North Sulawesi<\/p>\n
The rich coral reefs around the five islands 1.5 km northwest of
\nManado are North Sulawesi's center of attention. Yet the struggle
\nto keep Bunaken National Park's reefs intact from local fishermen
\nstraying into protected zones and the threat of overdevelopment
\non Bunaken island has spawned a set of challenges for its
\nguardians.<\/p>\n
Bunaken has always yielded generous visual dividends for its
\nvisitors, especially those who cross the globe in search of its
\nbreathtaking drop-offs and spectacular coral gardens around the
\nisland of the same name, as well as the four others lying
\nnorthwest of Sulawesi's peninsular tip: Montehage, Siladen, Nain
\nand Manado Tua.<\/p>\n
Home to 3,000 different fish species and 500 types of coral,
\nthe park has earned the proud distinction of being one of the
\nmost biologically diverse marine environments on the planet, a
\nparadise that keeps recreational divers coming back year after
\nyear.<\/p>\n
Listening to the banter of a group of returning divers in
\nMolas Beach one late December day revealed, however, that they
\nfound some things were missing from their past trips.<\/p>\n
Hiroko Saito from Japan voiced her disappointment at finding
\nher favorite dive spot, Likuan III, devoid of the numerous
\nlobsters she enjoyed seeing during previous trips to Bunaken over
\nthe last 10 years.<\/p>\n
\"There used to be hundreds of lobsters in a hole 40 meters
\ndown or so, but this trip the guides informed me that they were
\nall gone (and it wasn't worth going that far),\" she said, adding
\nshe was also disappointed that the corals were not as plentiful
\nas before but more plastic garbage was evident.<\/p>\n
In their four years frequenting the national park, Stefan
\nMuller and Christa Albrecht from Germany said they were
\ndisappointed they had not seen any lobsters or sharks this year,
\neven though diving at Sachiko point would usually assure them of
\nat least one sighting.<\/p>\n
\"We would also see moray eels, but this time we only saw one.
\nWe saw only one grouper at Fukui (point) and only one big tuna.\"<\/p>\n
Despite the fact that the 89,056 hectares have been protected
\nsince being designated a national park in October 1991,
\nfishermen, some of them from the 22 villages within the park's
\nboundaries, have been entering zones designated for conservation
\nand tourism.<\/p>\n
On our Dec. 27, 2003 dive trip, one of the dive guides onboard
\nour boat pointed out fishermen who were casting their net at
\nTimur point, a protected zone in the park and popular among
\ndivers for soft corals and shoals of tropical reef fish.<\/p>\n
The provincial adviser for Natural Resources Management (NRM)
\nNorth Sulawesi office, Mark Erdmann, conceded that the poaching
\nof lobster and Napoleon wrasse had been \"out of control\" in 1999
\nand 2000, adding that it was one of the main reasons a patrol
\nsystem had to be put in place.<\/p>\n
\"Unfortunately, lobsters take a while to come back, and we
\njust haven't seen them come back in number yet,\" he said.<\/p>\n
A quick check around Manado's popular eateries, including a
\ncouple that offered diving tours, revealed that lobster was on
\nthe menu of all of them, and some were serving grouper.<\/p>\n
NRM is a USAID project which works with the Ministry of
\nForestry and National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) on a
\nnational level, supporting a wide variety of programs in the
\nprovinces, including the Bunaken National Park.<\/p>\n
For the latter, it is assisting the park's governing board,
\nlocal government agencies, villagers from the 30 settlements in
\nthe park and the private tourism sector to develop a model of
\ncollaborative management of Bunaken that can help inform the
\nMinistry of Forestry's Directorate General of Forest Protection
\nand Nature Conservation (PHKA) in its efforts to implement
\ncomanagement for its protected areas system.<\/p>\n
Erdmann blamed the recent development of cheap airfares
\nbetween Manado and Jakarta for bringing in more tourists, both
\nIndonesians and expatriates, who were fueling demand for
\nBunaken's sea life at local restaurants.<\/p>\n
\"Unfortunately, the taste of Jakartans runs toward lobsters,
\ngroupers and Napoleon wrasse and over the last year there has
\nbeen a tremendous demand for them in local restaurants, and the
\npark is suffering from it,\" he said.<\/p>\n
\"A large number of returning divers and pro photographers felt
\nthat there were more fish at the end of 2002 than they had seen
\nthe entire time they had been diving (in the Bunaken area) since
\nthe early 1990s, but it is no surprise to me that there was a
\nreduction of fish numbers in 2003 as a result of illegal fishing
\ngoing on.\"<\/p>\n
He noted that the operation of the patrol system still needed
\nimprovement.<\/p>\n
\"Over the last year in 2003, the management board and
\nespecially the patrol system have had serious difficulties and as
\nsuch, there's definitely been a large number of zonation
\ninfractions, or quite a lot of fishing in no fishing zones.
