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The MAP News, 201st Ed., 25 July, 2008
Dear Friends,
This is the 201st edition of the MAP News, and marks the start of a new phase in a sense to all of our work. As you will see in reading this newsletter, there are many current events and recent findings that reveal the vital importance of mangroves in helping to conserve and enrich our coastal marine zones. This is the time when finally mangroves are taking their rightful place in the sun as the invaluable coastal wetlands for wild fisheries and biodiversity that they are!
For these reasons, we at MAP urge our readers to please join us on July 26th to celebrate the mangroves on Mangrove Action Day!
For the Mangroves,
Alfredo Quarto
Mangrove Action Project
Sign up to receive the MAP News by sending an e-mail to: mapnews@mangroveactionproject.org.
MAP's Mission:
Partnering with mangrove forest communities, grassroots NGOs, researchers and local governments to conserve and restore mangrove forests and related coastal ecosystems, while promoting community-based, sustainable management of coastal resources.
All news items and notices published in the MAP News can also be accessed directly from our home page www.mangroveactionproject.org, with links to the full story and the original source. New items are posted daily and are available as an RSS feed!
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Contents for MAP NEWS, 201st Edition, 25 July 2008
FEATURE STORIES
***ACTION ALERT!!!*** MANGROVE ACTION DAY-A GLOBAL CALL TO ACTION!!!
MAP WORKS
Local Educator Wins National Marine Education Award
Shrimpless Blog
Mangrove Forest Ecology, Management and Restoration" training workshop, March 4-6, 2009
Next Calendar Children's Art Contest for 2009 Seeking New Submissions, Deadline Approaching
2nd Annual MAP Baja, Mexico Sea Kayaking/Mangrove Tour with the Grey Whales
AFRICA
Kenya
Kenya Biofuel Plans Threaten Wetland - Eco-Groups
Nigeria
NIOMR, EG take trainees to Thailand for shrimp production
ASIA
S.E. ASIA
Burma
Cyclone Nargis Offers Sobering Lessons, Says Environmentalist
Two Shrimp Factories Close Down in Arakan
Indonesian
N Sumatra needs hard work to restore mangrove forests
Riau's threatened Indragiri 'a serious cause for concern'
Malaysia
Sabah to conserve 78,000ha of mangrove, wildlife reserves
The Philippines
Massive Mangrove Restoration Backfires
Thailand
Thailand seeks US upgrade on IPR
Processors to set own prices
Turning back the tide
S. ASIA
Bangladesh
Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century - A special report by Johann Hari
Shrimp exporters yet to reach latent heights
Increased salinity changes vegetation pattern
India
Mangroves: 3,000 hectares notified as 'protected forests'
Pakistan
Mafia poses threat to mangroves
Sindh: Karachi Being Rapidly Stripped of Mangrove Cover
LATIN AMERICA
Brazil
Let's Celebrate the Mangroves?!
Mexico
The old man who farms with the sea
Geo Generation -- Yucatan Update
THE CARIBBEAN
Belize
Belizean Makes Case for Sensible Development in Her Caribbean Paradise, Save The Mangroves: Don't Cancunize Belize
British Virgin Islands
18,000 signatures and 3600 comments from around the world presented in support of British Virgin Islands
Bahamas
Residents in uproar over Martin Marietta Bahama Rock plans for expansion
NORTH AMERICA
USA
HHS Announces New International Programs to Enhance Drug and Food Safety
Picking shrimp not such a simple choice anymore
U.S. loses appeals in WTO shrimp cases
Americans eating less fish
Canada
Escaped salmon pose threat to wild stock
British Columbia - World's largest salmon producing river threatened by escape of 30,000 farmed fish
EUROPE
Spain
Langoustines Wrongly Labelled
United Kingdom
Britain Makes the Switch to Sustainable Species
STORIES / ISSUES
Mexican mangroves well worth saving
PRESS RELEASE: Mangroves key to saving lives
CONFERENCES / WORKSHOPS / PUBLICATIONS
This Mangrove Forest Could Save Your Life: Protected Areas and Disaster Mitigation
Chef's Guide to Sourcing Sustainable Seafood
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Ocean in Focus Conservation Photography Contest
AQUACULTURE CORNER
Norwegian Multinational company brought ISA virus to Magallanes
Whole Foods Market(R) Introduces Enhanced Farmed Seafood Standards
Grocers' Rules Follow Wave Of Sustainably Farmed Fish
Sustainable Aquaculture
Chilean Salmon Aquaculture Task Force Denounced for Breaking Deadline on Reduction of Antibiotics
***ACTION ALERT!!!***
MANGROVE ACTION DAY-A GLOBAL CALL TO ACTION!!!
Please join us all on 26 July 2008 for the Annual Call On Mangrove Action Day!
This year's theme is "No more death, no more misery, no more shrimp farms. Long live the mangroves!!"
MAP staff and volunteers based in the Seattle area will be attending the 34th Annual Ballard SeafoodFest on 26-27 July, tabling at this popular Seattle event and talking with consumers about the problems of shrimp farming worldwide. We will be promoting our "Shrimp Less, Think More" Consumer Awareness/ Markets Campaign.
What will you or your organization be doing on this day? We are now collecting news about other planned events to commemorate the global call for action for the Mangroves that your organization is organizing for 26 July. Please write us to share your own plans for this international day for the mangroves!
MAP wishes to lend our full support to the plans and actions of all our network members for Global Action on 26 July 2008. We ask that you and/or your organizations please join us all in a global protest against the ongoing losses of the mangrove forest ecosystems and the local communities that depend upon the mangroves for their lives and livelihoods. Please send us your regional or local plans for actions that are meant to commemorate this international Day for the Mangroves! We would like to again share your plans and ideas with our global network. We look forward to hearing from you soon in this regard! (The Editor)
=======
Note: The following was sent by the Latin American Mangrove Network, Redmanglar Internacional, in reference to this year's campaign:
¡No más muerte, no más miseria, no más camaroneras; VIVA EL MANGLAR!
Campaña 2008, 26 de Julio, Día de la Defensa del Ecosistema Manglar
Local Educator Wins National Marine Education Award
Mr. Martin Keeley, Cayman Island teacher and Education Director of the Mangrove Action Project, has been selected to receive the National Marine Educators Association's Outstanding Teacher Award for 2008. This award honors effective and innovative marine science education in the classroom. Mr. Keeley was recognized for his history of outstanding performance as a marine science educator in the Pacific Northwest and the Cayman Islands.
Mr. Keeley will be honored on July 23, 2008 at a ceremony during the National Marine Educators Association's annual conference in Savannah, Georgia, hosted by the Georgia Association of Marine Education. NMEA is a national professional organization founded in 1976 for all educators of marine and aquatic science and represents several thousand educators in North America, the Atlantic, Caribbean and Paciric regions.
The NMEA brings together those interested in the study and enjoyment of both fresh and salt water and provides a focus for marine and aquatic studies all over the world. Visit http://www.marine-ed.org/ to learn more about NMEA.
Only NMEA members are eligible for the "Outstanding Teacher of the Year" and great consideration is given to participants involvement in the NMEA. The Awards Committee considers a candidate's classroom environment, innovative materials and activities used and/or developed, integration of marine topics into various subject areas, and evidence of superior performance by the candidate's students.
For more information on NMEA or the awards program, contact Vicki Clark, NMEA Awards Committee Chair, vclark@vims.edu, tel: 804-684-7169.
For further information on Martin's work.
=============================
MAP Shrimp Less Blog
As part of its new campaign, "Shrimp Less, Think More," MAP recently launched a new blog: www.shrimpless.wordpress.com. The blog is a source of information about the destruction caused by imported shrimp, and includes frequent news updates, facts, consumer tips, reports, and other resources. It also is intended to build a network and community of people concerned about the issues--so we invite the comments and input from readers!
=============================
ANNOUNCEMENT: "Mangrove Forest Ecology, Management and Restoration" training workshop, March 4-6, 2009, Hollywood, Florida, USA.
The seventh "Mangrove Forest Ecology, Management and Restoration" training workshop will be held at the Anne Kolb Nature Center, in Hollywood, Florida, USA, March 4-6, 2009. The training site is within a 500 ha mangrove restoration project at West Lake Park operated by Broward County. The award-winning project was designed by Roy R. "Robin" Lewis III, who will be teaching the course. Mr. Lewis has taught this very successful course in Cuba, Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam, India and Sri Lanka.
More details at mangroverestoration.com or contact me at lesrrl3@aol.com.
Robin Lewis
=============================
Next Calendar Children's Art Contest For 2009 - Seeking New Submissions, Deadline Approaching!
Dear Friends of the Mangroves,
We are sponsoring our 9th international children's art competition and would like to invite children in your country to enter this contest and learn more about the important role that mangrove forests play in the lives of the coastal communities in particular and for marine life in general.
Specifically we would like you to contact schools and teachers in your area and provide them with information regarding this contest, and also to act as a liaison between MAP and the local schools as a resource person regarding mangrove and ecological information. In addition, we would ask you to collect the winners from each school participating within your country, and send the three best entries on to MAP at the above address for the final judging, and possible inclusion in the calendar. We are extending the deadline for receiving the art work, but ask that this be sent to reach us by 15 August 2008 for the 2009 Art Calendar.
This provides an opportunity for participating NGOs to build relationships with teachers and to provide school children with environmental information. Educating children on the importance of mangrove and coastal ecosystems is critical to effecting long term change. Without this information, current generations will grow up placing little value on the environment (as modeled by their parents) unless they are given new eyes with which to see coastal ecosystems and mangrove forests.
See MAP's website for more information and downloadable material that is ready to have your name added as the local contact representative and duplicated for distribution to teachers in your country.
Please let us know if we can be of further assistance in helping you implement this exciting educational project in your country. We will send all student winners, participating NGOs and schools copies of our calendar as well. And, the winning students will receive a signed official certificate announcing their great achievement in the 2009 Children's Mangrove Art Contest.
Yours sincerely,
Monica Alicia Paz Gutierrez-Quarto,
Calendar Project Coordinator
Mangrove Action Project
monicagquarto@olympus.net
tel. (360) 452-5866
=====
Senora Gutierrez-Quarto: the Children's Mangrove Calendar organizes my chaotic life and is pinned securely to the back of my office door.... I eagerly await the 2009 Edition.
