To the readers of RDO who put up questions: LES and Serangan, Indonesia
I do not have the luxury of time to visit the RDO web. I get news from time to time re: RDO from Dr. Peter Rubec. I would like to answer several questions that were posted in the RDO to make clear some things that maybe are worthwhile addressing. This would be LES and Serangan in Indonesia. These two places have been our labor
atory and learning sites where a lot of valuable lessons have been learned.
Both LES and Serangan have different distinct livelihood components all based on marine and its resources. Les is doing Marine Ornamental fish and Serangan is concentrated on corals and artificial base rocks. Each has a set of protocols and guidelines and each has a micro-enterprise component to make it sustainable prevent backslide and gives a reflow to the marine environment. We have been keeping things close to our chest because we do not want copycats that cannot even copy and implement things right.
If we are talking about positive impact those that have questions on what we are doing is on a very different wavelength on what our priorities are in terms of what we call positive impact. Ours is towards sustainable reform, prevent backslide and give realistic benefits to the stakeholders and their environment. We do not go into just community organizing talking about how life will be better in the future because we see it as empty talks. We are not NGO's that would come in and disappear when the funds ran out. We have the guts to try and learn something new every day and we are not afraid to fail. We do not cover up our failures but instead we seek solutions and try to solve where we have failed.
LES: this village is concentrated on marine ornamental fish. There were 120 cyanide marine ornamental fish collectors in this village. We do have a coral farm and adopt a coral program but they will not go into the trade of corals or base rocks. We have our reasons on why we do not want them to go into the coral or base rock trade. The coral farm we have there is only use for seeding species that has disappeared in that area and see how they adapt. It is also use purely for coral rehab. The marine ornamental fish from capture to shipment has a set of protocols and guidelines. It took us time to undo a lot of practices that kills fish. We keep experimenting with Dr. Peter Rubec's help and guidance. Our shipments through him are so valuable in terms of what we can learn and implement. We also keep getting feedbacks from those who imports the product so we can do things better. The village base enterprise produces the quality needed but we are not stopping there. That is not our even our main goal. We want to impact other sites and islands giving them our set of protocols and environmental requirements. We are very strict on this but we help them get to where we want them to be and help organize them up to the time we can call them mature responsible users of their marine resources.
To cut cost we are now creating a training center in LES for marine ornamental fish. It is starting this January. We have several island representatives coming down to learn. We have ten sites online for training next year. At this very moment we have an ongoing net training and we have collectors from LES doing it with Telapak staff overlooking the whole thing in another island.
We do monitoring of the coral reefs in the collecting sites and we have the data that we will be willing to share and that we will be improving more. It is all participatory with collectors as those who collect data. We do the evaluation to verify that they are collecting the right data.
We have expanded the holding capacity of LES from 4,000 gallons to 28,000 gallons. So we are now starting to train farm staff how to handle bigger shipments. The farm has a lot of female staff and also some Filipinos who are trainers and some undergoing training to make them ready for our future plans. We are starting our own fish and tridac aquaculture there. Each week, mortality in the fish farm is practically nothing. Conservation in itself by bringing down mortality.
Serangan: We have a big coral farm. This site used to do coral mining for livelihood. The corals mined were sold to exporters and were used for construction. This activity has stopped. Our community there has a big base rock making operation fabricated out of cement. It is being shipped out by the tons each month. They produce one of the best quality of base rocks. We do not want them to collect marine ornamental fish. Again we have our reason for that too. The corals will be traded but our arrangement is for every 10 pcs of coral to be traded 4 goes to coral rehabilitation and if there is a necessity to have more they produce it. They too will be going to other sites to help set up coral rehab where it is needed. There are three sites online for this activity this next year. The Filipinos who are trainers in LES and those undergoing training goes to Serangan to do the same thing. Train and the others learn.
I am one of the directors of Telapak. This micro-enterprise as an entry point concept was created by Ruwi and me in the year 2000. There were a lot of setbacks. When Ruwi again headed Telapak he requested me to take over the marine sector which is based in Bali. Ruwi thought it better to suspend all marine projects until I came in to prevent more setbacks. We reopened things last December after almost 4 months of inactivity. I was given the mandate and free hand to do what was needed. At present we are opening up officially the Telapak Territorial Body /EASTI Marine Department that will be based in Bali. We will partner and are partnering with local NGO's that have their own expertise in their field so we do not "re-invent the wheel". We need education and field base NGO's that are locally based in the sites we will have an interaction with and we are at the moment creating that link.
When the UN Climate CHANGE conference was going on we had a continuous visit from delegates that
saw how we were addressing anthropogenic problems and how we were looking beyond that. Even the French Environmental Minister came to visit spending half a day with us.
So I hope you understand where our priorities are. We will ship to North Pole if we have to but our agenda and priorities will always be for the wellbeing of the communities, stakeholders, and their environment. There is a big market out there who understands support and care for the value added effort put into producing high quality marine live products in a consistent manner. Our village stakeholders' base enterprises serve them and we do appreciate and respect them for their support.
There will be another community -based export-oriented enterprise coming up next year too in Indonesia. It will not be in Bali. As for the Philippines we intend to replicate the same thing we have in Indonesia. We are on the last stage of planning for that and we will be doing the difficult sites except sites in Bohol. Telapak will go regional for this.
Telapak is known for its strength in forest and land base issues. Again on the forest issues we have approached this in terms of community logging. We are now seeking ways to set up a link on both the marine, river and terrestrial issues. Everyone says we cannot link the two issues closely so it can augment its other but we again have the guts to try and do it.
Ferdinand Cruz
