The diverse mangrove ecosystems occupy two worlds, acting as an interface between land and sea. They thrive in the brackish inter-tidal zones of sheltered tropical shores, estuaries, river mouths, and even deep inland in the riverbanks’ fringes. The trees range in size from small bushes to trees up to forty meters high depending on the species and growing conditions. In the the region where this case is located there are some 70 species of mangrove. As the mangrove trees’ specially adapted aerial roots 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 provide nutrients for a vibrant marine environment that 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.
Another important function of mangroves is to increase the resilience of the coastlines, protecting them from erosion, tropical storms and tidal waves. The trees and bushes trap sediment washing from the land, thereby protecting the seagrass beds and coral reefs from siltation. Mangroves co-exist with a wide variety of other plant life allowing them to function as a ‘supermarket’ stocked with fruits, honey, fuelwood, medicinal plants and construction material among other useful products.
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. From 1975 to 1993, it is estimated that about half of Thailand’s mangroves along its 2,560 kilometer coastline have been lost.
The Setting
Trang Province is one of 76 provinces in Thailand. It is located in the middle of southern Thailand and includes 190 kilometers of coastline on the Andaman Sea and 46 islands offshore.
Its coasts are home to 65,000 fishing households. The inland region is mostly hilly. Two mountain ranges, the Khao Luang and Banthat, are the sources of its two major rivers, the 125 km long Trang and the 58 km long Paliam. Both drain into the Andaman sea. Nearly all of Thailand’s Muslim population is concentrated in the southern provinces.
Although 20 % of Trang province’s population is Muslim, the fishing villages where Yadfon works are 80% Muslim. Since 2004, the southernmost region of Thailand, part of which borders Trang Province, has seen a revival of a 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.
The Narrative
In Trang province, most of the Muslim population lived 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 in addition to other activities such as rubber tapping and some herding of goats and 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 villages’ natural and social capital was seriously undermined by the broad range of effects into motion by the mechanization of fishing. Large trawlers began fishing the coasts of southern Thailand, violating the 3km coastal zone and encroaching on the villagers fishing grounds. 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 (and assumed organized crime) 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 of 1941 had granted the private sector the right to log mangroves, in 1968, the concession system was expanded to allow concessionaires the right to harvest an area of 2,500-5,000 rai (400—800 hectares) 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 the benefits of their common resources, but also left them to deal with all the costs of their decimation.
Meanwhile, some of the poorest villagers saw no other option than to accept low-paid, cash jobs, cutting mangroves for concessionaires or fishing on commercial trawlers. This in effect forced them to join in the destruction of their own resource base while remaining dependent on 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 and spent more hours in their boats. To survive they resorted to more destructive methods to find dwindling numbers of fish, using dynamite, cyanide and pushnets. Pushnets are large nets attached by long poles at the bow of the boat, which, as the boats moved forward, scrape the ocean floor, damaging sea grass beds, coral reefs and other marine habitats. Moreover, the 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. Yadfon worked 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 Leam Markham in the Muang district (‘Ban’ means ‘village’ in Thai.) Over the next few months they talked to Bu Nuansri, the local imam, and the villagers. Conversations with villagers led them to identify and prioritize some things that were badly needed. Since the village was affected by droughts in the dry season, a plan was made to dig a community well. Yadfon provided the cement and other cheap materials while villagers made the design and provided the labor. Yadfon and the villagers also created a cooperative buying program. This enabled the fishers to buy fishing gear and engines for their boats and sell their daily catch at fair market prices, thereby reducing their dependence on middlemen. Before they had to trade fish to pay off debts owed to the middlemen who inevitably set the prices lower than fair market value.