Senectitudinally,
D. Reid Wiseman who is teetering on fragile prop roots
=============================
2nd Annual MAP Baja, Mexico Sea
Kayaking/Mangrove Tour with the Grey Whales
January 24 - February 1, 2009
$1695
(does not include airfare)
Join
MAP's Executive Director, Alfredo Quarto, on a trip that promises to remind us
why we do this work!
Join us, the Mangrove Action Project, for our second journey to the mangrove estuary in Magdalena Bay. Thanks to our friends at Blue Waters Kayaking we will join their expert naturalist kayak guides to have the opportunity to navigate the labyrinth of pristine mangroves by kayak. This is a spectacular opportunity! Despite the ongoing demand to convert the mangrove ecosystem over to large-scale commercial use, the local people and Mexican Government continue to protect Magdalena Bay as a sacred place for the Gray Whales to give birth and as a diverse mangrove ecosystem. We will invite local fisherman and biologists and activists to join us for insightful discussions on the ongoing battle to protect Magdalena Bay.
This is a fully guided tour that includes two nights at a lovely hotel overlooking the Sea Of Cortez, in the charming town of Loreto, and six nights at the Blue Waters Kayaking base camp located on a protected island in the heart Magdalena Bay. The camp is nestled between the mangrove estuary and the lagoon where the Gray Whales give birth. From camp you can see whales spouting and playing in the distance, dolphins swimming by, pelicans visiting on the beach next door and coyotes howling at night—a nature lover’s dream.
Mornings will be spent visiting the whales by motorboat and in great amazement these enormous mammals approach us to introduce their newly born young. In the afternoons we will kayak the mangrove labyrinth as flocks of white pelicans fly overhead and yellow-crowned night-herons stare at us at eye level between mangrove leaves. There will plenty of time for relaxation and walks on the beach.
The only Island base camp situated between a Mangrove Estuary and a Gray Whale Birthing Lagoon:
Our exclusive beach camp is
ready to serve you with hot showers, and the best kitchen this side of the
border, solar electricity to charge your cameras, large tents with plush
sleeping pads and wall tents with elevated cots, plenty of fresh water, a large
community dome, and chairs & sun umbrellas for lounging and reading.
* Kayaking in the bird-filled
mangroves will be available
* No prior kayaking experience is
necessary
* Kayaking is not required,
however, it is offered as part of this trip.
Each trip limited to 14 participants
More info:
Blue Waters Kayaking
Tel: (415)669-2600
www.bajakayaktours.com/MAP.html
Kenya
24 June 2008
Kenya Biofuel Plans Threaten Wetland - Eco-Groups
by Daniel Wallis
NAIROBI - Kenya should reverse a decision to grow biofuel crops which will threaten wild life on an important coastal wetland, two conservation groups warned on Monday.
More than 80 square miles (207 sq. km) of the Tana River Delta will be planted with sugarcane, threatening 350 species of birds, lions, elephants, rare sharks and reptiles, Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said.
"This decision is a national disaster and will devastate the Delta," Paul Matiku of Nature Kenya said in the same statement.
"The Tana's ecology will be destroyed yet the economic gains will be pitiful. It will seriously damage our priceless national assets and will put the livelihoods of the people living in the Delta in jeopardy."
The RSPB said the proposal was approved by the Kenyan government's National Environment Management Authority, which it accused of ignoring an environmental assessment that showed irrigation in the area would cause severe drainage of the Delta.
Matiku said that would also leave hundreds of local farmers with nowhere to take their livestock for dry-season grazing.
Kenyan officials were not immediately available for comment.
The RSPB said a report it commissioned in May with Nature Kenya found that the biofuel plans overestimated profits, ignored water use fees and pollution from the sugarcane plant, and disregarded the loss of income from wildlife tourists.
It said developers estimated income from sugarcane farming at 1.25 million pounds (US$2.5 million) over 20 years, but that their report showed revenues from fishing, farming, tourism and other lost livelihoods would be 30 million pounds over the same period.
"This decision is a very serious blow to Kenyan wildlife and to wildlife worldwide since many migrating species use the Tana Delta in internationally important numbers," said Paul Buckley, an Africa specialist with the RSPB.
The society said targets set by Western governments to increase their biofuel use as part of plans to fight climate change were actually driving the destruction of valuable environments.
European Union leaders have agreed renewable energy sources -- such as ethanol made from grains and sugar crops -- should make up 10 percent of road transport fuels in the bloc by 2020.
But the plan has been attacked by some scientists, politicians and conservationists who say growing biofuel production is curbing food supply at a time of soaring prices.
Critics say fuels derived from crops compete with produce from farmland and helped to push up food prices. (Editing by Mariam Karouny) ( For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ )
Source: Reuters
====================================
Nigeria
20 June 2008
NIOMR, EG take trainees to Thailand for shrimp production
by Daniel Gumm, and agency reports
A partnership that would make food readily available and export the excess had been formed in Lagos. Called NIOMR-EG Public Private Partnership Arrangement, the partnership as way of demonstrating its seriousness are also sending a four-member team of the Nigerian Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research to undergo training course in shrimps breeding in Thailand.
In an address at the epoch making event, Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer of NIOMR, Dr. Olajide Ayinla said the collaboration was designed "to move Nigeria's research agenda forward to achieve Federal Government's programme on Food Security and job creation which are integral part of President Umar Yar' Adua's seven-point agenda."
The ED said the factors militating against remarkable achievement in research programme is lack of critical mass of well trained scientists and technologists to address the area of need apart from poor budgetary allocation to the institute in the past.
He added that the event which would jump-start shrimp culture in Nigeria was made possible by the good budgetary provision in 2008 by the Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Abba Ruma Sayyad.
He also pointed out that to explore the training of the "critical mass of scientists and technologists in Thailand is strategic to jump-start the process of developing full package of shrimp culture in Nigeria."
But Managing Director of Erste Graceland Limited (EG), Chidi Ulelu, who would be leading the delegation of trainees to Thailand said the key to "our national revival and food security in Nigeria is when we commercialise innovations on agriculture."
Ulelu explained that "we have all these things here but our people cannot eat them until we make them available and affordable at all times," charging the four people going on the trip "to be prepared to be agents of change that are needed in our country."
He said there was already a counterpart funding for the project to make it a success, and appealed to banks to also be prepared to guide the project to logical success when it commences.
He noted that though the institute had what it takes to succeed but added that the NIOMR needed the private sector input to make the place like a business otherwise it would not move to the next level, according to him "that is what informed the partnership."
He also said Asian companies trawled in "our economic zone and packaged the shrimps for the export market and the average price is about $10," saying that "as I have said what informed this partnership with NIOMR in essence is that we are trying to drive the food security project from all fronts. It is the need to produce affordable sources of protein for Nigerians whose per capital consumption of protein is the lowest in the world. To drive the project, we need fish, shrimps, cassava, yams and rice."
The EG boss said research institutes worldwide "have a lot of ideas and knowledge which their challenges in Nigeria in particular has not taken the initiative to commercialise, emphasising that "in Thailand where we are taking these people to train, every research institute has a shop; the Maize Research Institute sell maize, canned maize, processed maize and maize seedlings; Fish Research Institute sell fish up to the process of canning; so we believe that by this partnership we can take the institute to bring some of the innovations that they are going to learn for use of the public."
On whether the innovations would be going for sale, since he mentioned selling of products, he said his organisation's expectation "is that since NIOMR is a government institution, the basic funds - seeds, shrimp fries, fish fingerlings - in other places when research institutes produce them, they are highly subsidised so that a farmer can get a shrimp fries for less than N1.00. We expect that by the time they start producing these things, the other agencies can come forward to sponsor them so that results of research institutes can get to the public at affordable prices."
Source: Vanguard
Submitted by: Nenibarini Zabbey
zabbey1@yahoo.com
Burma
11 July 2008
Cyclone Nargis Offers Sobering Lessons, Says Environmentalist
By Violet Cho
A prominent Burmese environmental group has found a silver lining in the devastation wrought by Cyclone Nargis on May 2-3: a growing awareness among both government officials and ordinary citizens about the need to pay greater attention to the environment.
"It was a blessing from the sky," said U Ohn, general secretary of the Forest Resource Environment Development and Conservation Association (FREDA). "It was terrible that many people died in the storm, but this cyclone also provided an effective warning to the stakeholders to open their eyes to the environment."
The Rangoon-based FREDA, one of the few local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to conserving Burma's forests, has been active in establishing mangrove nurseries and installing mangrove plantations in abandoned paddy lands in the Irrawaddy delta, which bore the brunt of Nargis' fury.
U Ohn said that both officials and ordinary Burmese had long taken the environment for granted, but after Cyclone Nargis, they now know that they ignore nature's delicate balance at their own peril.
"This is the direct impact of the failure to protect the environment, so if we are not initiating efforts to preserve our forests now, we will definitely face this kind of catastrophe again," he added.
Burma contains some 34 million hectares of natural forest-the second-largest area in Southeast Asia after Indonesia-but deforestation in the Irrawaddy delta region has been catastrophic, with more than 20 percent of mangrove forests having been lost between 1990 and 2000, according to research done by the Washington-based non-profit organization Conservation International.
Cyclone Nargis also destroyed many self-sustaining mangrove forests in the Irrawaddy delta, in addition to the thousands of trees-some of them nearly a century old-felled by the storm in the former capital, Rangoon.
According to an official from the Department of Garden and Playground Parks under the Rangoon City Development Committee, around 531 of the more than 10,000 trees destroyed by the cyclone were more than 50 years old.
The Rangoon-based weekly, 7-Day News, reported on Thursday that Burma's military government was planning to use the roots and branches of cyclone-downed trees collected in the Rangoon municipal area to make sculptures to be auctioned to local and foreign entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, the local journal Bi-Weekly Eleven reported government plans to plant more than 30,000 shade-providing trees in cyclone-affected areas.
Source: The Irrawaddy
====================================
17 July 2008
Two Shrimp Factories Close Down in Arakan
Two shrimp product factories owned by relatives of the Burmese military government in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan State, closed down recently after the US government imposed further sanctions on Burma, said one worker who had been employed there.
He said, "The factories are Shwe Tharawan and Shwe Yamon, both shrimp product factories, located beside the Satro Kya Creek in Sittwe. Local Arakanese people called the factories Ah Ai Khan."
"Ah Ai Kan" translated literally into English means, "frozen-keeping room".
