COMMUNITY MANGROVE MANAGEMENT IN THAILAND
(Prepared by Amanda Suutari)
Three decades ago, coastal fishing villages were being assaulted on all sides from trawlers trespassing into their fishery, and from charcoal concessionaires clearing their mangrove forests. As catches fell, desperate fishers were drawn into further impacting their fishery by using destructive fishing methods and gear, by working on trawlers or by clearing the remaining mangroves. Yadfon, a small development organization began working with villagers to protect their mangrove forests, which triggered a regeneration of their society, economy and fishery.
Overview:
Sometimes called ‘rainforests by the sea’, mangroves cover one-quarter of the world’s tropical and subtropical (between 32 degrees north and 38 degrees south) coastline, which is between 190 and 240 thousand square kilometers in 117 countries and territories in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Indonesia has the largest area of mangrove forests, followed by Nigeria, Australia, Mexico and Malaysia.
These diverse ecosystems occupy two worlds and are the interface between land and sea, thriving normally in brackish inter-tidal zones of sheltered tropical shores, estuaries, river mouths, and fringing riverbanks deep inland. Ranging in size and species from small bushes to trees up to forty meters high (there are some 70 species of mangrove in the region where this case is located), mangroves’ specially adapted aerial roots which filter salt (that is then excreted by the leaves), they are able to colonize saline wetlands where other life doesn’t survive.
Mangroves are important to humans in fundamental ways. First, they are vital for healthy coastal ecosystems which in turn support healthy fisheries. The fallen leaves and branches provides nutrients for the marine environment and supports a large variety of marine and terrestrial life. They are refuges and nurseries for juvenile fish, crabs, shrimp, and mollusks. They, and the flora found in mangrove forests, are prime nesting sites for migratory birds, and home to other species such as monkeys, sea turtles, mudskippers and monitor lizards.
An important function of mangroves is that they increase the resilience of coasts, protecting them from erosion, tropical storms or tidal waves, and trap sediment from land which protects seagrass beds and coral reefs from siltation. They co-exist with a wide variety of plant life and function as a ‘supermarket’ which provides necessary materials to those who depend on them, such as fruits, honey, other foods, fuelwood, medicinal plants and construction material.
But mangroves are among the most threatened habitats in the world, and their rate of disappearance is accelerating due to conversion of coastal lands for development, charcoal production, tourism, or the controversial practice of shrimp aquaculture (see below). From 1975 to 1993, its estimated that about half of Thailand’s mangroves along its 2,560 kilometer coastline have been lost.
The Setting:
Trang is one of 76 provinces in Thailand, with 190 kilometers of coastline along the AndamanSea, and includes 46 islands offshore.
Its coasts are home to 65,000 fishing households. The inland region is mostly hilly, with the Khao Luang and Banthat mountain ranges the sources of its two major rivers, the Trang (125 km long) and the Paliam (58 km long), both of which drain into the Andaman sea.
Trang is located in the middle of southern Thailand. Nearly all of its Muslim population is concentrated in the southern provinces.Since 2004, the southernmost region, part of which borders Trang to the north, has seen a revival of Muslim insurgency which began in the 1970s and died down in the 1990s. The movement has links to some of the larger Muslim separatist groups such as Jemaah Islamiah and the Free Aceh Movement. Thailand’s Muslim minority often complains of discrimination and lack of opportunities, less access to education and basic services. 20 % of Trang province’s population is Muslim, but the fishing villages where Yadfon works are 80% Muslim.
The Narrative:
In Trang province, most of the Muslim population were in the fishing villages of the Sikao and Kantang districts along the coast. Up until the 1960s, these villages mainly subsisted on their once- rich coastal fisheries and other activities such as rubber tapping. There is some herding, such as goats or cows. They depended on the mangrove forests for medicinal plants, and materials such as thatch for housing and fishing gear. However, in the 1960s, the mechanization of fishing set into motion a broad range of effects which seriously undermined the villages’ natural and social capital. When large trawlers began fishing on the coasts of southern Thailand, they violated the 3km coastal zone where the villagers fished. Their fishing gear and destructive methods damaged coral, scraped the seabed, and cleared out young fish which had not yet reproduced. But villagers were afraid to confront trawlers, given their powerful government (or mafia) connections.
