By Salman Rashid*
For years the people of Sonmiani Bay in Pakistan have lived off the
shrimp harvest and the mangrove forest but only now are they learning
that the decline of one is related to the destruction of the other.
Lahore, Pakistan: There are 62 species of mangrove in the world and
Pakistan boasts eight of them. Once they were in vast forests along the
coastline but today there are just a few dwindling pockets, thanks to
years of thoughtless exploitation and, more recently, the destruction of
habitats.
The mangrove is an extremely useful tree. Its luxurious foliage makes
excellent fodder, the bark yields tannin and the wood provides not only
fuel but also - because it is termite-resistant, excellent construction
material. Hardly surprising, then, that Pakistan's mangrove forests have
been plundered.
But that is not the only reason for the disappearance of large swathes of
forest. Mangroves can tolerate only a certain amount of salinity, so they
favour mudflats by river mouths. In recent years, the flow of fresh water
into the sea has been increasingly restricted by dams and irrigation
schemes, so a build-up of salinity has slowly depleted the forests -
with further damage arising from growing amounts of domestic and
industrial waste.
But while environmentalists noted the decline with deepening concern,
the communities that benefited from the mangroves saw no cause for
alarm. The trees were the gift of God and, no matter how ruthlessly they
were they exploited, they would always renew themselves. Little did
they realise that the decrease in their shrimp harvest resulted largely
from to the destruction of the mangroves, whose tangled roots served
as nurseries for shrimps, crabs, and several species of fish.
Then, two years ago, WWF-World Wide Fund For Nature-Pakistan began
a project to preserve mangroves. It identified Sonmiani Bay, just over an
hour's drive north of Karachi, as a prime site because it contains three of
Pakistan's eight species: Avicennia marina, Ceriops tagal, and
Rhizophora mucronata.
At first the local community was unwilling to participate in an apparently
meaningless scheme, but the local schoolmaster, Gul Mohammed,
understood the project team's message and offered his otaq, a sort of
meeting-house for men, as the WWF field office. Thus began an informal
cycle of education in the otaqs and tea shops of the area.
Before long mangrove nurseries began to be established. The seedlings
germinate on the mother plant, and when they are about 20-25 cm long,
they drop off and take root in the soft mud below. This works well on
ebb tide when the mud is exposed, but seedlings falling during high tide
are nearly always destroyed. At high tide, however, seed harvesting
could be done with nets and the nurseries were soon flourishing.
By June 1996 the first seedlings were being transplanted on two sites in
40 hectares of bog. Most survived and today two clumps of healthy
mangrove trees, barely above a metre in height, are evidence of
success.
Meanwhile, the education programme continues. When signs were
erected reading, 'Grow mangrove, harvest shrimp', few locals saw the
connection, but today the relationship is widely understood and WWF
hopes to rehabilitate an additional 100 hectares of forest. Even that is
only a beginning, though. With full participation of a community converted
to the idea of sustainable use, the plan is to bring 700 hectares of
mangrove under management in Sonmiani Bay.
Much work remains to be done before that stage is reached, but WWF
hopes it will eventually be able to hand over the project to the community
to manage. That will be a mark of acceptance that the shrimp and the
mangrove are inter-dependent and that not even the most bountiful of
God's gifts can last forever without the help of those who make use of it.
(587 words)
*Salman Rashid is a freelance journalist based in Lahore.