The two factories were owned by relatives of the Burmese military government, and the Shwe Tharawan factory was reportedly owned by the son of General Shwe Mann, the third most powerful man in Burma.
The factories were closed down after a Singapore company stopped buying shrimp from the factory for importing.
The worker said, "I heard that the Singapore Company faced a problem transferring money from Singapore to Burma after the US-government imposed sanctions on Burma. The company reportedly stopped the business due to a problem with the banking system."
A source from Sittwe said, the Shwe Tharawan factory has been transferred by General Shwe Mann's son to a government fishery department in Sittwe since the factory was closed down.
The worker said that 200 employees for the two factories were left jobless after the closures, but the owners of the factories had already paid three months' advance salary to the workers.
Source: Narinjara
====================================
Indonesia
22 June 2008
N Sumatra needs hard work to restore mangrove forests
Medan, N Sumatra (ANTARA News) - North Sumatra province needs to work hard to restore its mangrove forests most of which have been converted into shrimp ponds and oil palm plantations in the past few years, an official said.
"I don`t know the exact figure but the area of damaged mangrove forests along the eastern coast of Sumatra island accounts for 70 percent of the total area and it takes at least five to eight years to restore them," Head of the North Sumatra Provincial Environmental Impact Management Board (Bappedalda) Prof Syamsul Arifin said on Saturday.
Efforts to restore the damaged mangrove forests were badly needed to conserve the environment, stem natural disasters such as flood and increase fishermen`s income, he said.
"The damaged mangrove forests have led to a decline in fish production as fish feed does not grow as expected," he said.
The restoration of damaged mangrove forests worked slowly due to a lack of full supports from all stakeholders, he said.
"Today, only the government and certain quarters have been serious about restoring the mangrove forests while in fact all sides must take equal responsibilities as the mangrove forests serve their common interests," he said.
Earlier, the Forum of Journalists Caring About Karo (FJPK) said an estimated 2.4 million hectares of land in North Sumatra were in critical condition and 1.3 million hectares of it must be rehabilitated soon because they had the potential of causing disasters. (*)
Source: ANTARA News
====================================
24 June 2008
Riau's threatened Indragiri 'a serious cause for concern'
by Rizal Harahap
Fishing communities in the Indragiri River delta in Riau risk losing their livelihoods because alarmingly high rates of mangrove destruction have led to dwindling biodiversity in the area, a local official said Tuesday.
Alimudin, head of the Indragiri Hilir regency's Mining and Environmental Agency, said 553.74 square kilometers of mangrove swamps, half the regency's coastline had been severely damaged.
He said logging companies were the main culprits behind the damage, having operated in the area since the 1990s.
"They have turned hundreds of thousands of hectares of mangrove swamp into wasteland, parts of which are now permanently submerged by seawater," he said.
Alimudin said several species of marine life, such as shrimps, crabs and fish, were now increasingly rare because of the loss of their natural habitat.
He said the environmental damage would be extremely difficult to overcome because of a lack of funds to help restore the wetlands.
"The only way to prevent the extinction of marine life in the area is to restore the ecosystem of the mangrove swamps. However, we can't do much about it without the funds," he said.
Wirman, head of the local fisheries and maritime agency, said his office had repeatedly requested funds from the provincial administration and government to build permanent embankments protected by mangrove trees. However, he said, there was no response yet to any of the requests.
"This is a serious cause for concern," he said.
He added around 2,500 fishermen risked losing their way of life if the mangrove swamps, the natural breeding grounds for fish, continued to be destroyed. He said the damage would also weaken the natural buffer against sea erosion.
"Shrimp farmers can only overcome the threat of tidal flooding by building embankments and replanting mangrove trees," he said.
Severe damage to mangroves is also on the rise in neighboring Rokan Hilir regency's Bangko district.
Wan Achmad Syaiful, head of the local forestry office, said more than 1,000 hectares of protected mangrove swamps had been destroyed by loggers.
"Police have identified the perpetrators and are gathering evidence for the case against them," he said.
About Rp 1.6 billion (US$166,000) in losses is incurred by the state through illegal logging in protected mangrove swamps every year, while misappropriation of reforestation funds amounts to US$14,454, he said.
"We will increase surveillance in protected areas and coordinate with the police to apprehend those responsible for the damage," he said.
Delfitri Akbar, executive director of the Bahtera Melayu environmental group and the recipient of the 2008 Kalpataru environmental award, urged the government to restore mangrove swamps by immediately planting new trees. She also called for increased engagement of local fishing communities in the effort.
"The fishing communities have long depended on the mangrove swamps. If logging is to be prohibited, then the most effective solution is to engage them as participants," she said.
"The government should pay coastal residents to replant mangrove trees. Don't apply labor-intensive methods that will leave them indifferent.
"Apart from creating new jobs, the effort will bring about mangrove swamp sustainability."
Delfitri also urged the government to allow people the opportunity to be involved in mangrove restoration projects without having to go through a tender process.
Source: The Jakarta Post
==============================
Malaysia
18 July 2008
Sabah to conserve 78,000ha of mangrove, wildlife reserves
By RUBEN SARIO
KOTA KINABALU: Sabah is permanently conserving wetlands and forests three times the size of Kuala Lumpur at a wildlife rich region on the state's east coast.
Sabah Forestry Department director Datuk Sam Mannan said the state cabinet approved the setting aside of some 78,000ha of mangrove and wildlife forest reserves in the Lower Kinabatangan-Segama region.
The cabinet made the move when giving its nod to the suggestion by the Borneon Biodiversity and Ecosystems Conservation Phase II programme to list the area as part of the global Ramsar Site Network.
Named after a place in Iran, Ramsar is an international convention on wetlands that provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. It it was first established in 1971 and came into force in 1975.
Ramsar falls under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and is managed by the Ramsar secretariat, which shares its headquarters with the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Switzerland.
Mannan said the area included were Trusan Kinabatangan, Kuala Segama-Maruap Mangrove Forest Reserves and Kulamba Wildlife Forest Reserve.
He said the site would be tabled and registered at the next "Conference of the Parties" (CoP10) to be held in South Korea in October. With that, Sabah would have the largest Ramsar Site in Malaysia, the others being five other areas ranging from 526ha to 6,610ha totalling 55,000ha in Peninsular Malaysia and Sarawak.
"Sabah's proposed area represents the largest contiguous area of wetland forests in the country," Mannan said, adding there were numerous benefits from listing the wetlands as a Ramsar site.
These include international prestige for achieving the gold standard in the conservation of wetlands of global importance, access to international assistance on the research of wetlands.
Other benefits include external funding for management activities such as forest management plan preparation, enhanced protection, bio-diversity assessments and increased access to expertise, he said.
"The listing will also further raise the profile of Sabah's conservation efforts internationally and this is bound to have a multiplier effect on the state's growing nature-based tourism industry," Mannan said in thanking the Sabah cabinet led by Chief Minister Datuk Musa Aman for the listing decision.
Source: The Star
==============================
The Philippines
15 July 2008
Massive Mangrove Restoration Backfires
By David Malakoff
One of the world's most intensive efforts to restore coastal mangrove forests is failing--in large part because people are planting the trees in the wrong places. Ironically, the restoration effort may also be harming other coastal habitats in the Philippines, according to a new study.
Over the past century, the islands that make up the Philippines have lost nearly three-quarters of their mangrove forests. The trees--which grow in brackish coastal waters on leggy roots--create key habitats for fish and shellfish. But settlers routinely cleared the flooded forests for development and ponds for fish farming. To reverse the trend, conservation groups began fanning out across the archipelago 2 decades ago, planting 44,000 hectares with hundreds of millions of mangrove seedlings.
Many of those trees were doomed to die quick deaths, according to biologists Maricar Samson and Rene Rollon of the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. In the current issue of Ambio, the researchers report that surveys of more than 70 restoration sites often found mostly dead, dying, or "dismally stunted" trees. The major problem, they say, is that planters didn't understand the mangrove's biological needs and placed seedlings in mudflats, sandflats, or sea-grass meadows that can't support the trees. Some of these areas have inadequate nutrients; in other places, strong winds and currents batter the seedlings. What's worse, the failed plantings sometimes pack a double ecological whammy, as restoration activities disturbed or damaged otherwise healthy habitats.
To get mangrove restoration back on track, Samson and Rollon say planters need better guidance on where to place the seedlings. Typically, the researchers say, the best locations are on gently sloping hill bottoms that are above mean sea level and flooded by the tides less than one-third of the time. The team says the Philippine government also needs to make it easier to convert abandoned or unproductive fish ponds back to mangrove swamps. But Samson admits this is a thorny legal and political issue, because landowners are reluctant to give up potentially valuable shorefront. As a result, the researchers write that they are "pessimistic about the 'voluntary surrender' of these pieces of wetlands back to nature."
The Philippines's dismal experience with mangrove restoration is not unique, says Roy "Robin" Lewis III, a prominent expert in the field and director of Lewis Environmental Services, a private restoration firm in Salt Springs, Florida. His studies have shown that mangrove restorers around the globe routinely fail to understand the tree's biology and that conflicts with landowners and political leaders can doom projects. Too often, he says, "ignorance and greed rule."
Source: Science Now Daily News
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Thailand
17 June 2008
Thailand seeks US upgrade on IPR
By Petchanet Pratruangkrai
Thailand urged the US to upgrade its trade status, taking into account its crackdown on intellectual-property-right (IPR) violations.
The move came during a meeting between Commerce Ministry permanent secretary Siripol Yodmuangcharoen and assistant US trade representative Barbara Wiesel in Washington last week.
Siripol said he tried to convince the US to upgrade Thailand 's trade status as the country had shown better results on IPR violation compared with other countries.
"The country's IPR violation statistics have decreased significantly during the past few years, and hence Thailand should be upgraded from the watch list," he said.
The US earlier this year kept Thailand on its "priority watch list" in its annual review of countries under its Special 301 measure. Siripol also denied accusations made earlier in an International Labour Organisation report that Thai fish farms and food-processing factories used child labour.
He explained that the government had surveyed all shrimp and food factories and found them to be hiring legal labourers.
To solve the prolonged conflict over Thai shrimp exports to the US, the two countries will soon have an unofficial meeting to end the continuous bond collection from Thai shrimp firms.