At the same time, mangrove forests were opened up to concessionaires who began clearing them to make charcoal briquettes for barbecues. (While the Forestry Act had granted the private sector the right to log mangroves since 1941, in 1968, the concession system allowed concessionaires the right to harvest an area of 2,500-5,000 rai-see conversions below-of mangrove forest each year. The method stipulated by the government was that one strip was clear-cut, replanted, and the next year a new strip would be logged and replanted, and so on. In reality this was not followed and usually the entire concession would be logged immediately.) This not only denied villagers of the benefits of their common resources, but also left them with the costs of their decimation.
Meanwhile, some of the poorest villagers saw no other option than to accept low-paid jobs cutting mangroves for concessionaires or on commercial trawlers. This in effect drove them to destroying their own resource base while remaining dependent (and exploited by) those responsible for the destruction in the first place. Villagers also began clearing the mangroves themselves, with the attitude that ‘if I don’t cut them, someone else will’. This offers insight into one reason why subsistence communities destroy their own resource base. Because the clearing eroded their subsistence economy, the villagers became dependent on cash, which they looked for through two sources: either by working for the concessionaires, or by illegally logging the forests themselves. While they knew that what they were doing was clearly suicidal, the logic was something like, ‘why should they profit off our trees instead of us?’ or, ‘we should sell these remaining forests before they do’.
Women began to look for unskilled, low-paid work in factories, leaving children behind with aging grandparents in the village, further undermining the social fabric. As the fisheries declined, fishers had to go further out to find fish, spent more hours in their boats, and resorted to more destructive methods to find dwindling numbers of fish, such as the use of dynamite, cyanide and pushnets (large nets attached by long poles at the bow of the boat, which, as the boats moved forward, scraped the ocean floor, damaging sea grass beds, coral reefs and other marine habitats). Moreover, to ‘keep up’, fishers faced the added burden of investing in higher-cost fishing gear in order to ‘keep up’ with others in the race for dwindling fish. Some began selling off land. In effect, these coastal communities were caught in a trap where day-to-day survival strategies eliminated or reduced their future options, and the result was a self-reinforcing downward spiral into increasing poverty, and social and environmental degradation.
Yadfon’s Intervention
In 1985, Pisit Charnsnoh, and his Ploenjai founded a small organization called Yadfon (which means ‘raindrop’ in Thai) which would work with impoverished coastal villagers in the province. Through their earlier work in various rural development projects, Charnsnoh noticed that the richer Thailand became, the more poverty increased.
They first visited the village of Ban (which means ‘village’ in Thai) Leam Markham in the Muang district, talking to the local imam, the Muslim religious leader known as Bu Nuansri, and the villagers over the next few months. Conversations with villagers led them to identify a few things that were badly needed. Since they were affected by droughts in the dry season, a plan was made to dig a community well, where YF provided the cement and other cheap materials while villagers made the design and provided the labor. Another activity which was set up by Yadfon and villagers were the creation of a cooperative buying program. This helped the fishers to buy fishing gear and engines for their boats, sell their daily catch at fair market prices, and reduced their dependence on middlemen where before they had to trade fish to pay off debts owed to middlemen (who inevitably set the prices lower than fair market value).
Another financial project was a revolving fund which was available to the poorest, most indebted villagers who would get small interest-free loans as a jumpstart. The rate of repayment is high at 80%. This helped them to set up small income generation projects such as small-scale aquaculture such as cultivating mussels, oysters, and grouper in small floating pens. The increase in income was an incentive for beneficiaries to contribute part of their profits to common village funds. While some of these projects brought mixed results, the importance of these experiments was the emergence of leaders in the villages, which was to become more important for later projects.
