LOADING
LOADING
THREE LOCAL STORIES — ONE GLOBAL EFFORT
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Our ocean is one of planet Earth’s greatest and most important resources. It provides food for four out of 10 people in the world. It protects us from even more dangerous effects of climate change, and it provides an income for billions of people.
Humans need a healthy ocean to survive and yet, we keep polluting, exhausting, and destroying this valuable resource.
We need to save our ocean before it’s too late, but who decides how we best take care of it? Who decides how many resources we should take from it now, or how they should be harvested?
Who can be relied upon to make decisions that benefit the entire ecosystem, rather than the people of one nation, city, or village? These are the questions that communities along the coasts of all continents face, and together they must work towards common answers.
Together, the stories of three coastal communities in India, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Peru illustrate the global challenge that all people and nations share. As these populations adopt sustainable practices, they also point the way towards a healthier, more verdant, and more prosperous future.
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Earlier men did everything, but now women can also do this crab cultivation. Despite all the mud, they can do it with their own hands. And so now women are not behind in anything. I am very proud of this.
Thousands of people in the Sindhudurg region rely on the ocean to make a living, and many in the area still struggle economically. Through her mangrove farming, Samiksha Gopal Gawker has been contributing directly to an effort to sustain not only her family, but her entire community. She is a member of what is called a self-help group in India, collectives of men or women who band together to support one another by pooling their income. “After opening an account in the bank, every month we started depositing Rs 100 per person,” she recalls. “If anybody was in need of some money, we use this account and give it to them.”
But the strongest communal bonds have been formed between women in the farming collective. “Coming from mumbai, I had no idea of how I should be working in mud. We had a lot of difficulties, but it was fun doing it with everybody,” says Gawker. “For example, if somebody fell, nobody made fun, but took care of them. If somebody was unable to do something, we would tell them do it only for a bit, and then rest — the entire team was very supportive.”
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Nowadays we are used to fishing all the way out into the high seas, because that is where we find a little more fish. When we leave the shore we have no way of knowing if there will be a storm or even rain — sometimes people die at sea because of accidents. We look forward to the project’s implementation in our village, including the ponds that will allow the fish of the sea to multiply.
It’s no wonder that Emmanuel Nzau feels personally invested in the project’s success. Nzau has been fishing for almost forty years, and now supports six children who are still in school.
“In the village not everyone is a fisherman,” he claims. “Our mothers and wives grow cassava and onions in the gardens. But what helps us make a living is fishing.”
As the ocean creeps up the world’s shores, however, Nzau is
beginning to see the very resource he depends on for survival threaten his livelihood in two direct ways: as the seas rapidly approach the land and threaten his community, he must also go deeper into the ocean in search of a good catch, leaving him more vulnerable to unpredictable weather. “In my childhood, the ocean was 100m from the village after a descent, and there was no offshore drilling as we see now,” Nzau remembers. “Today it is the ocean that advances towards the village!”
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The Gigartina Chamisoi seaweed used to just wash up and we didn’t have to dive to collect it, but back then there was more of it. Due to the current and other phenomena, the situation is changing and now we have to go diving.
Gutierrez and his fellow fishermen have learned to take advantage of the seaweed’s natural tendency to reproduce in a laboratory. Using this lab-grown seaweed, they’ve repopulated the 25 acres of ocean dedicated to the project, engendering highly efficient and sustainable cultivation practices in a community that had previously over-harvested. Gutierrez proudly explains, “We have developed a pilot plan that works. We — the five associations — are now dedicated exclusively to this type of work.”
The seaweed industry provides a variety of products for direct and indirect human uses worldwide, and have an estimated total value of 10 billion USD per year. It’s Gutierrez’s goal to sustain this industry independent of the government, securing an income for him and his fellow fishermen. “We want to add value to the product, but we also want to improve our quality of life and tell the government that the fishing communities will not mismanage the seaweed fields. We want to repopulate the seaweed to make a living with it because we are dedicated to this product,” he says.