Thailand has won the case over the US's unfair imposition of anti-dumping duty and the continuous-bond payments in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). However, the US has appealed to the WTO and still imposes high tariffs on Thai shrimp imports.
Siripol said the ministry would try to convince the US to withdraw its requirement for a 100-per-cent bank guarantee before the final ruling in order to help decrease the high burden on Thai shrimp exporters from paying the guarantee.
Source: The Nation
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18 June 2008
Processors to set own prices
Shrimp body disagrees with pledging scheme
by Walailak Keeratipipatpong
SURAT THANI : Seafood processors have countered the recent shrimp-pledging programme of the Commerce Ministry by setting their own weekly shrimp benchmark prices, which are lower than pledging prices. The weekly prices, based on farm production costs and export prices, will be announced every Monday and would be used as median prices for food processors and cold-storage operators to buy from farmers nationwide, according to Poj Aramwattananont, president of the Thai Frozen Foods Association.
To reduce potential pressure from the raisers, Mr Poj said the association would also persuade raisers nationwide to share their comments on the weekly prices.
The association disagrees with the pledging programme and sees it as an idea from giant agro-business groups.
''In the past, we've allowed parties not in the business to meddle with the industry. But now I want processors to work closely with farmers and set our own prices in order to stabilise shrimp prices in the long term,'' Mr Poj said at a meeting this week in Surat Thani where he met with farmers and cold-storage operators from upper southern provinces.
He said the pledging price agreed to earlier this month between groups of farmers and the Internal Trade Department of the Commerce Ministry did not reflect genuine market prices but was based on prices at the popular Mahachai seafood market, with inaccurate demand and supply figures.
As the association controls up to 70% of the local shrimp trade, it was justified in setting its own prices, he said.
The Internal Trade Department agreed on June 6 to use about 300 million baht to pledge a total of 10,000 tonnes of white shrimp or vannamei from farmers to prevent a further fall in shrimp prices.
The programme agrees to pay 140 baht per kilogramme for a size of 50 head per kg and 130 baht for 60 head per kg. The programme runs from June to October this year.
The attempt to announce weekly prices was intended to stabilise prices of the product, Mr Poj told more than 100 farmers from eight provinces in the upper south at the meeting.
The association's 31 member companies from Phuket, Surat Thani, Trang, Chumphon, Krabi, Phangnga, Ranong, and Nakhon Si Thammarat will be ready to use the new benchmark to buy shrimp from farmers.
For the first week, prices for the 50 shrimp/kg size will be 120 baht a kg, 20 baht lower than those offered in the pledging scheme.
According to Mr Poj, the falling domestic prices have stemmed mainly from slow orders from the United States, the major shrimp importer that controls half of the market. The US has accused the Thai industry of using forced and child labor in shrimping.
Officials from the US Homeland Security Department, representatives from the International Labor Organisation (ILO) and non-governmental organisations finished their investigation last week but the result of the inquiries hasn't been released.
The officials visited selected shrimp processing plants and peeling factories in Samut Sakhon, Samut Prakan and Rayong.
Mr Poj said that at the time the processors were dealing with the US officials, some in the shrimp raisers' association lobbied the Commerce Ministry hard to launch the pledging programme.
He said processors and exporters would join the scheme but only to allow use of their facilities to freeze the produce.
He has asked farmers to understand the falling market is because of the slow economy and the anti-dumping tariffs on exports to the United States of frozen shrimp from Thailand.
Thai shrimp production is projected to grow 6% this year to 530,000 tonnes and export volume to 350,000 tonnes.
The association plans to arrange meetings to inform cold-storage operators and farmers in the deep south, eastern, and central provinces of their new pricing scheme over the next three months.
Source: Bangkok Post
http://www.bangkokpost.com
via: www.ICSF.net
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12 July 2008
Turning back the tide
Local efforts to reverse effects of coastal erosion, by growing mangrove forests to overcome flooding, show signs of success, writes Chaiwat Satyaem in Samut Sakhon
Local efforts to save the natural environment and fight coastal erosion in Ban Khok Kham of Samut Sakhon's Muang district are showing signs of success. Until recently, villages were picking up the pieces from severe coastal erosion after greedy businesses invaded the mangrove forests which are natural buffers along the shore.
Local communities hope the experimental Phan Tai Norasingh learning park will help reverse the erosion problem.
Prasarn Iamwijarn, a teacher at Phan Tai Norasingh Witthaya school, is in charge of the learning park project financed by a 10-million-baht budget from the Khok Kham tambon administration organisation.
He said environmental destruction in Muang district was too severe to ignore. Until 1991, shrimp farms were common.
The farms gradually went out of business and the ground was left hard and barren.
Poorly-managed farms polluted the water and no measures were put in place to save the environment.
The school was hard hit as it sits on land which was formerly a salt farm.
The school is flooded every year and remains submerged for up to four months at a time.
At the peak of shrimp farming, the area near the school was covered with salty water and no trees could grow.
Mr Prasarn said that in 1996 he found ways to solve the problem by drawing on lessons from royal projects initiated by His Majesty the King.
He launched a project to plant mangrove trees on deserted shrimp farms around the school.
Students collected mangrove pods for cultivation and planted the young trees around the school.
More than 40% of green areas around the school were restored, which Mr Prasarn regards as a big advance.
Mr Prasarn convinced shrimp farmers to recognise the merits of growing mangroves around their farms.
Maintaining a balance in the environment by growing mangrove trees was crucial for the survival of marine life, he said.
''I thought up a model and borrowed unused land near the coastlines for experiments.
''Now we have grown about 400 rai of mangroves in those areas. As a result, marine life is returning to the area where the mangrove forest has grown.
''The forests also trap mud sediment which will help slow coastal erosion,'' Mr Prasarn said.
The mangroves have slowed the erosion which led to land subsidence and worsened flooding for the school.
His hard work has now paid off with cooperation from local people.
Residents began by building three rows of experimental bamboo walls along the shorelines as a barrier to protect the area against the force of the waves.
The three-month experiment, a joint effort between Chulalongkorn University and local people, showed that the bamboo walls helped trap sediment, allowing soft ground to build up behind them.
The cost of the bamboo wall is 2.5 million baht per kilometre, which is cheaper than most other wave breakers.
Mr Prasarn said he expected the sediment build-up would allow mangrove planting areas to expand in the next three to five years.
Narin Bunruam, 71, said the project was useful, so he decided to pitch in.
''I think it is important to plant more mangrove forests, which can act as a home to various forms of marine life.
''Most importantly, I believe mangrove forests can help reduce global warming,'' Mr Narin said.
He said the community has also launched a separate project to breed crabs.
Breeding pens for crabs are put up about one kilometre from shore, using bamboo sticks planted in the sea.
When crabs with eggs are caught, they are not sold straight away, but are kept in the pens until the eggs hatch.
The crabs, without the eggs, are then sold.
The project has caught on with local fishermen and has become a success as crabs in the wild in Khok Kham village are increasing in number.
Even though a crab can lay up to 500,000 eggs, only 10% of them survive.
Mr Narin urged people to stop eating crab eggs so more crabs will be available for consumption in the long term.
Source: Bangkok Post
Bangladesh
20 June 2008
Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century
- A special report by Johann Hari
Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on earth, is set to disappear under the waves by the end of this century - and we will be to blame. Johann Hari took a journey to see for himself how western profligacy and indifference have sealed the fate of 150 million peoplewent to see for himself the spreading misery and destruction as the ocean reclaims the land on which so many millions depend
This spring, I took a month-long road trip across a country that we - you, me and everyone we know - are killing. One day, not long into my journey, I travelled over tiny ridges and groaning bridges on the back of a motorbike to reach the remote village of Munshigonj. The surviving villagers - gaunt, creased people - were sitting by a stagnant pond. They told me, slowly, what we have done to them.
Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.
The waters flowing through Munshigonj - which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life - had turned salty and dead.
Arita Rani, a 25-year-old, sat looking at the salt water, swaddled in a blue sari and her grief. "We couldn't drink the water from the river, because it was suddenly full of salt and made us sick," she said. "So I had to give my children water from this pond. I knew it was a bad idea. People wash in this pond. It's dirty. So we all got dysentery." She keeps staring at its surface. "I have had it for 10 years now. You feel weak all the time, and you have terrible stomach pains. You need to run to the toilet 10 times a day. My boy Shupria was seven and he had this for his whole life. He was so weak, and kept getting coughs and fevers. And then one morning..."
Her mother interrupted the trailing silence. "He died," she said. Now Arita's surviving three-year-old, Ashik, is sick, too. He is sprawled on his back on the floor. He keeps collapsing; his eyes are watery and distant. His distended stomach feels like a balloon pumped full of water. "Why did this happen?" Arita asked.
It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal power plant, ends here, with this. Bangladesh is a flat, low-lying land made of silt, squeezed in between the melting mountains of the Himalayas and the rising seas of the Bay of Bengal. As the world warms, the sea is swelling - and wiping Bangladesh off the map.
Deep below the ground of Munshigonj and thousands of villages like it, salt water is swelling up. It is this process - called "saline inundation" - that killed their trees and their fields and contaminated their drinking water. Some farmers have shifted from growing rice to farming shrimp - but that employs less than a quarter of the people, and it makes them dependent on a fickle export market. The scientific evidence shows that unless we change now, this salt water will keep rising and rising, until everything here is ocean.
I decided to embark on this trip when, sitting in my air-conditioned flat in London, I noticed a strange and seemingly impossible detail in a scientific report. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - whose predictions have consistently turned out to be underestimates - said that Bangladesh is on course to lose 17 per cent of its land and 30 per cent of its food production by 2050. For America, this would be equivalent to California and New York State drowning, and the entire mid-West turning salty and barren.
Surely this couldn't be right? How could more than 20 million Bangladeshis be turned into refugees so suddenly and so silently? I dug deeper, hoping it would be disproved - and found that many climatologists think the IPCC is way too optimistic about Bangladesh. I turned to Professor James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose climate calculations have proved to be more accurate than anybody else's. He believes the melting of the Greenland ice cap being picked up by his satellites today, now, suggests we are facing a 25-metre rise in sea levels this century - which would drown Bangladesh entirely. When I heard this, I knew I had to go, and see.