While these activities were being set up, villagers came up with the idea of reviving the badly degraded mangrove forests around the villages of Leam Markham and Thung Dase. In 1986, with Yadfon staff as the go-between the villages and the Provincial forestry authorities (whose permission was needed before creating a community managed forest). A group of villages led by Bo Nuasri, established 95 hectares of community forest which covered Leam Markham and neighboring villages to create a 235-acre community-managed forest and sea-grass conservation zone, which was the first of its kind in Thailand. Boundaries of the zones were clearly marked on signs. No-fishing areas were created, and the practice of cyanide and dynamite were discouraged and pushnets banned. The network also petitioned the government to enforce the 3-km ban on trawlers. Sea grass was replanted in the lagoon, and mangrove seedlings were planted in degraded areas of the forest. The boundaries of the forest were clearly marked, and zones were divided up for different uses. During this time an inter-village network also emerged, who began meeting, sharing information and exchanging ideas.
Community mangrove forests (CMFs) are the cornerstone of Yadfon’s work with villages. Today, there are about ten CMFs modeled after Leam Markham, ranging in size from 12 to 700 hectares. Each forest is managed by the group of villages surrounding or depending on the forest. There are some 10-20 people on community forest managing committees, representing 80-200 families (villages range in size from 600-1500 people). While each forest has its own rules of management, not one of them allows shrimp farms within forest boundaries because there is general agreement that shrimp farms are dangerous to the mangroves (but in the government-managed forests, there are many shrimp ponds). Over the years, the forests have begun regenerating, and the coastal water have seen a revival of the fishery (see more on the negative and positive tips below). Villages who are already managing CMFs have been active in advising those villages with newer forests or those who want to create one.
Seagrass beds:
Southern Thailand’s sunny, clear, inshore waters beyond the mangrove zone are ideal conditions for the lush seagrass which were ‘pastures’ for fish, crabs, prawns, molluscs, and most importantly, dugongs. The dugong was once abundant in these large expanses of seagrass along Thailand’s southern shores, until pushnets and intrusion by trawlers began to damage the ocean floor. Meanwhile, gill nets, pollution, noise, and habitat destruction have been blamed for the 75 dead dugongs which washed onto the districts’ shores between 1979 and 1998. When a dugong began to frequent the coastal waters along the regenerated sea grass bed of Ban Chao Mai village in 1995, it caused a stir in the media as live dugongs had not been seen in a long time, and most young people had never seen one. The dugong, nicknamed Tone, being from a popular, ‘cute’ species, was instrumental in consolidating government support for the seagrass protections zones (which Pisit says are mainly protected by the government regulation in combination with village cooperation). For Yadfon, the dugong became a flagship for conservation in the area, and in Trang the dugong image can be seen on municipal property such as garbage cans.
Other Yadfon Projects:
Education:
Yadfon puts heavy emphasis on education, not only with children but also adults, with the latter being a cooperative learning process. One example of education with villagers uses large, laminated photos of various plants found in the mangrove ecosystem. They show them to villagers, find out how much they know about them, offer whatever information YF has about them, hear about what the villagers know about it (not necessarily in that order), about their uses, benefits, where they are found, and most importantly, their status. (Are they increasing? Decreasing? If so, why?) In this process, villagers may develop their own insights about disappearing resources, or rebounding ones, and how they connect these changes to activities in the village or outside of them. This is a more powerful and participatory process as opposed to being lectured by outsiders telling them, ‘this or that species is disappearing, you have to protect it.’
School children are very much involved with the conservation process, and teachers do projects with them surveying documenting the species of flora in the mangrove forests, and marking certain areas to record changes over time. Schools are one focal point of community events, and sometimes schoolchildren participate in planting seedlings.
