Mangroves give way to big business
The Tombonuo homeland in northern Borneo had been home to mangroves, saltwater-loving trees that anchor a web of life. Now the trees are gone after a Malaysian company bulldozed swaths of mangroves to make space for plastic-lined ponds filled with millions of king prawns. The farm’s expansion came at a heavy cost to the environment.
—Swinging his machete with an economy of movement that only the jungle can teach, Matakin Bondien lopped a stray branch from the path of his boat. He hopped barefoot from the prow, climbed a muddy slope and stared once more at what he’d lost.
Not long ago, the clearing had been home to mangroves, saltwater-loving trees that anchor a web of life stretching from fish larvae hatching in the cradle of their underwater roots to the hornbills squawking at their crown.
Now the trees’ benevolent presence is gone, in their place a swath of stripped soil littered with felled trunks as gray as fossils.
“Do you think we can find any food in this place now?” asked Bondien, a village leader of the Tombonuo people. “The company thinks it can do anything it wants—that we don’t count.”
The company is Sunlight Inno Seafood, owned by Cedric Wong King Ti, a Malaysian businessman known as “King Wong.”
The company has bulldozed swaths of mangroves in the Tombonuo’s homeland in northern Borneo to make space for plastic-lined ponds filled with millions of king prawns.
The prawns were fattened for three months, then scooped up in nets, quick frozen, packed into 12-meter refrigerated containers and loaded onto cargo ships bound for distant ports.
Gargantuan as it may seem to Bondien and his relatives, the project represents only a speck in the global aquaculture industry, one of the world’s fastestgrowing sources of protein.
Unfolding across Asia and around the world, this revolution in farming could help mitigate the impacts of climate change—or make them even worse.
Ecosystems upended
As the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases causes the world’s oceans to warm, ecosystems that formed hundreds of thousands of years ago are being upended in less than a human lifespan.
Across the planet, fish and other marine creatures are being forced into a desperate search for cooler waters.
Even coral is on the move: Some Japanese reefs are expanding northward at up to nearly 15 kilometers per year, researchers have found.
Tropical seas may be the hardest hit.
Species in the once-stable conditions near the equator could find it much harder to tolerate even mild temperature increases than hardier cousins at higher latitudes, which are used to coping with the contrast between summer and winter.
“If you ask me what is the No. 1 concern that I have on climate change effects on fisheries, it is on these tropical, developing countries,” said William Cheung, director of science at the Nippon Foundation-University of British Columbia Nereus Program.
“The sheer speed of the change will make it that much harder for marine life to adapt,” Cheung added.
Bleaching
Coral reefs, as vital to tropical fish as trees are to birds, are becoming more vulnerable to a process called “bleaching,” which occurs when a spike in water temperatures causes coral to expel the algae that provide their kaleidoscope colors, leaving them prone to starvation or disease.
Today, swaths of the oncepsychedelic Great Barrier Reef in Australia have turned boneyard white and largely devoid of life.
Scientists fear a similar fate could await the Coral Triangle, a huge underwater wonderland east of Borneo endowed with a trove of biodiversity comparable to the rainforests of the Amazon Basin.
Millions of people depend on its bounty to survive, a large share of them Malaysians, who eat an average of 54 kilograms of fish each a year—more than double the world average.
More sustainable way
With climate change bearing down on the tropics, the search is on for a more sustainable way of getting food from the sea, one that doesn’t take more than nature can give.
Farther to the north on Borneo, an island divided among Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, villagers are raising sea cucumbers: curious-looking creatures resembling giant slugs that are typically braised and served with oysters, mushrooms and spring onions, or—if you’re in Japan—thinly sliced, flavored with wasabi and eaten raw.
These echinoderms, close relatives of sea urchins and starfish, may not appeal to every palate.
But farming them has one of the lightest footprints of any form of food production, a reminder of the vast untapped global potential for harvesting oysters, mussels, clams and many other types of filter feeders.
