Fight goes on to safeguard Bunaken's riches

Fight goes on to safeguard Bunaken's riches

Maria Lisa K., Contributor, Bunaken, North Sulawesi

The rich coral reefs around the five islands 1.5 km northwest of Manado are North Sulawesi's center of attention. Yet the struggle to keep Bunaken National Park's reefs intact from local fishermen straying into protected zones and the threat of overdevelopment on Bunaken island has spawned a set of challenges for its guardians.

Bunaken has always yielded generous visual dividends for its visitors, especially those who cross the globe in search of its breathtaking drop-offs and spectacular coral gardens around the island of the same name, as well as the four others lying northwest of Sulawesi's peninsular tip: Montehage, Siladen, Nain and Manado Tua.

Home to 3,000 different fish species and 500 types of coral, the park has earned the proud distinction of being one of the most biologically diverse marine environments on the planet, a paradise that keeps recreational divers coming back year after year.

Listening to the banter of a group of returning divers in Molas Beach one late December day revealed, however, that they found some things were missing from their past trips.

Hiroko Saito from Japan voiced her disappointment at finding her favorite dive spot, Likuan III, devoid of the numerous lobsters she enjoyed seeing during previous trips to Bunaken over the last 10 years.

"There used to be hundreds of lobsters in a hole 40 meters down or so, but this trip the guides informed me that they were all gone (and it wasn't worth going that far)," she said, adding she was also disappointed that the corals were not as plentiful as before but more plastic garbage was evident.

In their four years frequenting the national park, Stefan Muller and Christa Albrecht from Germany said they were disappointed they had not seen any lobsters or sharks this year, even though diving at Sachiko point would usually assure them of at least one sighting.

"We would also see moray eels, but this time we only saw one. We saw only one grouper at Fukui (point) and only one big tuna."

Despite the fact that the 89,056 hectares have been protected since being designated a national park in October 1991, fishermen, some of them from the 22 villages within the park's boundaries, have been entering zones designated for conservation and tourism.

On our Dec. 27, 2003 dive trip, one of the dive guides onboard our boat pointed out fishermen who were casting their net at Timur point, a protected zone in the park and popular among divers for soft corals and shoals of tropical reef fish.

The provincial adviser for Natural Resources Management (NRM) North Sulawesi office, Mark Erdmann, conceded that the poaching of lobster and Napoleon wrasse had been "out of control" in 1999 and 2000, adding that it was one of the main reasons a patrol system had to be put in place.

"Unfortunately, lobsters take a while to come back, and we just haven't seen them come back in number yet," he said.

A quick check around Manado's popular eateries, including a couple that offered diving tours, revealed that lobster was on the menu of all of them, and some were serving grouper.

NRM is a USAID project which works with the Ministry of Forestry and National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) on a national level, supporting a wide variety of programs in the provinces, including the Bunaken National Park.

For the latter, it is assisting the park's governing board, local government agencies, villagers from the 30 settlements in the park and the private tourism sector to develop a model of collaborative management of Bunaken that can help inform the Ministry of Forestry's Directorate General of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation (PHKA) in its efforts to implement comanagement for its protected areas system.

Erdmann blamed the recent development of cheap airfares between Manado and Jakarta for bringing in more tourists, both Indonesians and expatriates, who were fueling demand for Bunaken's sea life at local restaurants.

"Unfortunately, the taste of Jakartans runs toward lobsters, groupers and Napoleon wrasse and over the last year there has been a tremendous demand for them in local restaurants, and the park is suffering from it," he said.

"A large number of returning divers and pro photographers felt that there were more fish at the end of 2002 than they had seen the entire time they had been diving (in the Bunaken area) since the early 1990s, but it is no surprise to me that there was a reduction of fish numbers in 2003 as a result of illegal fishing going on."

He noted that the operation of the patrol system still needed improvement.

"Over the last year in 2003, the management board and especially the patrol system have had serious difficulties and as such, there's definitely been a large number of zonation infractions, or quite a lot of fishing in no fishing zones. However, the management board and the North Sulawesi Watersports Association are working closely to resolve these issues and to revive the patrol system.

