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.