Balinese Farm Coral to Boost Fish Catch, Income

Emma Graham-Harrison, PlanetArk 10 Dec 07;

SERANGAN, Indonesia - Algae-covered lumps of cement would make a strange catch for most fishermen, but they have helped revive a Bali fishing village devastated by reckless tourist development and "mining" of reefs for building materials.

Seaside Serangan has become a modest center for the unusual coral-farming trade, with thousands of the formations growing in offshore iron grids. They are sold for export or used to reconstruct reefs that nurture fish and draw diving tourists.

Beside the farmed coral, cement chunks that are shaped like the rocks that line the ocean and reefs, are picking up a patina of natural growth that turns them into valuable decorations for aquariums from Australia to the United States.

"Before reclamation, the fish here were not so plentiful. Also, the numbers of different kinds of fish were lower," said Nyoman Sopi, leader of the fishermen who set up the farm and who previously worked in the tourist center of Kuta.

Once a small island off Bali's shore, the area was claimed in the 1990s by a developer who planned to build a huge resort, and set about expanding it to six times its original size, and linking it to the mainland.

To do this, giant pumps sucked filler from the sea floor, pulverizing corals they vacuumed up with the sand, said Asyma Sianiapar, Program Assistant at the Global Environment Facility, which is also supporting the venture.

Combined with traditional "mining" of coral for building houses and temples, which was officially banned around 2002, and damaging fishing practices, the reefs that supported the local fishing industry were decimated.

The resort was never built, hit by the Asian financial crisis and the domestic turmoil that accompanied the end of former President Suharto's reign in 1998. But the damage was done.

Catches fell by half, and the seaweed banks that the women used to walk around the island harvesting for food and to sell disappeared, fishermen and their families said.

Earnings fell and children were forced to drop out of school.

"If you don't make an alternative income source for the families, what will they eat, what will they put on the table for their children?" said Nael Ginting, manager of the project for NGO Telapak, which promotes sustainable fishing in poor communities.

"Many people in Indonesia are only thinking about the present ... because they need some money to live off."

CLIMATE RISK

Now they have about 800 square metres (8,600 sq feet) of cultivated coral, including the farms and new reefs and sell around 20,000 pieces a year, for around US$3 to $5 each.

The nearly 40 families, about 10 percent of the village, who are involved in the farm make US$50 a month, an important supplement to other income from fishing and tourist work.

Coral farming seems surprisingly simple. All you have to do is break off a branch from a living coral, glue it to the cement bases that anchor it in the off-sea cages, and leave them in a shallow, clean, wave-swept part of the sea.

A hard coral in a month can grow to the size of a toddler's hand, and in a year it can expand to the span of a large adult hand, with fingers fully stretched.

Plucked from the farm and held by their long cement stems, the corals, which range from purple and white to green and orange, look like bouquets of surrealist flowers.

But the village's new-found income faces a serious risk from a source that 190 nations have gathered to discuss at UN-led climate talks less than an hour's drive along the coast.

Hotter seas have been causing "bleaching," a mass die-off. Experts say 16 percent of the world's coral was wiped out in 1998 when global warming and the "El Nino" weather phenomenon combined to cause the highest sea temperatures ever recorded.

And while Serangan has so far been untouched, the nearby West Bali National Park has been badly hit, with many soft corals disintegrating altogether -- making loss of reefs, or coral farms, another danger for poor seaside communities already at risk from rising seas and storm surges linked to climate change.

"If the reality of climate change brings bleaching of corals we must be prepared because we don't want to lose our income," said Telapak's Ginting. (Editing by David Fogarty)