1. The edge of a cliff
The first thing that happens when you arrive in Dhaka is that you stop. And wait. And wait. And all you see around you are cars, and all you hear is screaming. Bangladesh's capital is in permanent shrieking gridlock, with miles of rickshaws and mobile heaps of rust. The traffic advances by inches and by howling. Each driver screams himself hoarse announc-ing - that was my lane! Stay there! Stop moving! Go back! Go forward! It is a good-natured shrieking: everybody knows that this is what you do in Dhaka. If you are lucky, you enter a slipstream of traffic that moves for a minute - until the jams back up and the screaming begins once more.
Around you, this megalopolis of 20 million people seems to be screaming itself conscious. People burn rubbish by the roadside, or loll in the rivers. Children with skin deformities that look like infected burns try to thrust maps or sweets into your hand. Rickshaw drivers with thighs of steel pedal furious-ly as whole families cling on and offer their own high-volume traffic commentary to the groaning driver, and the groaning city.
I wanted to wade through all this chaos to find Bangladesh's climate scientists, who are toiling in the crannies of the city to figure out what - if anything - can be saved.
Dr Atiq Rahman's office in downtown Dhaka is a nest of scientific reports and books that, at every question, he dives into to reel off figures. He is a tidy, grey-moustached man who speaks English very fast, as if he is running out of time.
"It is clear from all the data we are gathering here in Bangladesh that the IPCC predictions were much too conservative," he said. He should know: he is one of the IPCC's leading members, and the UN has given him an award for his unusually prescient predictions. His work is used as one of the standard textbooks across the world, including at Oxford and Harvard. "We are facing a catastrophe in this country. We are talking about an absolutely massive displacement of human beings."
He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility." In the past, he has called it "climatic genocide".
The worst-case scenario, Dr Rahman said, is if one of the world's land-based ice-sheets breaks up. "Then we lose 70 to 80 per cent of our land, including Dhaka. It's a different world, and we're not on it. The evidence from Jim Hansen shows this is becoming more likely - and it can happen quickly and irreversibly. My best understanding of the evidence is that this will probably happen towards the end of the lifetime of babies born today."
I walked out in the ceaseless churning noise of Dhaka. Everywhere I looked, people were building and making and living: my eyes skimmed up higher and higher and find more and more activity. A team of workers were building a house; behind and above them, children were sewing mattresses on a roof; behind and above them, more men were building taller buildings. This is the most cramped country on earth: 150 million people living in an area the size of Iowa. Could all this life really be continuing on the crumbling edge of a cliff?
2. 'It is like the Bay is angry'
I was hurtling through the darkness at 120mph with my new driver, Shambrat. He was red-eyed from chewing pan, a leaf-stimulant that makes you buzz, and I could see nothing except the tiny pools of light cast by the car. They showed we were on narrow roads, darting between rice paddies and emptied shack-towns, in the midnight silence. I kept trying to put on my seatbelt, but every time Shambrat would cry, "You no need seatbelt! I good driver!" and burst into hysterical giggles.
To see if the seas were really rising, I had circled a random low-lying island on the map called Moheshkhali and asked Shambrat to get me there. It turned out the only route was to go to Coxs Bazar - Bangladesh's Blackpool - and then take a small wooden rowing boat that has a huge chugging engine attached to the front. I clambered in alongside three old men, a small herd of goats, and some chickens. The boat was operated by a 10-year-old child, whose job is to point the boat in the right direction, start the engine, and then begin using a small jug to frantically scoop out the water that starts to leak in. After an hour of the deafening ack-ack of the engine, we arrived at the muddy coast of Moheshkhali.
There was a makeshift wooden pier, where men were waiting with large sacks of salt. As we climbed up on to the fragile boards, people helped the old men lift up the animals. There were men mooching around the pier, waiting for a delivery. They looked bemused by my arrival. I asked them if the sea levels were rising here. Rezaul Karim Chowdry, a 34-year-old who looked like he is in his fifties, said plainly: "Of course. In the past 30 years, two-thirds of this island has gone under the water. I had to abandon my house. The land has gone into the sea." Immediately all the other men start to recount their stories. They have lost their houses, their land, and family members to the advance.
They agreed to show me their vanishing island. We clambered into a tuc-tuc - a motorbike with a carriage on the back - and set off across the island, riding along narrow ridges between cordoned-off areas of sand and salt. The men explained that this is salt-farming: the salt left behind by the tide is gathered and sold. "It is one of the last forms of farming that we can still do here," Rezaul said. As we passed through the forest, he told me to be careful: "Since we started to lose all our land, gangs are fighting for the territory that is left. They are very violent. A woman was shot in the crossfire yesterday. They will not like an outsider appearing from nowhere."
We pulled up outside a vast concrete structure on stilts. This, the men explained, is the cyclone shelter built by the Japanese years ago. We climbed to the top, and looked out towards the ocean. "Do you see the top of a tree, sticking out there?" Rezaul said, pointing into the far distance. I couldn't see anything, but then, eventually, I spotted a tiny jutting brown-green tip. "That is where my house was." When did you leave it? "In 2002. The ocean is coming very fast now. We think all this" - he waved his hand back over the island - "will be gone in 15 years."
Outside the rusty house next door, an ancient-looking man with a long grey beard was sitting cross-legged. I approached him, and he rose slowly. His name was Abdul Zabar; he didn't know his age, but guessed he is 80. "I was born here," he said. "There" - and he points out to the sea. "The island began to be swallowed in the 1960s, and it started going really quickly in 1991. I have lost my land, so I can't grow anything... I only live because one of my sons got a job in Saudi Arabia and sends money back to us. I am very frightened, but what can I do? I can only trust in God." The sea stops just in front of his home. What will you do, I asked, if it comes closer? "We will have nowhere to go to."
I was taken to the island's dam. It is a long stretch of hardened clay and concrete and mud. "This used to be enough," a man called Abul Kashin said, "but then the sea got so high that it came over the dam." They have tried to pile lumps of concrete on top, but they are simply washed away. "My family have left the island," he continued, "They were so sad to go. This is my homeland. If we had to leave here to go to some other place, it would be the worst day of my life."
Twenty years ago, there were 30,000 people on this island. There are 18,000 now - and most think they will be the last inhabitants.
On the beach, there were large wooden fishing boats lying unused. Abu Bashir, a lined, thin 28-year-old, pointed to his boat and said, "Fishing is almost impossible now. The waves are much bigger than they used to be. It used to be fine to go out in a normal [hand-rowed] boat. That is how my father and my grandfather and my ancestors lived.
"Now that is impossible. You need a [motor-driven] boat, and even that is thrown about by the waves so much. It's like the bay is angry."
The other fishermen burst in. "When there is a cyclone warning, we cannot go out fishing for 10 days. That is a lot of business lost. There used to be two or three warnings a year. Last year, there were 12. The sea is so violent. We are going hungry."
Yet the islanders insisted on offering me a feast of rice and fish and eggs. I was ushered into the council leader's house - a rusty shack near the sea - and the men sat around, urging me to tell the world what is happening. "If people know what is happening to us, they will help," they said. The women remained in the back room; when I glimpsed them and tried to thank them for the food, they giggled and vanished. I asked if the men had heard of global warming, and they looked puzzled. "No," they said. We stared out at the ocean and ate, as the sun slowly set on the island.
3. No hiding place
Through the morning mist, I peered out of the car window at the cratered landscape. Trees jutted out at surreal angles from the ground. One lay upside down with its roots sticking upwards towards the sky, looking like a sketch for a Dali painting. Shambrat had spat out his pan and was driving slowly now. "There are holes in the ground," he said, squinting with concentration. "From the cyclone. You fall in..." He made a splattering sound.
It was here, in the south of Bangladesh, that on 15 November last year, Cyclone Sidr arrived. It formed in the warmed Bay of Bengal and ripped across the land, taking more than 3,000 people with it. Like Americans talking about 9/11, everybody in Bangladesh knows where they were when Sidr struck. For miles, the upturned and smashed-out houses are intermixed with tents made from blue plastic sheeting. These stretches of plastic were handed out by the charities in the weeks after Sidr, and many families are still living in them now.
There have always been cyclones in Bangladesh, and there always will be - but global warming is making them much more violent. Back in Dhaka, the climatologist Ahsan Uddin Ahmed explained that cyclones use heat as a fuel: "The sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have been rising steadily for the past 40 years - and so, exactly as you would expect, the intensity of cyclones has risen too. They're up by 39 per cent on average." Again I circled a cyclone-struck island at random and headed for the dot.
The hour-long journey on a wooden rowing boat from the mainland to Charkashem Island passed in a dense mist that made it feel like crossing the River Styx. The spectral outline of other boats could sometimes be glimpsed, before they disappeared suddenly. One moment an old woman and a goat appeared and stared at me, then they were gone.
The island was a tiny dot of mud and lush, upturned greenery. It had no pier, so when the rowing boat bumped up against the sand I had to wade through the water.
I looked out over the silent island, and saw some familiar blue sheeting in the distance. As I trudged towards it, I saw some gaunt teenagers half-heartedly kicking a deflated football. From the sheeting, a man and woman stared, astonished.
"I was in my fields over there," Hanif Mridha said. "I saw the wind start, it was about eight at night, and I saw everything being blown around. I went and hid under an iron sheet, but that was blown away by the wind. The water came swelling up all of a sudden and was crashing all around me. I grabbed one of my children and ran to the forest" - he pointed to the cluster of trees at the heart of the island - "and climbed the tallest one I could reach. I went as high as I could but still the water kept rising and I thought - this is it, I'm going to drown. I'm dying, my children are dying, my wife is dying. I could see everything was under water and people were screaming everywhere. I held there for four hours with my son."
When the water washed away and he came down, everything was gone: his house, his crops, his animals, his possessions. A few days later, an aid agency arrived with some rice and some plastic sheeting to sleep under. Nobody has come since.
His wife, Begum Mridha, took over the story. Their children are terrified of the sea now, and have nightmares every night. They eat once a day, if they're lucky. "We are so hungry," she said. The new home they have built is made from twigs and the plastic sheet. Underneath it, they sleep with their eight children and Begum Mridha's mother. The children lay lethargically there, staring blankly into space over their distended bellies.
Begum Mridha cooks on a lantern. They eat once a day - if that. "It's so cold at night we can't sleep," she said. "The children all have diarrhoea and they are losing weight. It will take us more than two years to save up and get back what we had."
If cyclones hit this area more often, what would happen to you? Hanif looked down. He opened his mouth, but no words came.