A couple of hours’ drive from the Sunlight Seafood shrimp farm, inhabitants of the stilted village of Mapan Mapan have created a maze of sunken enclosures fenced with a barnacle-covered mesh.
A revolution in fish
Forty years ago, only 5 per- cent of the world’s fish production was farmed.
After decades of rapid growth, aquaculture reached a tipping point in 2013, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, when the amount the industry raised in cages, tanks and ponds outweighed the tonnage of freely swimming fish hauled from lakes, rivers and seas for people’s plates.
In many respects, the industry has a good-news story to tell.
Farmed salmon, for example, can convert feed into edible protein far more efficiently than cows or pigs, while producing fewer greenhouse gases.
Now, almost all the salmon sold in restaurants and supermarkets is raised in captivity, with Norway, Chile and Scotland the biggest producers.
Cost of expansion
But this phenomenal expansion has come at a cost.
Shrimp farms, in particular, have made coastal communities in the tropics even more vulnerable by cutting down mangroves, their first line of defense against extreme weather and rising sea levels.
Since the mid-1970s, the aquaculture industry has led to the destruction of more than 1.3 million acres of mangroves spread across Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, China, Brazil and Ecuador, according to a 2013 paper in the Bulletin of Marine Science.
Nevertheless, some governments in Southeast Asia and Latin America have concluded that it’s worth sacrificing more mangroves in return for the export earnings and employment the projects can generate.
Among them is the Malaysian state of Sabah, which is a partner in King Wong’s shrimp farm.
Hopes of a better life
In 2013, representatives of Sunlight Seafood offered leaders of the Tombonuo and other indigenous communities a deal.
In return for some of the land flanking the tidal creeks where their mangroves stood, locals recalled, the company would provide running water, electricity and much-needed employment for youths in the surrounding area.
Five years since the bulldozers went to work, Tombonuo community leaders say they’ve lost more than 800 hectares of mangroves and that the jobs and infrastructure they were promised haven’t materialized.
“I have no words. It’s like we’ve lost our whole world,” said Samad Samayong, a Tombonuo elder, surveying a sacred outcrop consecrated by his ancestors that is now encircled by shrimp ponds.
“We only realized what was happening when it was too late,” he added.
The sheer scale of the farm is only fully apparent from up close. In July, a Reuters reporter and photographer accompanied Samayong, Bondien and others on a three-boat party to various points where water from the ponds gushed from pipes, leaving foamy trails of scum in the creeks.
It took hours to trace even a portion of the fence enclosing the site. The barrier’s stark edges cut a jarring contrast to the tangle of mangrove roots straddling saltwater and land, their branches home to proboscis monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, blue-eared kingfishers and storks.
Apart from losing more trees, Samayong and Bondien fear diggers will further encroach on their ancestral shrines.
“It’s not only the forest that’s being destroyed,” said Mastupang Somoi, another member of the Tombonuo. “It’s our identity.”
Trees provide buffer
With evidence mounting that mangroves represent an effective buffer against climate impacts, some tropical countries are starting to question the gusto with which they once felled the trees, which can take 15 years to mature.
Were it not for the way mangroves served as shields, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami could have taken many more than 220,000 lives.
The trees can also help mitigate the impact of rising sea levels: Their multitiered root systems trap sediment to raise the land around them relative to the encroaching waves.
Equally ingeniously, mangroves sequester more greenhouse gases than almost any other type of forest, as well as serving as natural larders of fish, birds, fruit and the kind of snails you can eat raw by snapping their conical shells and sucking out the innards.
Sabah’s government says it is committed to striking a balance between economic development and preserving Borneo’s extraordinary natural heritage, including by designating extensive areas of forest as nature reserves for threatened orangutans and creating Malaysia’s largest marine protected area.
Earlier this month, Junz Wong, Sabah’s agriculture minister, toured the Sunlight Seafood farm and said the company had operated “quite professionally” and created nearly 400 jobs.
On his Facebook page, Wong said he had rejected a company request to cut down an additional 1,000 acres of mangroves. “I told them NO,” he wrote. “No more destroying of mangroves.”