Thai Locals Nurture Mangroves Back to Life
9/15/99
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Thai Locals Nurture Mangroves Back to Life
Source: InterPress Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: September 15, 1999
Byline: Prangtip Daorueng
SAMUT SONGKHRAM, Thailand, Sep 15 (IPS) - For 64-year-old Paiboon
Rattanapongtala, saving the mangrove forest in his hometown means
saving his entire community.
''The villagers lost their land and can't rely on small fishing
because natural resources have been destroyed along with the mangrove
forests,'' says Paiboon, who lives in Klong Kon sub- district here in
Samut Songkhram province south-west of Bangkok.
''This needs to be fixed or we won't survive,'' he explains.
Klong Kon sub-district, which is in Samut Songkhram facing the Gulf
of Thailand, is one of a few communities in the country that have
been able to bring back mangrove forests after years of decay.
The mangrove rehabilitation project here was initiated in 1990 by a
former Samut Songkhram governor who got strong cooperation from the
community led by Paiboon.
''Community participation in this project is impressive,'' agrees Dr
Kamtorn Kaewpaitoon of School of Environment, Resources and
Management at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok.
''What we found when we went on the field trip there was people in
Klong Kon sub-district were able to use their local experience in
planting mangroves,'' he adds.
Students at the 40-year-old AIT, which has a programme in aquaculture
and aquatic resources management, had visited Klong Kon to learn from
the project.
More than 2,000 rai (800 acres) of mangrove forest have been
rehabilitated on an extended mudflat area since 1991. But it was not
easy at the start, says Paiboon. Though majority of 7,000 villagers
were supportive, others preferred not to participate.
Community leaders had to convince these villagers, including by
getting students to pitch in. ''Every holiday local people and
students from two schools in our sub-district volunteered to work on
the project. It went on for years before we were able to have 100
percent of villagers agree,'' Paiboon says.
The effects of environmental damage on everyday life convinced them
of the need to do something.
''The situation was severe. Many fish and animal species we had seen
since we were young had disappeared,'' he recalls. ''Many villagers
left home to look for job elsewhere because it was difficult to make
a living. That made them think about how to get back our forest.''
''The villagers were able to use their traditional knowledge to grow
mangroves in an empty mudflat area extended to the sea. This is
amazing,'' says Wallop Maimongkon, Samut Songkhram province forestry
chief, noting that villagers contributed both labour and money to the
rehabilitation effort.
The AIT's Kamtorn says the vision of community leaders, combined with
support from local people and governments, is crucial to such
efforts.
Like many mangrove-growing provinces in Thailand, Klong Kon's area
was destroyed by encroachment from outside industries.
The boom of prawn farming, which started in 1980s, wiped out Klong
Kon's mangrove forests and reduced it from an area as big as 40,000
rai (16,000 acres) in early the 1980s to only 900 rai (360 acres)
after 1984.
Moreover, many villagers who owned small parcels of land sold them to
deep-pocketed investors from other provinces who came to the Klong
Kon for prawn farming. Soon, villagers were happily making money as
prawn farms' labourers.
But when prawn prices dropped dramatically after that, their fortunes
were reversed. Investors abandoned their farms, leaving behind
polluted water and unemployed and landless villagers.
''It took almost 10 years for villagers to see how much they had
lost,'' says Sonjai Havanond, chief of mangrove and swamp forest
development group at the forestry department. ''After ten years
villagers began to know how much the environment was destroyed and
how much their traditional lifestyles have changed.''
The scale of mangrove forest destruction in Thailand has been big and
quick. In 1961, the country had a total of 2,299,275 rai (919,710
acres) of mangrove forests. In 1996, only 1,047,300 rai (418,920
acres) or a little less than half remained.
Between 1979 and 1991, more than 700,000 rai (280,000 acres) of
mangrove forests disappeared.
While a key factor was prawn farming which peaked in the mid-
eighties, mangrove forest destruction is also caused by the issuance
of concessions in mangrove forest areas. Many of these will end in
2001 and 2002.
Forestry department reports show that Thailand produces an annual
average of 241,582 cubic metres of firewood and charcoal from
mangrove forests, sold to domestic and export markets.
By the time the concessions expire between 2001 to 2003, 90 percent
of the valuable trees inn the concession plots will b gone, the
forestry department warns.
Though mangrove concessionaires reforest their areas, the environment
is changed -- most plant commercial species that are harvested for
charcoal. Indigenous flora are often lost forever.
Paiboon says villagers know how to use the forest sustainably and
have long relied on mangrove forests as their source of food, housing
materials and medicine. But he says the trend of commercial use of
mangrove ecosystems is hard to fight.
''We have to replant mangroves every time we cut. But the problem is
we can't help when big industries like prawn farming came in,'' he
explains. ''Their encroachment in the forest is much bigger and
faster than ours.''
In 1997, the government issued a temporary ban on mangrove forest
concessions. Existing prawn farms were allowed to continue, except
those which encroached on mangrove conservation areas.
''As a result, mangrove forest areas in 1993 up to now remain almost
the same,'' says Sonjai. ''We have been able to prevent an extreme
drop in terms of mangrove forests areas like what had happened a few
years earlier.''
Kamtorn of AIT says the results of mangrove rehabilitation do not
come overnight, adding that it took at least seven years for
fishermen in Samut Songkhram to see recovery of coastal environment
and resources.
He says other communities are also realising the value of protecting
their local resources, with one fishing village in Chantaburi barring
shrimp culture to protect their mangroves.
Today, Klong Kon folk are still working at healing their mangrove
forests. The schoolchildren who started out with the project are now
in their teens, and one of its strongest assets today, Paiboon says.
The sub-district aims to reach 5,000 rai (2,000 acres) of
rehabilitated mangrove area soon.
Mused Paiboon: ''It may not be possible to bring back the same
mangrove forests our ancestors lived with, but at least now we can
see some animal species returning to our community. The sea is slowly
richer, and we have begun to have hope.''