4. Bangladesh's Noah
In the middle of Bangladesh, in the middle of my road trip, I tracked down Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan. He was sitting under a parasol by the banks of a river, scribbling frenetically into his notebook.
"The catastrophe in Bangladesh has begun," he said. "The warnings [by the IPCC] are unfolding much faster than anyone anticipated." Until a few years ago, Rezwan was an architect, designing buildings for rich people - "but I thought, is this what I want to do while my country drowns? Create buildings that will be under water soon anyway?"
He considered dedicating his life to building schools and hospitals, "but then I realised they would be under water soon as well. I was hopeless. But then I thought of boats!"
He has turned himself into Bangladesh's Noah, urging his people to move on to boats as the Great Flood comes. Rezwan built a charity - Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, which means self-reliance - that is building the only schools and hospitals and homes that can last now: ones that float.
We clambered on to his first school-boat, which is moored in Singra. In this area there is no electricity, no sewage system, and no state. The residents live the short lives of pre-modern people. But now, suddenly, they have a fleet of these boats, stocked with medicines and lined with books on everything from Shakespeare to accountancy to climatology. Nestling between them, there are six internet terminals with broadband access.
The boat began to float down the Curnai River, gathering scores of beaming kids as it went. Fatima Jahan, an unveiled 18-year-old girl dressed in bright red, arrived to go online. She was desperate to know the cricket scores. At every muddy village-stop, the boat inhaled more children, and I talked to the mothers who were beating their washing dry by the river. "I never went to school, and I never saw a doctor in my life. Now my children can do both!" a thin woman with a shimmering heart-shaped nose stud called Nurjahan Rupbhan told me. But when I asked about the changes in the climate, her forehead crumpled into long frown-lines.
I thought back to what the scientists told me in Dhaka. Bangladesh is a country with 230 rivers running through it like veins. They irrigate the land and give it its incredible fertility - but now the rivers are becoming supercharged. More water is coming down from the melting Himalayan glaciers, and more salt water is pushing up from the rising oceans. These two forces meet here in the heart of Bangladesh and make the rivers churn up - eroding the river banks with amazing speed. The water is getting wider, leaving the people to survive on ever-more narrow strips of land.
Nurjahan took me up to a crumbling river edge, where tree roots jutted out naked. "My house was here," she said. "It fell into the water. So now my house is here -" she motioned to a small clay hut behind us - "but now we realise this is going to fall in too. The river gets wider day by day."
But even this, Nurjahan said, is not the worst problem. The annual floods have become far more extreme, too. "Until about 10 years ago, the floods came every year and the water would stay for 15 days, and it helped to wet the land. Now the water stays for four months. Four months! It is too long. That doesn't wet the fields, it destroys them. We cannot plan for anything."
When the floods came last year, Nurjahan had no choice but to stay here. She lived with her children waist-deep in the cold brown water - for four months. "It was really hard to cook, or go to the toilet. We all got dysentery. It was miserable." Then she seemed to chastise herself. "But we survived! We are tough, don't you think?"
We sat by the river-bank, our feet dangling down towards the river. I asked if she agrees with Rezwan that her only option soon will be to move on to a boat. He is launching the first models this summer: floating homes with trays of earth where families can grow food. "Yes," she said, "We will be boat-people."
I clambered back on to one of the 42 school-boats in this area. Young children were in the front chanting the alphabet, and teenagers at the back were browsing through the books. I asked a 16-year-old boy called Mohammed Palosh Ali what he was reading about, and he said, "Global warming." I felt a small jolt. He was the first person to spontaneously raise global warming with me. Can you tell me what that is? "The climate is being changed by carbon dioxide," he said. "This is a gas that traps heat. So if there is more of it, then the ice in the north of the world melts and our seas rise here."
I asked if he had seen this warming in his own life. "Of course! The floods in 1998 and 2002 were worse than anything in my grandfather's life. We couldn't get any drinking water, so the dirty water I drank made me very sick. The shit from the toilet pits had risen up and was floating in the water, but we still had to drink it. We put tablets in it but it was still disgusting. What else could we do?"
Mohammed, do you know who is responsible for this global warming? He shakes his head. That answer lies a few pages further into the book. Soon he, and everybody else on this boat, will know it is me - and you.
5. The warming jihad
What happens to a country's mind as it drowns? Professor Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University believes he can glimpse the answer: "The connection between climate change and religious violence is not tenuous," he says. "In fact, there's a historical indicator of how it could unfold: the Little Ice Age."
Between the ninth and 13th centuries, the northern hemisphere went through a natural phase of global warming. The harvests lasted longer - so there were more crops, and more leisure. Universities and the arts began to flower. But then in the late 13th century, the Little Ice Age struck. Crop production fell, and pack ice formed in the oceans, wrecking trade routes. People began to starve.
"In this climate of death and horror, people cast about for scapegoats, even before the Black Death struck," he says. Tolerance withered with the climate shocks: the Church declared witchcraft a heresy; the Jews began to be expelled from Britain. There was, he says, "a very close correlation between the cooling and a region-wide heightening of violent intolerance."
This time, there will be no need for imaginary scapegoats. The people responsible are on every TV screen, revving up their engines. Will jihadism swell with the rising seas? Bangladesh's religion seems to be low-key and local. In the countryside, Muslims - who make up 95 per cent of the nation - still worship Hindu saints and mix in a few Buddhist ideas, too. In the Arab world, people bring up God in almost every sentence. In Bangladesh, nobody does.
But then, as we returned to Dhaka, I was having a casual conversation with Shambrat. He had been driving all night - at his insistence - and by this point he was wired after chewing fistfuls of pan, and singing along at the top of his voice to the Eighties power ballads. I mentioned Osama bin Laden in passing, and he said, "Bin Laden - great man! He fight for Islam!" Then, without looking at me, he went back to singing: "It must have been love, but it's over now...."
I wondered how many Bangladeshis felt this way. The Chandni Chowk Bazaar - one of the city's main markets - was overcast the afternoon I decided to canvass opinions on Bin Laden. I approached a 24-year-old flower-seller called Mohammed Ashid, and as I inhaled the rich sweet scent of roses, he said: "I like him because he is a Muslim and I am a Muslim." Would you like Bin Laden to be in charge of Bangladesh? "Yes, of course," he said. And what would President Bin Laden do? "I have no idea," he shrugged. What would you want him to do? He furrowed his brow. "If Osama came to power he would make women cover up. Women are too free here." But what if women don't want to cover up? "They are Muslims. It's not up to them."
A very smartly dressed man called Shadul Ahmed was strolling down the street to his office, where he is in charge of advertising. "I like him," he said. "Bin Laden works for the Muslims." He conceded 9/11 "was bad because many innocents died," but added: "Osama didn't do it. The Americans did it. They are guilty."
As dozens of people paused from their shopping to talk, a pattern emerged: the men tend to like him, and the women don't. "I hate Bin Laden," one smartly dressed woman said, declining to give her name. "He is a fanatic. Bangladeshis do not like this." As the praise for Bin Laden was offered, I saw a boy go past on a rickshaw, stroking a girl's uncovered hair gently, sensuously. This is not the Arab world.
The only unpleasant moment came when I approached three women selling cigarettes by the side of the road. They were in their early thirties, wearing white hijabs and puffing away. Akli Mouna said, "I like him. He is a faithful Muslim." She said "it would be very nice" if he was president of Bangladesh. Really? Would you be happy if you were forced to wear a burqa, and only rarely allowed out of your house? She jabbed a finger at my chest. "Yes! It would be fine if Osama was president and told us to wear the burqa." But Akli - you aren't wearing a burqa now. "It's good to wear the burqa!" she yelled. Her teeth, I saw, were brown and rotting. "We are only here because we are poor! We should be kept in the house!"
I wanted to track down some Bangladeshi jihadis for myself, so I called the journalist Abu Sufian. He is a news reporter for BanglaVision, one of the main news channels, who made his name penetrating the thickets of the Islamist underground. He told me to meet him at the top of the BanglaVision skyscraper. As the city shrieked below us, he explained: "In the late 1980s, a group of mujahideen [holy warriors] who had been fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan came back to launch an Islamic revolution here in Bangladesh. They tried to mount an armed revolt in the north and kill the former Prime Minister. But it didn't come to much."
Islamic fundamentalism is hobbled in Bangladesh, because it is still associated for most people with Paki-stan - the country Bangladesh fought a bloody war of independence to escape from.
But Sufian says a new generation of Islamists is emerging with no memory of that war. "For example, I met a 21-year-old who had fought in Kashmir, whose father was a rickshaw driver. He said it was his holy duty to establish an Islamic state here through violence. Most were teenagers. All the jihadis I met hated democracy. They said it was the rule of man. According to them, only the rule of God is acceptable."
He said it would be almost impossible to track them down - they are in prison or hiding - but my best bet was to head for the Al-Amin Jami mosque in the north-west of Dhaka. "They are fundamentalist Wahhabis, and very dangerous," he said. Yet when I arrived, just before 6pm prayers, it was a bright building in one of the nicer parts of town. Men in white caps and white robes were streaming in. An ice-cream stall sat outside. I approached a fiftysomething man in flowing robes and designer shoes. He glared at me. I explained I was a journalist, and ask if it would it be possible to look inside the mosque? "No. Under no circumstances. At all."
OK. I asked a few polite questions about Islam, and then asked what he thought of Osama bin Laden. "Osama bin Laden?" he said. Yes. He scowled. "I have never heard of him." Never? "Never." I turned to the man standing, expectantly, next to him. "He has not heard of Osama bin Laden, either," he said. What about September 11 - you know, when the towers in New York fell? "I have never heard of this event, either." Some teenage boys were about to go in, so I approached them. Behind my back, I can sense the Gucci-man making gestures. "Uh... sorry... I don't think anything about Bin Laden," one of them said, awkwardly.
I lingered as prayers took place inside, until a flow of men poured out so thick and fast that they couldn't be instructed not to speak. "Yes, we would like Osama to run Bangladesh, he is a good man," the first person told me. There were nods. "He fights for Islam!" shouted another.
The crowd says this mosque - like most fundamentalist mosques on earth - is funded by Saudi Arabia, with the money you and I pay at the petrol pump. As I looked up at its green minaret jutting into the sky, it occurs to me that our oil purchases are simultaneously drowning Bangladesh, and paying for the victims to be fundamentalised.