Income generation:
Some village women’s groups have begun income generation projects making handicrafts such as baskets, purses, spectacle cases using forest products. Some of these products are sold through Yadfon’s channels (see photos). This has not only been incentive to preserve the forest products but also to strengthen the local handicraft and artisanal traditions. In almost every village which has worked with Yadfon, there is a women’s cooperative which is active in generating funds to supplement household incomes or providing insurance during the monsoon when fishers cannot go out in their boats.
Extension work: As YF worked on coastal regions, it began to realize that what happened inland in the mountains, forests, fresh and brackish wetlands also affected the coasts. They slowly began moving upstream, particularly with preserving watersheds, and various species such as the nypa (whose leaves are used to roll cigarettes) and sago palm (an ecosystem dominant in brackish wetlands), which is an important food source, a material for roof thatch, and an important forest covering for water catchments.
Scaling up: (Regional, National, Global):
While Yadfon is small and focuses on the local region, it has been active at the national policy level, and in the international movement to preserve mangroves and stop shrimp farming. One of its most pressing political campaigns is to lobby for the Community Forest Act, which grants rights of villagers who properly manage their lands, even if it is on national parks, to continue to live and harvest their livelihood there. Public forums have been held around the country, and the act was written up by farmers and fishers around the country with support of Yadfon and other organizations. When it was brought to parliament, the Act was unanimously accepted by the lower house. But when it was sent to the upper house, amendments were made which were deemed unacceptable to many of the act’s writers as it shifted power away from the user groups. The lower house held its ground and refused the changes. A compromise is currently under negotiations.
In 1992, Yadfon co-founded the Mangrove Action Project, an international network of some 800 conservation groups and academics from 60 countries working to conserve and promote mangrove conservation. It also co-founded the Industrial Shrimp Action Network, which educates consumers of the impact of the shrimp market on poor fishing communities around the world.
Community Dynamics:
An important by-product of creating the community forests and related projects is transformation of the formerly passive, apathetic attitude among villagers who had forgotten traditional ways of working together. Through the process, villagers are (re)discovering a newfound sense of engagement, solidarity, and confidence.
In a report on Yadfon on the Mangrove Action Project website (www.map.org), Pisit cites that locals have knowledge, but no opportunities to share it. Moreover, they may not have a sense that their problems are actually a symptom of much larger changes affecting not only fishing villagers in the region, but other regions and countries. They don’t know that these are shared problems until they sit down together to discuss it.
As the unity of villagers developed, leaders began to emerge, and the talents of others began to ‘shine’, and the situation gave them the confidence and opportunity to develop them further.
Successes have given villagers confidence that they have the power to help themselves instead of perceiving themselves as victims of an unfair system, waiting for the government to rescue them from their lot. Shared successes has motivated villagers to seek other creative ways to improve their lives. Investing their time in building assets as a group has given them a sense of ownership, and therefore incentive to band together to protect these shared assets from outside interests. Fishers have begun confronting trawlers who violate the 3km coastal zone, something they never did before. When a local corporation spilled poisonous palm oil into a local waterway, killing a large number of fish, villagers took the issue to provincial authorities, recorded information about the spill, such as fish mortalities, and brought this evidence, along with photos to provincial authorities. Eventually the company was forced to pay compensation to 100 families for the loss of the fish.
Normally, 40-60% of villagers participate in projects, but this is enough to generate results, especially when considering that less than half of the population votes, and when one considers that normally democracy does not need the involvement of 100% of the population to sustain itself).
The Feedback Loops and Transition from Vicious to Virtuous Cycle:
The exact chronological chain of events is not clear, but the tipping point appears to be the creation of the mangrove forests. This was part of a larger goal to improve the lives of fishers through reviving the coastal fisheries of which the mangroves and seagrass beds were an integral part.
