THOMAS Maniwavie looks at an island of mangrove trees about a kilometre away from the wheelchair he is sitting on. Then he shakes his head and tells me:
“It looks great ... it looks intact if you’re looking at it from here ... but inside, you’ll see a massive gap carved out by firewood gathering.
“And it could take long years to fill the gap with second generation growth. This is because replanting efforts would be very difficult, it is always under deep water.”
Maniwavie has all the reasons to be concerned.
As the marine biologist tasked to do something to stop the rapid loss of mangrove trees along the coastline of Central province and in critical areas elsewhere in the country, he is projecting what could happen to our mangrove resources as the population grows.
“They (mangrove trees) have become a saleable commodity,” says the 50-year-old mangrove protection advocate who works for the Motupore Island Biology Unit of the University of PNG.
“As firewood, cut mangrove trees have become saleable. It has a big market in Port Moresby and on the outskirts of the city. Many households now can no longer afford to buy kerosene or LPG for their cooking stoves and they are turning to mangrove trees for firewood.
“Before, firewood gatherers cut them just for household use which was not that harmful but now, with the rising prices of basic items, especially cooking fuels, they thought of selling firewood in big volume to city dwellers who can no longer afford kerosene or LGP (liquefied petroleum gas).
As a result, further mangrove destruction followed.
It is also a lucrative source of income, this firewood being in great demand now.
What is worse, Maniwavie says, firewood gatherers are now able to access the inner areas even at high tide by boats with which they use to haul off cut tree trunks.
Now, if mangrove areas are a resource that should benefit the people, especially those who own them as part of their traditional land, is cutting them down for firewood and source of income not their right?
True, says Maniwavie. “It’s theirs for the taking but they should also think of the harm they are doing to the marine wildlife that uses mangrove areas as natural habitat and breeding grounds.”
And as a true advocate of conservation, he had tried his best to explain to the villagers that mangrove areas are the breeding place of marine wildlife in the bay - from crabs, bivalve shells, to prawn, lobster, shrimp and various fish species - and the source of protein for humans.
Without mangroves and coral reefs, marine wildlife wouldn’t be able to reproduce efficiently and thus, sustain its number over the years as fishing activities continue.
Likewise, mangrove forests are the best protection against coastal ground erosion and also help stabilize the sediment as the roots hold onto the soil, and thus protect it from being carried away during the rising and ebbing of the bay.
In the Philippines, which lost over the last 50 years about 80 per cent of its mangrove resources out of the 500,000ha to development - from aquaculture projects like fish/prawn ponds to subdivision housing projects - had experienced a sharp decline in catch from coastal fishing grounds.
Main reason was that natural breeding grounds of marine wildlife were demolished to pave way for land reclamation and fishery projects, an activity fully supported with adequate funding by the government during the 1950s and 1960s. This was in the hope to increase fish production intended for the export market.
However, as the areas of destroyed mangrove forests increased, the volume of catch by small fishermen drastically declined, thus depriving thousands of fishermen across the country of sustainable source of livelihood, according to several studies earlier conducted.
Overtime, aquaculture production declined, forcing operators to abandon the project, leaving thousand hectares of useless fishponds and millions in unpaid government loans. And leaving fishermen with half-filled catch basket.
Maniwavie, in his own analysis, is also seeing this scenario should wanton tree-cutting continue. He says village fishermen along the coast of Central province will be the first biggest losers, then the fish population that normally thrives along the coastal waters of the province.
But all this seemed no big deal to the villagers who insisted that their traditional mangrove areas are huge and trees would keep coming up.
And Maniwavie was just ignored and even jeered at and was told that “you’re just a foreigner here ... you have no rights to tell us what to do with our resources ...”
True, the marine biologist is not from this place. He’s come from Wewak, a far-off town on the northern edge of Papua New Guinea.
Unshaken, Maniwavie continues to monitor and to find solution to the mangrove problems on the island which is host to 38 species of the 44 found in PNG, a country were the most extensive and most diverse mangroves in the world could be found.
Although mangrove denudation has not reached an alarming stage yet, with just about 26 per cent, or 143,000ha out of the 553,000ha being lost to various forms of exploitation and destruction as of 2000, over time it could accelerate.
With the trees becoming a new-found source of cooking fuel for the growing population in coastal and urban areas, massive loss of mangrove areas has now become a foregone scenario.
His fears are anchored on the fact that in the next 42 years, or a span of two generations from today, the population of 6.7 million will jump to 10.6 million and the demand for fish protein, and firewood, would put a lot of pressure on PNG’s coastal waters.
It means that the country’s coastal fishing grounds have to continue providing enough catch to meet the protein needs of the increasing number of people.
But and this is a BIG BUT this would only be possible if the mangrove resources around the country are protected from wanton destruction.
We should always remember that mangrove areas, which will not expand over time but decrease instead, are the ones providing a natural habitat for coastal marine wildlife to breed and thus multiply to continue populating our coastal fishing grounds in sufficient number.
In the past, there had been a number of initiatives to educate the villagers along the coast of Tahira Bay on the importance of the mangroves in their area, a part of the strategy to encourage the coastal people to slowdown on their cutting of the trees.
For quite sometime, he has been working to conserve and rehabilitate the mangrove areas around the island that had been denuded, using scrimpy funds from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Although his line of expertise is on coral reef preservation and protection, he nevertheless found himself among international marine biologists converging in Japan just recently to find ways to improve the system of rehabilitating lost mangrove areas in Third World countries like Papua New Guinea.
On Motupore Island, Wanimavie has established a mangrove tree nursery which is now the source of tree-planting materials he needed to replant denuded areas along the coast of Central province.
And he’s trying his best to make do with the little funding he gets from WWF, an agency which in someway is supporting him in his effort to protect of the country’s still standing mangrove areas.
“We have lined up replanting activities and hope to involve schools in the city,” Maniwavie said.
Just very recently, he succeeded in encouraging people from the media to initiate the tree-planting activities by replanting a portion of the Motupore Island just next to the jetty where a ferryboat taking visitors to Loloata Island usually parks.
Fifteen years ago, the space around this area was covered with thick, thriving lush mangrove trees that extended up to 300 meters into the Tahira Bay.
I saw it myself on my way to Loloata resort in 1993. In its untouched state, this mangrove forest was Mother Nature’s greatest wonder — green scenery that made me feel good.
But since this swath of the coastline was easily accessible to people, especially firewood gatherers who lived nearby, this mangrove forest was logged overtime, leaving no trees to allow for second growth.
Today, there is no hint that mangrove trees ever existed here.