After half-an-hour of watching this conversation and fuming, the initially recalcitrant man strode forward. "Why do you want to know about Bin Laden? We are Muslims. You are Christian. We all believe in the same God!" he announced.
Actually, I said, I am not a Christian. There was a hushed pause. "You are... a Jew?" he said. The crowd looked horrified; but then the man forced a rictus smile and announced: "We all believe in one God! We are all children of Abraham! We are cousins!" No, I said. I am an atheist. Everyone looked genuinely puzzled; they do not have a bromide for this occasion. "Well... then..." he paused, scrambling for a statement... "You must convert to Islam! Read the Koran! It is beautiful!" Ah - so can I come into the mosque after all? "No. Never."
6. The obituarist?
In a small café in Dhaka, a cool breeze was blowing in through the window along with the endless traffic-screams. The 32-year-old novelist Tahmima Anam was inhaling the aroma of coffee and close to despair.
She made her name by writing a tender novel - A Golden Age - about the birth of her country, Bangladesh. When the British finally withdrew from this subcontinent in 1948, the land they left behind was partitioned. Two chunks were carved out of India and declared to be a Muslim republic - East Pakistan and West Pakistan. But apart from their religion, they had very little in common. The gentle people of East Pakistan chafed under the dictatorial fundamentalism imposed from distant Islamabad. When they were ordered to start speaking Urdu, it was enough. Her novel tells how in 1971, they decided to declare independence and become Bangladesh. The Pakistanis fought back with staggering violence, but in the end Bangladesh was freed.
Now Anam is realising that unless we change, fast, this fight will have been for the freedom of a drowning land - and her next novel may have to be its obituary.
Anam came to Bangladesh late. Her Dhaka-born parents travelled the world, so she grew up in a slew of international schools, but she always dreamed of coming home. Her passion for this land, this place, this delta, aches through her work. About one of her characters, she wrote: "He had a love for all things Bengali: the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy and the open, aching blue of the sky over flat land."
"You can see what has started to happen," she says. The vision of the country drowning is becoming more real every day. Where could all these 150 million people go? India is already building a border fence to keep them out; I can't imagine the country's other neighbour - Burma - will offer much refuge. "We are the first to be affected, not the last," Anam says. "Everyone should take a good look at Bangladesh. This story will become your story. We are your future."
It is, she says, our responsibility to stop this slow-mo drowning - and there is still time to save most of the country. "What could any Bangladeshi government do? We have virtually no carbon emissions to cut." They currently stand at 0.3 per cent of the world's - less than the island of Manhattan. "It's up to you."
Anam is defiantly optimistic that this change can happen if enough of us work for it - but, like every scientist I spoke to, she knows that dealing with it simply by adaptation by Bangladeshis is impossible. The country has a military-approved dictatorship incapable of taking long-term decisions, and Dutch-style dams won't work anyway. "Any large-scale construction is very hard in this country, because it's all made of shifting silt. There's nothing to build on."
So if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame. "All the people who strain at this country's seams will drown with it," Anam says, "or be blown away to distant shores - casualties and refugees by the millions." The headstone would read, Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water.
Source: The Independent
Submitted by: Zakir Kibria
==============================
24 June 2008
Shrimp exporters yet to reach latent heights
The country's second largest export earner, the shrimp industry, is unable to tap the full potentials of this sector due to a number of problems including a lack of knowledge on global standards, according to a study released yesterday.
"Bangladesh must comply with all the hygiene issues so that the export of shrimps increases. However, it is not an easy job because of the involvement of numerous players," M Asaduzzaman, research director of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), told a seminar in Dhaka yesterday.
The seminar, chaired by BIDS Director General Quazi Shahabuddin, was organised to exhibit the preliminary findings of a study on the country's shrimp industry, which is now affected by falling prices in the global market.
The $45.7 crore worth export earning industry is now facing various compliance issues such as sanitary measures from buyers, especially from the European Union (EU), the main destination of the country's shrimp.
The industry is also facing difficult times in their efforts to export to the US on grounds of child labour. However, the government turned down the charges and said child labour does not exist in the shrimp processing plants.
The industry sprang up over the last three decades on the coastal belt of the country and now employs about 12 lakh people at various stages of production, marketing and processing.
People involved with the sector are less aware of the global standards, especially about sanitary measures, which they have to abide by to woo importers, according to the study.
The study also observed that the shrimp business, despite having the potentials to be highly profitable, is risky due to numerous technical factors, lack of observance of basic hygiene factors and lack of knowledge on world standards.
Risks also arise due to the fragile market linkages between the hatcheries and the 'ghers' (enclosure) and also between the 'ghers' and the processing plants.
The BIDS research director said adequate investments are needed to minimise these risks and to boost the exports. "It will help us attain a competitive edge in the global market," he said.
Syed Ataur Rahman, secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, said the EU is now laying emphasis on issues such as proper laboratory tests, 'Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points' (HACCP) and trace ability, while the US is focusing on workers' rights.
"We have to address all these issues to boost this sector even further," he said.
Source: The Daily Star
Submitted by: Zakir Kibria
zakir.kibria@gmail.com
==============================
14 July 2008
Increased salinity changes vegetation pattern
by Pinaki Roy
Geowa plants are abundant on the banks of Khalsi canal. Most of these species are less than a decade old; many others are growing for only couple of years. Not only geowa, some golpata (nypah) and other saline-tolerant plants are visible here and there along the canal.
The canal is named after Khalsi village in Dakop upazila in Khulna where the residents are mostly Hindus.
During a stroll around the village it was seen geowa is the main tree there. Locals say vegetation pattern of Khalsi has entirely changed in just 20 years. Just two decades ago, like other typical Hindu majority villages, Khalsi was full of Tulsi, joba, sheuli and coconut, banana, mango, wood apple and other fruit trees essential for worshipping the Hindu gods and goddesses.
But now concentration of salt has become so high in the land that only saline tolerant plants can survive it.
"We had 45 coconut trees. But those started dying slowly since saline water entered the village. Now we have some other fruit trees with no produce," said housewife Mira Ray.
During the 80s when shrimp farming was becoming popular, influential people forced small farmers to lease out their land for the venture. A number of the farmers started shrimp farming at will, but many others were forced into the business flooding their cropland with saline water.
Initially, shrimp farming yielded a good profit. But soon it became a losing concern due to virus infection and the farmers realised that producing crops was a better option.
"I remember just immediate before first shrimp farming we got 1,000 mounds of rice from 60 bighas of land. Now our land has increased to 94 bighas and produce comes down to only 100 mounds," said Dr Achintya Bhowmik, principal of a local graduation college.
Krishna Pada Mandal echoed the same. He cultivated rice in 10 bighas and harvested only 11 mounds rice whereas a farmer from saline-free land got over 100 mounds from the same quantity of land.
Now villagers want to get rid of saline water and saline water-based shrimp farming like those of Bazua who have successfully rid their cropland of saline water and are making huge money cultivating rice, watermelon and pumpkin.
But influential shrimp farmers want to continue the business anyhow. The villagers allege an influential businessman from Dhaka is producing shrimp taking lease of their land at Tk 1,000 yearly for per bigha.
The villagers say the businessman cultivates shrimp on only 40 acres of land through irrigating saline water from the Kazibachha river. But about 700 acres of land around is getting increased amount of salinity.
The villagers say local civil and police administration is working for the influential shrimp cultivators, who are also leaders of major political parties. These leaders are filing cases against marginal farmers and police are taking bribe from them, they claim.
A farmer who is protesting against the salinity aggression said if someone wants to cultivate rice in an acre of land, they have to spend Tk 21,000 for power-tiller, Tk 2,400 for seeds, Tk 3,000 for labours and Tk 1,000 for irrigation.
In the end, they will possibly get around 45 mounds of rice from single-crop land which is worth no less than Tk 40,000 at current market price. And in this area farmers can grow three crops annually.
But now farmers who have one acre of land are hardly getting only Tk 5,000-6,000 a year.
SUCCESS OF BAZUA VILLAGE
Locals of Bazua union, just three kilometres down from Khalsi have successfully got rid of saline water and are cultivating crops there. Vegetation pattern is different there as geowa and other saline water varieties are hardly visible.
The farmers in Bazua said they get around Tk 75,000 by selling watermelons in one acre of land in addition to Tk 25,000 from over 30 mounds of rice.
Parimal Mandal from Bazua said they are doing fine cultivating sweet water varieties.
Gouranga Prasad Roy, convener of salt-water prevention committee in Bazua, said the small and landless farmers protested against the shrimp farming.
"Commoners and landless people don't want shrimp farming as it only makes the rich people richer. But by cultivating watermelon and rice the marginal farmers are making some money themselves."
Source: The Daily Star
==============================
India
8 July 2008
Mangroves: 3,000 hectares notified as 'protected forests'
by Nitya Kaushik
Mumbai. The state government has notified over 3,000 hectares of mangroves in and around Mumbai as 'protected forests'.
The new notification, issued last week, covers the mangroves in the Borivali, Andheri and Kurla talukas as well as parts of Colaba, a senior official from the Forest Department said.
According to J P Dange, additional chief secretary (revenue and forests): "We have acted on a High Court ruling which ordered mapping and notification of mangroves in the state. Last year, we notified about 2,157 hectares. Now, 3,431 hectares have been added to it."
With this, notification of 5,589 hectares of the 6,000 hectares of mangroves identified in Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai has been completed.
Vivek Kulkarni, mangrove expert and member of NGO Conservation Action Trust (CAT), said: "This was a long pending issue and the new notification is a welcome move. With this, nearly 90 per cent of the mangroves in the extended city have been notified. However, the ruling was for the protection of mangroves in the entire state and that mammoth job is still pending."
Kulkarni pointed out that not notifying mangroves along the state's coastline has already caused much harm to the valuable mangroves. "Along the Malvan coast, mangrove land is being sold by builders at Rs 7-8 lakh per acre today. A few years ago it was barely Rs 7,000-8,000 per acre," he said.
In October 2005, in response to a PIL filed by Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG), the High Court had ordered "a total freeze on the destruction and cutting of mangroves in Maharashtra".
The court ruled that the mangroves be mapped and notified as "protected forests" within a deadline of eight months. The government was asked to hand over its land to the Forest Department by August 2006.
Confirming the notification, Dr P N Munde, Conservator of Forests, Sanjay Gandhi National Park, said, "All these government-owned mangrove lands will now be protected by the forest department."