The negative tips were the invasion of commercial interests in communal resources, ie the mechanization of fishing and the charcoal concessionaires in mangrove forests, both of which seemed to have happened fairly simultaneously. The destruction of mangroves and the incursion of large trawlers into their fishing areas caused the number and variety of fish to decrease. To compensate for this, fishers began using more destructive fishing methods, spending more time on the water, and going out further. Dynamite, cyanide and pushnets further damaged the coral reefs and seagrass beds which marine animals needed to survive. Loss of mangroves also opened the coral reefs and seagrass beds to erosion and siltation.
The economy began to change from subsistence to cash-dependent. People went out of the villages to find work as day laborers, in factories, large trawlers, or on concessions cutting mangroves. This, plus the reduced amount of time fishers were spending in the villages, had a negative impact on the social and cultural fabric. Increasingly impoverished villagers lost their sense of control and shared ownership over the mangroves, and clearing them was a way for them to get income before any outsiders did. When villages began creating community mangrove forests and seagrass beds, the web of effects were in large part a reversal of the negative tip. The fisheries began to recover. A study frequently cited in some of the articles I found (sourced below) found that for a target group of 500 families, from1991-1994, the total catch rose by 40%, and fishers spent 3-4 hours fewer in their boats and not going out as far, and their net income increased by 200%. By spending less time in their boats, they are saving on gas. Using simple wooden traps or nets, children can catch crabs in the mangroves and earn 250-300 baht in an afternoon, which was once a day’s earnings cutting mangrove trees. They can also collect clams at 1 baht per clam. In the past, a day’s work cutting down mangroves would earn 120 baht. This means they could make more money fishing or catching crabs or clams than if they worked for concessionaires.
The regenerated seagrass beds attracted a threatened species, which became a symbol for coastal conservation in Thailand and attracted needed media attention to the work of the villagers and Yadfon. (It should be noted that there has been no evidence that the numbers of dugong have risen, because there is no baseline data on numbers before YF began working in the region). Unity among villagers increased not only because urban migration was reduced but because villagers had learned about how to work together, how to take control over their fate, and more importantly, how to stand up to the commercial interests from outside. While these interests might be even stronger today than twenty years ago (because of the acceleration of the forces driving ‘development’ and globalization, and possibly because the increased richness of their fishery attracting trawlers), villagers are also better equipped to protect their shared assets because they have invested their time and energy regenerating them. While villagers associated with Yadfon have not completely resisted the allure of shrimp farming, they do not allow farms inside their community mangrove forests. As the work of the villagers became publicized and Yadfon’s profile increased, visitors, either media, village representatives, other NGOs or government officials, have come to visit the villages, which has emboldened villagers, bolstered their pride and strengthened their resolve.
Shrimp Farming:
Known as ‘pink gold’, shrimp farming is the ultimate ‘boom and bust’ economic activity. It receive active support from various multilateral aid and lending agencies, despite the fact that the activity rarely meets their own stated ecological and social standards. It is a gambler’s dream: while it bring high returns in the beginning (largely because initial inputs such as chemicals, feed, energy, and water are subsidized), as time goes on, mounting contamination of the soil, increasing costs and diminishing returns forces farmers to abandon the ponds after a few years and move to pristine coastline elsewhere, leaving behind a land and fishery which may take years to recover, if ever.
A fundamental problem is that shrimp farming is an activity still in its research and design phase that has been prematurely introduced on an industrial scale. They rarely generate large benefits for local communities who bear disproportionate environmental and social costs. Shrimp aquaculture is water-intensive, often diverting freshwater supplies from neighboring villages, while the ponds’ effluent, laden with salt and chemical sludge(from fertilizer, antibiotics, larvicides, shrimp feed and excrement) is discharged into the rich brackish water ecosystem where the mangroves grow, impacting the fisheries on which the communities depend. Eventually, the area becomes so contaminated that after a few years the ponds self-destruct, leaving the environment, and the villagers, worse off than before. Most shrimp farms follow this pattern of serial degradation all over the coasts of South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and recently Africa.
