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Chief Manoa Kaun

Helping to strengthen the management of Vanuatu's precious coastal fisheries

Manoa Kaun is the Chief of Louni Village, one of several villages that make up the community of Crab Bay, on Vanuatu’s Malekula Island. This small community is at the forefront of the Vanuatu International Waters Project - an innovative attempt to try and find practical ways to help coastal communities manage their rapidly dwindling coastal resources in a more sustainable way.

“My people are the most dependent on the resources around Crab Bay area but, if we are not responsible, the resources will all be gone and there is nowhere else for us to move for new settlement." Chief Manoa Kaun

Chief Manoa originally grew up on the small nearby island of Uripiv spending much of his time on the reef, fishing and harvesting food, with his friends. As the population of Uripiv grew his family decided to move back to the mainland where they had access to more land for coconut plantations, food gardens, and wild food resources.

He says that when they resettled in Crab Bay in the early 1980s these resources were still in abundance.

“We would catch big fish and pick only those crabs with the biggest claws for barbeque. I would join other young boys of my age and we would always have crab barbeque near the village. We did not use canoes because these resources were so plentiful within our shorelines,” he says.

In fact, as the area’s name suggests, people say the land crabs were once so plentiful that they would literally crawl over you as you slept. But, as Chief Manoa says, much has changed in the last 20 years.

“Now as an adult I am no longer catching big fishes and I spend more time searching. We no longer have crab barbeques near the village and our women have to walk distances to catch crabs for their families. We no longer look for crabs with big claws and we pick any size crabs we find,” he says.

The land crab is one of the main sources of protein and cash for local villagers. They are made into soup, go well with bananas, taro, cassava, and yams, and are often cooked in coconut cream to make a big dish to feed a large family. Any extra are sold for cash or traded at the market.

As the population growth puts greater pressure on sensitive mangrove habitats the growing demand for cash has also led to uncontrolled harvesting. The crab collectors are mostly women and they now use coconut baits, set up traps, or go out at night to harvest. It’s now much harder to find the crabs and takes longer to bundle up enough to feed the family and earn money at the market.

Three years ago bundles of 50 crabs would fetch $US1 on market day—today, 10 crabs will earn the women $US2. But now the women and girls must go out for almost an entire day to collect enough crabs. A 1997 report estimated that sales of land crabs in the Port Stanley-Crab Bay area rose more than 300% in seven years. The report’s author, David Esrom, believes crabs sold last year would have generated more than $US100, 000 - a significant sum for this small coastal community.

A land crab caught from the Crab Bay Area

Arresting this decline in crab numbers has been hampered by a lack of basic information on the crab’s biology and the lack of clear local rules to govern the management of this vital resource. The country’s national and provincial policies also focus on commercial fisheries rather than the subsistence or artisanal fisheries that are so important to the 70% of people who live in Vanuatu’s coastal communities.

Since mid-2004 the Pacific Regional Environment Programme’s International Waters Project (IWP) has been working with the people of Crab Bay to try and find out how they can improve the management of the land crab and other coastal resources. Crab Bay was chosen as the pilot site for the Vanuatu International Waters Project because local chiefs had already established a ‘no entry, no take’ tabu area, in an effort to halt the obvious decline in these resources.

As a young Chief Manoa says it is a privilege for him to be the Secretary of the Crab Bay Taboo Area Committee where he is working directly with older chiefs to try arrest the decline of these resources.

Chief Manoa was of 30 local facilitators who were trained to work together with the rest of the community to develop a better understanding of the root causes of their resource management problems.

“Being trained by the IWP as a local facilitator for my village I now have more confidence to facilitate local meetings with elders, youths, and women, to discuss resource management issues. Now the decisions we make are consensually agreed upon rather than just being the Chiefs decisions as used to happen in the past,” he says.

Leah Nimoho, the National Coordinator for IWP in Vanuatu, says it says it soon became clear that the women crab collectors would be need to be closely involved in decision-making if the community wanted to promote any changes to improve the long-term management of these in-shore resources.

“ When people talk about fishing many of us think about men catching fish. But, in Crab Bay, women are just as knowledgeable as men and they have a lot to share about their experiences in using these resources. This does not normally happen for our cultural reasons that men are more highly respected than women and in open meeting places women are shy and they often say very little.”

She says the project is using “participatory processes” to encourage the whole community to fully participate in all resource management decisions.

“Managing the coastal resources is not only the mans or chiefs task. It is appropriate that those who are going to be affected by the situation become involved. There is a need for the women to become more involved in marine resource management and conservation so they can help to sustain their family needs,” she says.

Chief Manoa says he is working with the other village facilitators to build greater understanding of their resources and to motivate them to participate in management decisions that will have a direct impact on their livelihoods. In a recent meeting he says the community agreed that the women should only be allowed to collect crabs twice a week with each woman to have a maximum of 5 bundles they can sell at the market each week.

A woman from Crab Bay selling her crabs at the Malampa Market

Leah says the project is not just about stopping people from taking crabs. She says they hope to encourage a shift away from the dependence on marine resources by encouraging families to develop their own lands to sell garden crops, or make copra and other agricultural products.

Traditional local knowledge underpins the project - much of it can’t be found in textbooks or scientific reports. When the project team gathered last November they discussed ways this existing knowledge would help crab (and other resource) management in the area.

Understanding when the crabs reproduce and where they release their eggs could be vital in determining what kind of rules need to be put in place. Building greater understanding of the importance of mangroves as a habitat could also help to discourage people from cutting large areas for firewood or housing.

Last November the project team carried out an ecological baseline survey where GPS technology was used to define geographical boundaries and members of the local community learned how to count and record all the species present. This was no small undertaking as over 50 different species were noted, including 25 samples sent to a taxonomist in Port Vila to identify.

Dedicated field workers tallied the crabs by counting crab holes and adding up the number of crabs along access roads and at special bait sites.

Names of all the species were documented in Bislama as well as the vernacular languages of the different Crab Bay villages of Hatbol, Lingarak and Uripiv. The team needed to check with village elders for a lot of this information so it wouldn’t be lost for future generations.

The current pilot project is due to finish at the end of 2006. The next steps are to finalize border maps, analyze the information collected so far and to take this back to the communities for them to discuss and approve a path forward. A monitoring programme will also be set up.

Leah Nimoho is optimistic about the future of the crabs and communities of Crab Bay but cautions that the pilot project must also be translated to sustainably manage all of Vanuatu’s coastal resources. But Leah says other villages are already starting to take notice.

“They’re beginning to ask what’s happening in Crab Bay. They’re starting understand what the project is trying to do,” she says. “They want to be involved. They want to be part of it.”

Leah says the IWP is working towards the development and implementation of a plan to show how sustainable subsistence fisheries management can be supported at the community, provincial and national levels.

“ It is a challenge to try and demonstrate sustainable coastal resource management through a community-based pilot project like this. We have to look at the role of the national government, the provincial authorities that govern local communities such as Crab Bay, and the local traditional landholders who have rights over use of resources within their land.

“We hope that what we do in Crab Bay in strengthening the local community, provincial capacities to enable them to be responsible to manage resources in their own areas, rather than entirely depending on the national government that has limited capacity.

“We hope that the pilot project will be a role model that other communities or islands in Vanuatu will adopt, to suit their needs in managing their own fisheries resources,” she says.

As Chief Manoa says, “My people are the most dependent on the resources around Crab Bay area but, if we are not responsible, the resources will all be gone and there is nowhere else for us to move for new settlement.

“Crab Bay is one of the most productive areas on Malekula and it deserves to be treated with appreciation.”