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International Waters Project

Bęche-de-mer Under Pressure in Marovo Lagoon

7/7/2005

The Marovo Lagoon located in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands is the longest lagoon in the southern hemisphere. Once described by James A. Michener as the “eighth wonder of the world” the lure of its spectacular natural beauty attracts tourists from across the globe.

The lagoon is also home to 12,000 people, residing in 70 villages and hamlets scattered along its coastline. In the Solomon Islands most of the country’s 500,000 people live in similar coastal or island communities.

Solomon Islanders have one of the highest per capita seafood consumption rates in the world with over 80% of the population deriving their protein from marine resources. Approximately 85 % of all land and marine areas are held under ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ tenure systems as villagers rely mainly on fishing, trade and subsistence agriculture for their food security and livelihoods.

In the Solomon Islands the International Waters Project (IWP) is working together with the villages of Mbili Passage and Chea in the eastern Marovo Lagoon to try and find cost-effective ways to improve the local management of important commercial coastal resources such as Bęche-de-mer.

Bęche-de-mer is the name for sea cucumbers that have been harvested, cooked, and dried for consumption. In Asia this product is highly regarded as delicacy with powerful qualities as a traditional medicine and aphrodisiac. In the Solomon Islands Bęche-de-mer is a multi-million dollar industry and it is second only to Tuna as the country’s most valuable marine resource.

Because of the ease of harvesting and processing Bęche-de-mer it has become one of the largest sources of cash in many coastal communities throughout the Solomon Islands. During the recent tensions bęche-de-mer provided one of the few reliable sources of income for many Solomon Islanders. However the increasing demand, coupled with new and unsustainable harvesting practices, has led to a drastic decline in the number of these higher value species.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the diversity of Bęche-de-mer species in the eastern Marovo Lagoon is now being altered due to increasing exploitation. This represents a threat not only to community livelihoods, but also to the fishery itself and the overall biodiversity of the lagoon.

Bęche-de-mer expert, Dr Christian Ramofiafia, who is based at the WorldFish Center’s Field Station at Nusa Tupe in the Solomon Island’s Western Province, says that with rising prices the use of unsustainable, and often dangerous, practices has also increased.

“Ten years ago people were happy to free dive or simply collect the sea cucumbers at low tide. Now people are night diving with torches, using weighted “bombs” with steel barbs, and even using dredges to harvest from deeper waters,” he says.

Dr Ramofafia says the growing use of “hookah”, or diving using air compressors and long hoses, has even contributed to a growing number of deaths in the Western Province.

In 1991 the white teatfish was worth only SB$30 a kilo but it now fetches SB$220-270. In 1999, more than 50% of the total catch was white teatfish but by 2002 this species accounted for only 2% of the total catch. In fact catches and exports have fallen from 715 tonnes in 1992 to less than half this figure today. In 1989, the Western Province yielded 58 % of the total Bęche-de-mer production for Solomon Islands. It contributed 24 % of annual production in 2000, 35 % in 2001, dropping to 17 % in 2003.

The predominant Bęche-de-mer species harvested at present in the eastern Marovo Lagoon are the medium value, brown sandfish, and the high value species, peanutfish, curryfish (includes brown curryfish) and stonefish, which also account for the highest cash value as well, accounting for 87.75 % of all Bęche-de-mer sold at Mbili Passage and Chubikopi (Uvilau) during the period from December 2004 to April 2005.

Dr Ramofafia says that local fishers tend to harvest all species found, regardless of their value, and that heavily harvested stocks can take more than fifty years to recover.

“Economically, Bęche-de-mer is a very important resource for the Solomon Islands but the Government’s ‘top-down’ approach to management simply isn’t working. The Government doesn’t presently have the capacity or resources to enforce regulations such as size limits, bag limits, gear restrictions, and seasonal closures. In fact, there aren’t any national regulations or guidelines to safeguard the fishery, except for a 1998 ban on fishing for Sandfish and this was repealed in 2000,” he says.

The IWP is a collaborative effort between traditional resource owners and the Solomon Islands’ Government. The project is managed in partnership with the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme and supported by non-government organisations (NGOs) and other stakeholders such as the dive and eco-tourism sector. The IWP is promoting sustainable coastal fisheries by establishing a system of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and working to promote increased community involvement and responsibility for local resource management and conservation.

In order to help develop plans to improve the management of this important marine resource the IWP team (including Community Facilitators, Patrick Mesia and Nelly Kere, and IWP scholarship recipient, Julia Maniloli) has been working with the pilot communities to gather information about the social and economic factors governing their resource use.

Jeff Kinch, the Coastal Fisheries Advisor at the University of Papua New Guinea, also worked with the IWP team to prepare a Socio-economic Baseline Assessment of the communities assist the IWP team to help guide the implementation of the project.

Mr Kinch says the population of the Marovo Lagoon is expected to double from its 1999 level by the year 2027. He says this increase in population, combined with the growing commercialisation of resources, will place increasing the pressure on natural resources as people strive to maintain or improve their standard of living.

The villages of Chea and Mbili Passage both have a population of around 300 people each and, as followers of the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Church, Jeff Kinch says they observe the Old Testament ban on eating ‘fish without scales’, such as shellfish, turtles, and crustaceans.

“Because of the restrictions imposed on SDA villagers by their faith, the collection and processing of Bęche-de-mer in the Marovo Lagoon, has previously been an almost exclusive activity by followers of the Christian Fellowship Church (CFC) and/or United Church,” he says.

“Bęche-de-mer is an important source of income, but only for young men who are more or less alienated from the SDA faith. There are approximately 20 youths in both Chea and Mbili Passage involved in the exploitation of Bęche-de-mer. In contrast, Chubikopi, which is a United Church community, near Chea has approximately 100 Bęche-de-mer fishers,” he says.

Mr Kinch says earlier surveys showed that a quarter of all households in the Marovo Lagoon were obtaining cash from the harvesting of Bęche-de-mer with an annual income range of between SI $ 166.00 – SI $ 2,920.00, giving an average of SI $496.00 per household. Despite the religious restrictions recent surveys by the IWP 2004, showed that Bęche-de-mer contributed to household income in 63 % of households at Mbili Passage and 27% in Chea.

Due to concerns of increased exploitation and lower abundances of Bęche-de-mer in the early 1990’s, some United Church and Christian Fellowship Church (CFC) communities began to enforce an increasing variety of management measures on Bęche-de-mer harvesting in their own areas.

Mr Kinch says that in most SDA communities Bęche-de-mer was not thought to warrant management because of church doctrine considered it to have no value. He says the Chea community was an exception to this, and in 1991, the community developed a Resources Policy Framework to control the collection of marine resources and to avoid over-exploitation.

Mr Kinch believes that the IWP should now work to involve the surrounding United Church communities and build on the Marine Resource Policy Framework that Chea developed in 1991 to manage the Bęche-de-mer fishery and other marine resources.

Dr Ramofafia agrees that the only way to protect these resources is to actively involve these fishing communities and resource owners in developing and implementing their own management strategies.

"Management of these resources should be transferred to communities and they should be responsible for enforcing regulations such as bag limits, gear restriction, seasonal closures, species rotation and area restrictions. These regulations should be implemented in accordance with the local system of customary marine tenure and the national government should develop policy and regulatory frameworks that help to support this community-based management," he says.

For more information on the International Waters Project visit: www.sprep.org/iwp

Contact Name	Steve Menzies
e-mail	stevem@sprep.org
Phone	(685) 21929
Fax	(685) 20231

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