Forest’s ugly duckling to the rescue

Jul 04, 2010 News

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– Guyana’s mangrove forest takes on a new look

By Neil Marks

From being cut down for firewood and garden fences to serving as pasture ground for goats, mangroves have never really been seen as a legitimate member of the forest family.
Further, mangrove swamps are seen as wasteland and breathing grounds for mosquitoes. As a result, those who live on the coast don’t stop to think twice before dumping garbage in the mangrove forest and setting it alight.
“We got permission from the local authority,” claims Carlos Cummings who has been cutting down the black mangroves to burn mud to sell as “brunt bricks.” He started his business at the beginning of this year, just about the same time the Minister of Agriculture, Robert Persaud, approved new regulations to protect mangroves.
“It’s a lie,” argues Bissasar Chintamani, a research scientist who now heads an ambitious project to protect and restore forests. He didn’t believe that the local authority would give approval. Cummings says he has “the papers” to prove it.
But all Chintamani can really do is drive by with the huge pile of burnt bricks staring at him; unless he can stop it himself. No rangers with the power to make arrests are yet in place to patrol the expansive coastland, and the Police have no mandate to make arrests.
“The Police are not involved in that. We have not been asked by the Commissioner to do this. That is for the local and regional government,” explains Steve Merai, the Commander of the Berbice Division of the Guyana Police Force.
Ironically, while the government is now in a race to protect mangroves, it is the same burnt bricks manufactured from the destruction of the mangrove forest that goes back into government-funded road projects.
“We have spoken with the Ministry of Local Government to get them to stop that,” Chintamani counters. But he will have to do much more.
The man who manufactures bricks by burning mangroves says he only recently received a huge order from a nearby local authority, and the government-run rice research centre also put in an order. Cummings knows it is now illegal to cut down mangroves.
“I don’t think we would continue,” Cummings says, on learning that it is illegal to cut down mangrove trees. Chintamani hopes he keeps his word.
Convincing the local population that there is a need to protect and restore the mangrove forest is the biggest challenge facing Chintamani’s multi-million-dollar project, but he is seeing some success.
In his home village of Novar, Mahaicony, an estimated 39 miles from the capital Georgetown, Chintamani received a “citizen alert” and was able to stop a man from using the black mangroves to produce brunt bricks even if that was after the mangroves were already cut down and piled up.
According to the Sea Defence Act, anyone caught cutting mangroves can be fined $12, 000 and be imprisoned for twelve months. But there is no stringent enforcement; rather a tip-toe approach is still being taken, seeing further destruction of the mangrove forest.
A few miles from Novar, at No.6 Village in Berbice, a farmer takes his sheep and goats to the seashore to graze; what they chew on is the young mangroves. And this is just around where a huge billboard was placed warning about the penalty of destroying mangroves.
“We don’t want to cause conflict. We have to take things step by step,” Chintamani asserts. In the meantime, the goats chew on. Chintamani’s caution might be well placed. In the absence of pasture grounds, where would the farmer graze his animals?
“We have engaged the Ministry of Agriculture to look at alternative grazing areas for these farmers,” he says. It looks unlikely that that will happen in a month or so, when Chintamni hopes to start a project to restore a portion of the coast with mangroves.
He finds consolation in the fact that the support of local communities is gradually improving. In fact, restoring mangroves means a livelihood for a group of single mothers in the community of Trafalgar, further up the coast.
They are being paid to go to the foreshore, pick up mangrove plants that were germinated at sea, and grow them in a small shed in the village. Once they reach a certain stage, the young mangrove plants will be transferred to the National Agricultural Research Institute, where they will be allowed to grow to a “hardened” stage before being planted back on the coast.
“It gives the women a little livelihood, and we hope they can later go on to get ranger jobs,” says Lloyda Angus, the president of the Trafalgar Community Development Committee. So far, an estimated 6,000 mangrove plants are being nurtured.
This is creating quite a buzz in the community and Angus says the school children are getting to know of the importance of mangroves in protecting the sea defence. Across the 430-kilometre coast, there are 15 such projects underway.
Increased attention to climate change is changing the way the country sees mangroves and an ambitious project is now underway, not only to protect the remaining mangrove forests, but to restore portions along the low-lying coastland.