Another economic project created a revolving fund available to the poorest, most indebted villagers. This helped them get small interest-free loans to set up small income generation projects such as small-scale aquaculture. They cultivated mussels, oysters, and grouper in small floating pens. At 80% the rate of repayment was very high. Additionally, their increase in income was an incentive for them to contribute part of their profits to the 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, village representatives met with the Provincial forestry authorities whose permission was needed to create 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, 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
The diverse mangrove ecosystems occupy two worlds, acting as an interface between land and sea. They thrive in the brackish inter-tidal zones of sheltered tropical shores, estuaries, river mouths, and even deep inland in the riverbanks’ fringes. The trees range in size from small bushes to trees up to forty meters high depending on the species and growing conditions. In the the region where this case is located there are some 70 species of mangrove. As the mangrove trees’ specially adapted aerial roots 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 provide nutrients for a vibrant marine environment that 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.
Another important function of mangroves is to increase the resilience of the coastlines, protecting them from erosion, tropical storms and tidal waves. The trees and bushes trap sediment washing from the land, thereby protecting the seagrass beds and coral reefs from siltation. Mangroves co-exist with a wide variety of other plant life allowing them to function as a ‘supermarket’ stocked with fruits, honey, fuelwood, medicinal plants and construction material among other useful products.
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. From 1975 to 1993, it is estimated that about half of Thailand’s mangroves along its 2,560 kilometer coastline have been lost.
The Setting
Trang Province is one of 76 provinces in Thailand. It is located in the middle of southern Thailand and includes 190 kilometers of coastline on the Andaman Sea and 46 islands offshore.
Its coasts are home to 65,000 fishing households. The inland region is mostly hilly. Two mountain ranges, the Khao Luang and Banthat, are the sources of its two major rivers, the 125 km long Trang and the 58 km long Paliam. Both drain into the Andaman sea. Nearly all of Thailand’s Muslim population is concentrated in the southern provinces.
Although 20 % of Trang province’s population is Muslim, the fishing villages where Yadfon works are 80% Muslim. Since 2004, the southernmost region of Thailand, part of which borders Trang Province, has seen a revival of a 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.
The Narrative
In Trang province, most of the Muslim population lived 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 in addition to other activities such as rubber tapping and some herding of goats and 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 villages’ natural and social capital was seriously undermined by the broad range of effects into motion by the mechanization of fishing. Large trawlers began fishing the coasts of southern Thailand, violating the 3km coastal zone and encroaching on the villagers fishing grounds. 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 (and assumed organized crime) 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 of 1941 had granted the private sector the right to log mangroves, in 1968, the concession system was expanded to allow concessionaires the right to harvest an area of 2,500-5,000 rai (400—800 hectares) 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 the benefits of their common resources, but also left them to deal with all the costs of their decimation.
Meanwhile, some of the poorest villagers saw no other option than to accept low-paid, cash jobs, cutting mangroves for concessionaires or fishing on commercial trawlers. This in effect forced them to join in the destruction of their own resource base while remaining dependent on 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 and spent more hours in their boats. To survive they resorted to more destructive methods to find dwindling numbers of fish, using dynamite, cyanide and pushnets. Pushnets are large nets attached by long poles at the bow of the boat, which, as the boats moved forward, scrape the ocean floor, damaging sea grass beds, coral reefs and other marine habitats. Moreover, the 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. Yadfon worked 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 Leam Markham in the Muang district (‘Ban’ means ‘village’ in Thai.) Over the next few months they talked to Bu Nuansri, the local imam, and the villagers. Conversations with villagers led them to identify and prioritize some things that were badly needed. Since the village was affected by droughts in the dry season, a plan was made to dig a community well. Yadfon provided the cement and other cheap materials while villagers made the design and provided the labor. Yadfon and the villagers also created a cooperative buying program. This enabled the fishers to buy fishing gear and engines for their boats and sell their daily catch at fair market prices, thereby reducing their dependence on middlemen. Before they had to trade fish to pay off debts owed to the middlemen who inevitably set the prices lower than fair market value.
Another economic project created a revolving fund available to the poorest, most indebted villagers. This helped them get small interest-free loans to set up small income generation projects such as small-scale aquaculture. They cultivated mussels, oysters, and grouper in small floating pens. At 80% the rate of repayment was very high. Additionally, their increase in income was an incentive for them to contribute part of their profits to the 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, village representatives met with the Provincial forestry authorities whose permission was needed to create 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, 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
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..