While it is widely recognized that mangrove forest soil is too acidic for farming, the mangroves themselves are good filters for wastewater, which is why many farms are located just behind them. Recently government attitudes are recognizing the value of mangroves, especially since the tsunami last year, where the devastation on more heavily forested coastlines was much less severe than on coasts which had been cleared. Still, mangrove forests are still seen as dispensable wastelands ripe for conversion to make way for the exploding industry. Global shrimp production has risen from 26 thousand tonnes in the 1970s to 100,000 tonnes in the 1980s to over 700,000 tonnes in 1995. Japan’s import of shrimp has risen from 29% in 1981 to 46% in 1991. Thailand is the world’s biggest farmed shrimp exporter, with one in three originating from the Kingdom. The US and Japan are the biggest importers taking two-thirds of the global market share, the remainder divided up between other foreign markets and luxury domestic markets.
In 1999, a team led by economist Suthawan Sathirathai did a study on a coastal village in Surathani province, southern Thailand, to compare the monetary value of mangroves versus shrimp farms. It found, using conventional measures with only cash values for products, that shrimp farms brought higher returns, at US$ 3,734 per rai for the latter and $ 666 for the former. However, when bringing in the indirect value of mangrove, assigning monetary value to services such as nurseries, protection of erosion and storms, (and assuming two things: a five-year time horizon of shrimp farms before profits began to fall, and that replanting must wait for 15 years), the value of the mangrove forest rises to $ 5,771 eclipsing shrimp aquaculture by nearly double.
Also not included in these figures are the social costs and the human rights issues. Incidents of displacement–sometimes forcible–of coastal fishing communities to make way for farms, are widely documented. More vocal opponents of the practice have been threatened and even killed by agents of the owners. Lastly, there are health concerns for the consumer who may be affected by the presence of antibiotics and other chemicals in the farmed shrimp.
Yadfon has campaigned about shrimp farming through the International Shrimp Action Network. Unfortunately, Pisit says, many forces are feeding the expansion of the industry, including pressure on developing nation governments to get foreign exchange and open up markets, on impoverished villagers to lease or sell off land to companies, and the lack of legal protection of land rights. Many villages Yadfon works with do have some shrimp ponds, much of which is on land owned (or claimed by) the government. Fortunately, creating CMFs has helped to keep shrimp ponds out of the mangrove forests, locating them slightly inland, with effluent being dumped into a second ‘holding tank’ for at least two weeks before being dumped into the canal (which drains into mangrove lined canals eventually into the coastal waters). While this still has impacts on the ecosystem, this is far less destructive than clearing mangroves to make ponds directly on the coastal waters.
****1 hectare=6.2 rai, or 2.5 rai=1 acre
Sources:
Barbier, Edward B. And Suthawan Sathirathai. “Shrimp Farming and Mangrove Loss in Thailand”, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., UK, 2004.
Martinez-Alier, Joan. “Ecological Conflicts and Valuation: Mangroves vs Shrimp in the late 1990s”. Research paper. Department of Economics and Economic History, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2001.
Berlin Snell, Marylin. “No Empty Boats: A Thai conservationist helps fishermen prosper.” Sierra Magazine, January/February 2003, pp. 16-20.
Ong Ju Lynn. “One With Mother Nature.” The Star Online: Malaysia News. September 2, 2003.
Cunningham, Susan. “A Raindrop Cleans the Wetlands.” Changemakers Journal Archives, 1998. http://www.changemakers.net/journal/98october/cunningham.cfm
Quarto, Alfredo. “Local Community Involvement in Mangrove Rehabilitation: Thailand’s Yadfon.” (From W. Streever, ed. “An International Perspective on Wetland Rehabilitation”.pp. 139-142. Kluwer Academic Publishers, the Netherlands, 1999.)
Yadfon staff, including Pisit and Ploenjai Charsnoh, and Kowit Pongchabapnapa
มูลนิธิหยาดฝน จ.ตรัง (สมาคมหยาดฝน) 