\nHowever, the management board and the North Sulawesi Watersports
\nAssociation are working closely to resolve these issues and to
\nrevive the patrol system.<\/p>\n
\"There's strong hope that within the next three to four months
\nan effective patrol system will be working again.\"<\/p>\n
For local dive guides like Eppy Takapente, who depend on the
\ntourists' dollars that the reefs attract, frustration has
\nsimmered over the fishermen fishing in the protected areas and
\neven at the park's patrol staff.<\/p>\n
He said he, his boat crew and a guest witnessed a patrol
\naccepting the catch of fishermen who had been net fishing in a
\nprotected area in return for turning a blind eye to their
\nactivities.<\/p>\n
Erdmann said that although fishermen were encouraged to fish
\naway from the reefs, many calls from guides had been received
\nover the years, but \"we've found that it is often difficult to
\nseparate fact from fiction\".<\/p>\n
He explained that one of the main problems had been it was
\nlogistically difficult to involve all the villages on one of the
\nteams, whereas the involvement of rangers, police and villagers
\nrepresenting several villages in the patrols greatly decreased
\nthe chances of collusion or conflicts of interest when dealing
\nwith fishing violations involving friends or neighbors.<\/p>\n
\"There is a feeling of too much collusion, and that village
\npatrol members are less likely to enforce things against their
\nneighbors. All the villages will all have representatives on the
\npatrol team with the hope that collusion will be minimized.\"<\/p>\n
Some dive operators grouped in the North Sulawesi Water
\nAssociation (NSWA) have shared in the frustration of watching
\nfishermen enter protected zones with nets and spears. It
\nculminated in a strike at the end of last year in which they
\nencouraged their guests to refrain from paying the park's
\nentrance fees, a system which the association had pushed to have
\nin place in 2001 in an effort to slow environmental degradation
\nto the park.<\/p>\n
Erdmann explained that the NSWA operators had been \"very
\nfrustrated at the decreasing effectiveness of the joint patrol
\nsystem as the park rangers and the water police were generally
\nnot active throughout December, leaving only the villager patrol
\nmembers to patrol\".<\/p>\n
\"Because these villager patrol members do not have the
\nauthority to arrest people (in the way the rangers and police
\ndo), by late December there were a number of daily violations of
\npark rules by local village fishermen who did not pay any
\nattention to the villager patrol members.<\/p>\n
\"In order to communicate their frustrations to the DPTNB
\n(Bunaken National Park Management Advisory Board), several NSWA
\noperators organized a strike in which they would stop having
\ntheir guests pay the entrance fees until the DPTNB improved the
\npatrol system.\"<\/p>\n
Charged with the task of stopping destructive fishing
\npractices, such as blast and cyanide fishing, mangrove cutting
\nand other activities that damage the park's environment, the 24-
\nhour patrol system is about to have another team added to the
\nexisting two, which will include six more park rangers and 16
\nvillagers, bringing the total number of active patrollers to 61
\nvillagers, 21 park rangers and five water police officers.<\/p>\n
The strike only lasted a few days, Erdmann said, as the DPNTB
\nimmediately organized an emergency meeting and, based upon the
\nrecommendations of the village government, involved both the
\nrangers and local village officials in the patrols to make them
\nmore effective.<\/p>\n
\"As for how this has changed things, in late January the DPTNB
\nwill revise the entire patrol system to make it more efficient
\nand reliable, so this was overall a good interaction in that it
\nis helping improve park management,\" Erdmann said.<\/p>\n
A group of environmentally concerned dive operators in Manado
\nbanded together several years ago as the NSWA, and came up with
\nthe idea of an entrance fee system for the Bunaken National Park
\nin 2000 in order to fund a patrol system and other management
\nactivities as a way to fight rapid degradation of the park.<\/p>\n
Modeled after the successful Bonaire Marine Park entrance fee
\nsystem in the Caribbean, foreign visitors to the park have had to
\neither purchase a year-long pass in the form of a waterproof tag
\nfor Rp 150,000 (up from Rp 100,000 in 2003), or a day pass for Rp
\n50,000. Locals can buy a daily entrance ticket for Rp 2,500 and
\nstudents pay Rp 1,000 a day.<\/p>\n
Of the revenue collected from the entrance fee system
\n(US$83,109 in 2002), 80 percent goes to the DPTNB management
\nboard for conservation programs in Bunaken, such as trash
\nmanagement, conservation education and environmentally friendly
\nvillage development and enforcement, with the joint
\nvillager\/ranger\/water police officer patrol system enlisted to
\ncruise the waters of Bunaken to stop violators and check that
\npermits are in order.<\/p>\n
Erdmann called the entrance fee system a \"ground-breaking
\ndecentralized\" one, as normally 100 percent of the entrance fees
\ncollected from Indonesian national parks go directly into the
\nstate's coffers and were not necessarily used for conservation
\n(The remainder is distributed among local, provincial and central
\ngovernments)<\/p>\n
However, Loky Herlambang, the pioneer of Bunaken's dive sites
\nwho was given the government's Kalpataru environmental award in
\n1985 for his conservation efforts in getting the park
\nestablished, does not agree with the prices set for the park
\nfees.<\/p>\n
\"It's OK to ask by way of a charity box or something, but it's
\nnot fair to ask directly from tourists, who support the
\nrestaurants, accommodation and transportation operators with
\ntheir dollars, and have them pay for environmental protection
\nwhen the government should be paying for it,\" Loky said.<\/p>",
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