"There's strong hope that within the next three to four months an effective patrol system will be working again."

For local dive guides like Eppy Takapente, who depend on the tourists' dollars that the reefs attract, frustration has simmered over the fishermen fishing in the protected areas and even at the park's patrol staff.

He said he, his boat crew and a guest witnessed a patrol accepting the catch of fishermen who had been net fishing in a protected area in return for turning a blind eye to their activities.

Erdmann said that although fishermen were encouraged to fish away from the reefs, many calls from guides had been received over the years, but "we've found that it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction".

He explained that one of the main problems had been it was logistically difficult to involve all the villages on one of the teams, whereas the involvement of rangers, police and villagers representing several villages in the patrols greatly decreased the chances of collusion or conflicts of interest when dealing with fishing violations involving friends or neighbors.

"There is a feeling of too much collusion, and that village patrol members are less likely to enforce things against their neighbors. All the villages will all have representatives on the patrol team with the hope that collusion will be minimized."

Some dive operators grouped in the North Sulawesi Water Association (NSWA) have shared in the frustration of watching fishermen enter protected zones with nets and spears. It culminated in a strike at the end of last year in which they encouraged their guests to refrain from paying the park's entrance fees, a system which the association had pushed to have in place in 2001 in an effort to slow environmental degradation to the park.

Erdmann explained that the NSWA operators had been "very frustrated at the decreasing effectiveness of the joint patrol system as the park rangers and the water police were generally not active throughout December, leaving only the villager patrol members to patrol".

"Because these villager patrol members do not have the authority to arrest people (in the way the rangers and police do), by late December there were a number of daily violations of park rules by local village fishermen who did not pay any attention to the villager patrol members.

"In order to communicate their frustrations to the DPTNB (Bunaken National Park Management Advisory Board), several NSWA operators organized a strike in which they would stop having their guests pay the entrance fees until the DPTNB improved the patrol system."

Charged with the task of stopping destructive fishing practices, such as blast and cyanide fishing, mangrove cutting and other activities that damage the park's environment, the 24- hour patrol system is about to have another team added to the existing two, which will include six more park rangers and 16 villagers, bringing the total number of active patrollers to 61 villagers, 21 park rangers and five water police officers.

The strike only lasted a few days, Erdmann said, as the DPNTB immediately organized an emergency meeting and, based upon the recommendations of the village government, involved both the rangers and local village officials in the patrols to make them more effective.

"As for how this has changed things, in late January the DPTNB will revise the entire patrol system to make it more efficient and reliable, so this was overall a good interaction in that it is helping improve park management," Erdmann said.

A group of environmentally concerned dive operators in Manado banded together several years ago as the NSWA, and came up with the idea of an entrance fee system for the Bunaken National Park in 2000 in order to fund a patrol system and other management activities as a way to fight rapid degradation of the park.

Modeled after the successful Bonaire Marine Park entrance fee system in the Caribbean, foreign visitors to the park have had to either purchase a year-long pass in the form of a waterproof tag for Rp 150,000 (up from Rp 100,000 in 2003), or a day pass for Rp 50,000. Locals can buy a daily entrance ticket for Rp 2,500 and students pay Rp 1,000 a day.

Of the revenue collected from the entrance fee system (US$83,109 in 2002), 80 percent goes to the DPTNB management board for conservation programs in Bunaken, such as trash management, conservation education and environmentally friendly village development and enforcement, with the joint villager/ranger/water police officer patrol system enlisted to cruise the waters of Bunaken to stop violators and check that permits are in order.

Erdmann called the entrance fee system a "ground-breaking decentralized" one, as normally 100 percent of the entrance fees collected from Indonesian national parks go directly into the state's coffers and were not necessarily used for conservation (The remainder is distributed among local, provincial and central governments)

However, Loky Herlambang, the pioneer of Bunaken's dive sites who was given the government's Kalpataru environmental award in 1985 for his conservation efforts in getting the park established, does not agree with the prices set for the park fees.

"It's OK to ask by way of a charity box or something, but it's not fair to ask directly from tourists, who support the restaurants, accommodation and transportation operators with their dollars, and have them pay for environmental protection when the government should be paying for it," Loky said.