New strategy adopted on Bunaken island

New strategy adopted on Bunaken island

By Jim Della-Giacoma

BUNAKEN, North Sulawesi (Reuter): For coconut farmer and sometime fisherman Yunus Kasehung, living on this reef-fringed island, famed the world over for its sea-diving sites, was once like sitting on a time bomb.

After Indonesia founded the Bunaken National Park in 1989, the future of Kasehung and more than 10,000 others living within the boundary of the park became increasingly uncertain.

"In the early 1990s we would read in the Manado Pos newspaper that the government wanted us to move but we did not know where we would go," he said, sitting in his small tin-roofed home in Alungbanua village.

If Kasehung had been officially relocated in a government program, he and his family could have been sent to a remote corner of Indonesia far from their current picturesque location on a coconut tree-covered hillock off the northern tip of Indonesia's spider-shaped Sulawesi Island.

Those plans have now been shelved following new environmental conservation strategies fashioned by the U.S.-funded Natural Resources Management Project (NRMP) in consultation with the government, Bunaken park residents, fishermen and tourism industry representatives.

The villagers, classified as among Indonesia's poorest, were to be cleared away from the land they had occupied for more than a century to preserve the spectacular reefs off Bunaken island, which were discovered by international divers in the 1970s.

"There was an erroneous perception that you could not have a destructive occupation like fishing co-existing with tourism and conservation," marine conservation adviser and NRMP team leader Graham Usher said.

"Our idea is that it is just not true," said Usher in an interview in Manado, the town closest to Bunaken and about half- an-hour away by speedboat.

"What people tend to forget is that these reefs were only 'discovered' in the mid-1970s and hailed as a wonderful diving experience," the British-born Usher told Reuters.

"But at that time there had already been people living on those islands and fishing those reefs for generations," he said.

The 80,000-hectare (197,680-acre) Bunaken park, which covers five main islands, reefs and coastal mangroves, is host to endangered species such as the dugong, green and hawksbill turtles and the giant clam, while the black macaque monkey lives in residual rainforest on the volcanic island of Manado Tua.

Thrilling

Marine biologists say the stunning reefs on the sheltered southern side of Bunaken island have enormous biodiversity and the sheer drop-off on the sea floor of more than 100 metres (yards) provides a thrilling experience for scuba divers.

"You won't find many places with such a great array of biodiversity so close to a major urban center still in such good condition," Usher said.

Government officials see a tourism bonanza in the park and they were initially over-eager to clear out those living within its boundaries.

But Usher's project has found expelling fishermen would have had a significant effect on the local economy as a study commissioned by it found fishing to be worth more than US$6 million a year.

Even diving operators, who benefit most from the reef, are wary of unbridled expansion on Bunaken, which they say is a specialist tourist destination.

"The more promotion there is, the more dangerous it is for Bunaken," Katiman Herlambang, manager at Manado's Nusantara Dive Centre, told Reuters. "Already in the high season in August it is like a sea of humanity out there," he said.

Until 1994, when a Japanese resort was built on Bunaken, the island had only small lodges to house tourists. Even now, the resort is the only large building on Bunaken.

In the last 10 years, Herlambang said, the number of licensed diving operators had gone from two to 15 with many unauthorized operators also working the reef.

"The unauthorized operators know nothing of the conservation regulations and drop their anchors anywhere," Herlambang said.

"There is a chronic level of damage going on and there is a probably a net decrease in the quality of the reef but the rate of that decrease by my assessment is still relatively small," Usher, a biologist by training, said.

Villagers are working with local government officials and non- government organizations to keep the water, reefs and beaches clean.

"The people here are proud they live in a national park that is famous throughout the world," Kasehung told Reuters.

"If it is well looked after, many tourists will come, but if it is dirty then they will stay away," he said.