Chintamani is looking to enlist the help of everyone, including fishermen. Mangroves produce strong and durable poles for the artisanal fishing industry. These poles are used mainly for the mooring of boats, and for supporting drift gillnets and fyke nets, commonly known as Chinese seine.
Fishermen, educated about the importance of saving the mangroves are now using alternative forest species to get their poles. The thought that restoration of mangroves could bring back the prized gilbacker is good news for them.
Fisherman Sasenarine, for example, remembers pulling up about 10 gilbackers, but now he is lucky to get one a month. He has been fishing for 35 years, and has pulled up gilbackers weighing as much as 70 pounds.
The fact that it is one of the most expensive fish on the market is enough incentive to find a way to bring it back within the reaches of their seines.
The mangrove swamps are natural breeding grounds for brackish water shrimp (Paneaus spp.) and finfish species (of the families Sciaenidae and Aridea) which gilbackers feed on. So the fishermen are on a quest to bring back the gilbacker, and restoring the mangrove forest might just be one of the ways they can do so.
But there is yet another threat to the mangrove forest that has not yet been addressed, and that is the use of mangrove barks for the tannin industry.
Due to an increase in the demand for tannin, the production of mangrove bark increased dramatically during the period 1996–1999. The Guyana Forestry Commission estimated that in 1996 an estimated 10,800 kilogrames of mangrove bark was extracted in Regions One and Two for use in the local leather industry. Three years later, the amount of mangroves extracted jumped to a whopping 90,956.8 kilogrammes.
Annette Arjoon, who chairs the mangrove action committee, feels if citizens know of the alternative use of the mangrove forest then this could add to the protection of mangroves.
For example, she said the mangrove forest could be used in beekeeping for the production of honey. In fact, approximately 75% of the honey produced in Guyana comes from bees of the mangrove forest.
Arjoon believes that if apiculture could be spread to the other mangrove forests it could serve a dual purpose – help to produce honey and scare away those who cut down the mangroves, because Guyanese are naturally scared of bees.
The protection and restoration of the mangrove forest has become a key focus of the sea defence sector given global climate change.
Guyana with its low-lying coastal plain and a crumbling and under-resourced sea and river defence system is at exceptional risk with sea level rise being one of the more certain outcomes of global warming.
The coastal zone of Guyana lies between 0.5 to 1.0 m below high spring tide level of the Atlantic Ocean, making it particularly vulnerable to flooding, erosion and salinization. Moreover, global sea level rise is expected to increase from 20 cm to 100 cm by the year 2100. The coastal zone is 430 km long and 26-77 km wide.
Approximately 90 percent of the nation’s population of 750,000 live within the coastal zone. Even though it constitutes less than seven percent of the country’s total land area it has the most fertile soil. Therefore, Guyana cannot afford to ignore the Atlantic Ocean.
The information acquired from an Overseas Development Assistance project on sea wall defence in the vicinity of the Essequibo River between 1979 and 1984 indicated that “the best coastal protection you can have in Guyana is a long sloping foreshore, leading to mangroves and a small earthen dam behind that”
Mangroves protect the coast through stabilisation of the shoreline by controlling erosion from waves. Mangroves are also the first line of defence against wave actions and storms, helping to protect the sea wall or embankment and reduce damage of sea defence systems.
The coastal mangrove swamps, which help to break the waves from directly crashing into the concrete sea wall, have been drained, and in many places the wood extracted and replaced by sea walls, irrigation canals, polders and human settlements.
It was in 2005 when the worst flood in the country’s history devastated the coastland that Guyana began to wake up to the realities of climate change and solutions to barricade the coast from the rising sea started to crop up; attention shifted to mangroves.
Two to three hundred years ago, the entire coast was covered with mangroves, says Chris Ingelbrecht, Head of Technical Section of the EU Delegation in Georgetown.
Over the years, the mangrove forests has been depleted, due mainly, to lack of appreciation for the role mangroves play in protecting the coastland from the sea, says Ingelbrecht.
There is no clear indication of how much of the mangrove forest has been destroyed over the years, but the Guyana Forestry Commission is looking to come up with an assessment using GPS and remote sensing.
Ingelbrecht says the cost of repairing and maintaining the masonry sea defence could be reduced significantly if mangrove forests were restored. He knows the cost of building and repairing the sea wall, a concrete structure that keeps the waters of the Atlantic from rushing into communities and farmlands.
The European Commission’s big job in Guyana is sea defence. An estimated 18 million Euros is currently being spent at 31 sites to either fix or build new concrete sea defence, and another 14 million Euros is expected soon. But the big spending on repairing the sea defence could come down if the mangrove forest could be restored along the coast.
With the European Union looking to mainstream climate change activities in all of its programmes, support for mangrove protection and restoration seem like an automatic project.
Now, the European Commission is getting ready to give Guyana 4.165 million Euros for the mangrove restoration project.
“If you can get something sustainable in terms of mangrove growth it is a very effective way of defending the coastline from the sea,” says Ingelbrecht.
The mangrove forests in Guyana are found on large sections of the Atlantic Coast from the Corentyne River to the Waini River. Mangrove forests are also found at the interface between
the terrestrial and marine eco-systems, in estuarine wetlands and in tidal reaches of riverain
areas.
Three major species of mangroves including Rhizophora mangle, Avicennia germinans
and Laguncularia racemosa exist there.
The total area of mangrove forest in Guyana is estimated at 80,432 hectares. The failure to treat the mangrove ecosystems as a critical element in sea defence strategy has perhaps been its biggest threat.
Mangroves have been regarded as a common property to be exploited without control. This attitude and the practices which flow from this have endangered or eliminated large areas of mangrove forests, with potentially dire consequences in terms of coastal erosion and loss of valuable biological resources and ecological services.
It had to take global warming to change the fate of the mangrove forest, and indeed the restoration of the mangrove forest in Guyana could help to protect an entire nation from catastrophic destruction.

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