Source: Express India
==============================
Pakistan
8 July 2008
Mafia poses threat to mangroves
By Shafi Baloch
KARACHI - The Coastal-line of Sindh is suffering from environmental threats as thousands of tons of mangroves have been cut within only few weeks in several parts of Hawks Bay while the land grabbers have occupied large tracts of land particularly on Sandspit Road, Fisheries Goth, Yoususabad and other parts of the coastline in the metropolis, The Nation learnt in a survey conducted on Monday.
The survey revealed that mafias have occupied major parts of land in the coastal belt. In connivance with the government and authorities concerned, the land grabbers managed to continue their illegal activities in Hawks Bay and cut down mangroves.
Despite receiving huge funds from foreign donor agencies to save the mangroves, local NGOs have failed to protect these natural assets. Similarly, the government agencies have not taken any initiative in this regard. Similar situation has also been observed in various parts of coastal belt in Sindh and Balochistan.
During the survey, several residents told the land mafias have been operating here without any restriction from the police and other concerned departments
They further revealed that at first the land grabbers occupy the land then legalise it with the help of high officials of concerned departments.
Pakistan is heavily dependent on these mangrove forests to maintain the ecological balance. For example, the mangrove leaf litter provides a major source of nutrients. The mangroves provide a diverse habitat for a complex and interdependent community of invertebrates, fish, birds, and reptiles; and the primary productivity of these mangrove-covered deltaic areas are four to seven times those of coastal areas without mangroves.
A global concern is that the South Asian waterfowl seek food and shelter in these estuaries and mangroves. In addition, most of the tropical marine such as the commercially important shrimp species seek shelter in the mangroves for one stage of their life cycles. The shipping industry, through its discharges, water pollution, and possible leakages and spills, impacts on this environment. Mangroves are inter-tidal forests with great economic and ecological significance. The mangrove conservation efforts in Karachi provide another illustration of sustainable community development. Mangroves represent a unique type of ecosystem mostly found in salty habitats.
Hundred of thousands people in Karachi depend on the mangroves for their livelihood. For villages surrounding the forests, the mangroves provide food, fodder and fuel-wood. Mangrove forests also provide protection to the coastal areas from strong winds and ocean currents. Their vegetation also helps in reducing coastline erosion because the roots collect sediments that flow into the sea from the river.
Over the past several years, the degradation of Pakistan's mangroves has occurred at the rate of 6 per cent per annum. As a result, only 16 per cent of Pakistan's mangroves are thought to be healthy. The most harmful environmental stress that the mangroves face today derives largely from human activity. The steady growth of a major industrial city within the vicinity, the untreated sewage and industrial discharge, the increase in the demand for fuel wood, overgrazing and over-exploitation of resources are just a few of the strains on the mangrove's ecosystem.
The reduction of incoming freshwater flows also threatens the survival of the mangrove ecosystem. Recently, The World Bank proposed that the mangrove area become a national park, and a foreigner NGO asked that the area be designated a biosphere reserve. The biosphere reserve may serve to protect and contribute to the conservation of the area as well as foster economic and human development, enabling the communities to manage the natural resources themselves and ensure sustainability. Because of the high dependence of villagers on the mangrove resources, these proposals do not seem very practical to many.
Presently, there are three government bodies - the Sindh Forest Department, the Port Qasim Authority and the Board of Revenue - that control and manage different areas of the mangroves.
Source: The Nation
==================================
13 July 2008
Sindh: Karachi Being Rapidly Stripped of Mangrove Cover
Over a month after the declared protection of mangrove forests in the Indus delta, rapid depletion continues to affect local populations.
KARACHI: Large tracts of mangrove forests under the control of multiple agencies - the Port Qasim Authority, Karachi Port Trust and Defence Housing Authority - in the Korangi Creek system have been cut and stand denuded from inside and the process continues at a fast pace in broad daylight, a survey of the affected areas revealed.
It has been over a month that the government decided in principle to declare all mangrove forests in the Indus delta protected, though a notification has not been released so far. At present, only those forests under the supervision of the Sindh forest department have the 'protected' status, while the rest are under the control of multiple organizations, which have not shown much regard to the valuable marine resource over the decades.
Taking advantage of the situation, the timber mafia, allegedly in connivance with government officials, is rapidly stripping the mangrove cover, which acts not only as a natural barrier against tsunamis and cyclones but also as a nursery for fish and shrimps. Karachi, however, is fast losing the natural resource.
Dawn's team visited the mangroves in the Korangi Creek system, off Rehri Goth and Lat Basti, and the area behind the PAF Korangi base, where it was observed that the forests, which looked dense from a distance, were in fact hollow from the inside where large tracts of trees had been cut.
"Around 10 to 12 donkey carts loaded with logs leave this place daily whereas their number is larger at the other end of the forest," said a man sitting on his donkey-cart in the area behind the PAF Korangi base.
Each donkey cart, he said, was shared by two to three entrepreneurs who earned Rs700 to Rs800 daily from the business. The logs sold to factories were reportedly used for making different low-cost wooden materials and also as fuel.
"The activity has increased in recent months due to a drastic increase in fuel prices. The logs are sold for Rs120 to Rs130 per maund. The business is being carried out in collusion with government officials," alleged Abdullah, working with the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum. The area with mangroves behind the PAF Korangi base is guarded by two private security personnel and reportedly planned to be sold.
About the jurisdiction under which these areas fall, Tahir Qureshi of the IUCN, who has been working on Sindh's mangroves for 20 years said: "The part of the area behind the PAF Korangi base falls under the administrative control of the DHA, the area behind Baba Bhit Island is under the Karachi Port Trust, while the area in front of Rehri Goth and Lat Basti is under the jurisdiction of the Port Qasim Authority."
Too many cooks
The same facts have been stated in a report, "The mangroves of Pakistan, status and management," which Mr Qureshi authored with the support of the Asian Development Bank, the ministry of environment and the Sindh forest department in 2003. "Lack of a single authority and uniform legislation is a major threat to the existence of mangroves. Multiple agencies exercise control over these forests, but nobody is ready to take responsibility. There are also areas which are free-for-all," he remarked.
The forest department had transferred the area to the Port Qasim Authority for the construction of the port in 1972. However, it didn't de-notify the status of mangroves and they still enjoy the same protected status.
Upon contact, the DHA's PRO Colonel Riffat Naqvi denied this statement and said: "No mangroves fall under the jurisdiction of the DHA. We posses only land and have no claims over the Korangi Creek and the plantation therein."
Shoddy surveillance
Dawn's team also spotted two forest personnel roaming around to check illegal cutting of mangroves. One of them was a retired employee while the other, Haji Nisar Ahmed, was in his late 60s. He said he was posted there to keep watch in the areas from Ibrahim Hyderi to Shah Bander. Though he had a motorcycle unlike his two subordinates, who were on foot, the forest department had not issued any weapon to him.
When asked why he was not going to the area where mangroves were being illegally chopped off, he said: "We are ordered to fine those who bring logs and transport them. How can we go inside without any weapon? These men have axes and can attack us. I also bear petrol expenses myself."
Coastal Divisional Forest Officer Tahir Durrani admitted that the department faced a lack of manpower and resources, but contended that the best was being done and a lot of efforts were being made to improve mangrove plantation.
"The forests under the control of the forest department are protected under the 1958 notification that entitled them to a certain status and as such, their commercial harvesting is banned. However, these laws are not applied to areas which don't come under our jurisdiction," he said, adding that a formal notification to declare all mangrove forests 'protected' without challenging land ownership is awaited, after which the forest department would provide technical expertise for conservation to the organizations concerned.
Large-scale destruction of mangrove forests is also being carried out in the area behind Baba Bhit Island, according to area residents who have lodged many complaints with the forest department and other officials concerned.
About the destruction of mangrove forests in the Baba Bhit Island area, Mohammad Hussain, a social activist, said big wood godowns had been set up in Machchar Colony from where people came in boats daily to cut trees. "Tons of logs are being taken away. Though the business has been going on for ages, it has developed on a mass scale during the last year-and-a-half. All this is happening despite the fact that the KPT's pollution control offices are located nearby. With the help of some colleagues, I caught some thieves, but they were later released by the police on the pretext that no law exists to punish such offenders," he added.
Source: Dawn.com
Brazil
22 July 2008
Let's Celebrate the Mangroves?!
26 July: International Day in Defense of the Mangrove Ecosystem
Planned by environmental movements and communities of Ceara State, Brazil
PROGRAM
Mangrove Communities in the struggle for Environmental Justice
Date: 25 July 2008
Delivery of solicitation for recuperation of areas degraded by shrimp farming
Time: 9am
Place: MPF - Defense of Citizen Nucleus - Fortaleza
Contact: Rodrigo Medeiros (85)91975319
Community of Cumbe, Aracati
Mangroves, cradle of life
Date: 21-26 July 2008
Place: Silverio Filho Elementary School
- Drawing and painting workshops
- Video screenings
- Ecological walks in the mangroves and archeological sites
- Garbage collection in the mangroves
- Cultural presentations
Community of Curral Velho, Acarau
Tourism Day in the Mangroves
Date: 26 July 2008
Place: Center of Environmental Education and Community Tourism
- Ecological walks
- Boat trips
- Art-education workshops
- Video Screenings
- Poetry readings
Contact: Vanilson (88) 3674-5094
Community of Barra do Rio Curu, Paracuru
Fishing for Information and Celebration of World Mangrove Day
Date: 25-26 July 2008
Place: Shores of the Rio Curu Estuary
- "Fishing for Information" workshop
- Photography Exposition "Fisherfolk of Barra"
- Opening of exposition "Mangroves - Peoples and Seas"
- Cast-netting competition
- Garbage collection in the mangroves
- Distribution of educational materials
- Mangrove walks
Natural Mangrove Museum of Sabiaguaba, Fortaleza
Date: 23-27 July 2008
- Exposition of mobile mangrove museum
- Canoeing workshop in Messejana and Maraponga lagoon
- Meeting of friends of the natural mangrove museum of Sabiaguaba with ecological walks and mangrove reforestation.
Movement of Popular Councils, Fortaleza
2nd Mangrove Action in Agua Fria Park
Date: 26 July 2008
Place: Ze do Mangue - Av. Edilson Brasil Soares
Time: 7am