Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The atoll of Ontong Java, in the Solomon Islands, is unusual for a few reasons. First, it’s huge, one of the largest atolls in the South Pacific. Second, unlike the main islands of the Solomon Islands with their Melanesian populations, the people of Ontong Java are Polynesian. The third reason is that they have been able to maintain their traditional fisheries of beche-de-mer and trocus shell by following locally-designed conservation methods.
Figure 1. Ontong Java atoll. There are two main towns, Pelau and Luaniua.
That’s why I was surprised to see an article in the Solomon Star newspaper that starts out (emphasis mine):
$2m pay-out queried
FRIDAY, 04 JANUARY 2013 04:49
A CONTROVERSIAL $2 million was paid out by the government to the Malaita Outer Islands (MOI) people without Cabinet approval, sources say.
According to government sources, the money was paid out by the Ministry of Environment & Climate Change to the Luaniua and Pelau community to facilitate climate change programmes.
However, the source said after some disagreements within Cabinet, a cabinet paper was withdrawn following confusions because the amount was not enough and whether the money was for climate change or to buy beche-de-mer.
Can’t tell climate change from beche-de-mer? Reminds me of the old joke about watermelon and rat poison. The joke is, someone asks you “Do you know the difference between watermelon and rat poison?”. When you answer “No”, the person says “Well, I’m sure as heck not sending you to town for watermelon”.
So how could you mistake a beche-de-mer purchase for a climate change project? And what is a beche-de-mer when it’s at home, anyhow? As you might imagine, it’s a very South Pacific kind of story, with a huge surfeit of inconsistencies and uncertainties, and a correspondingly great paucity of empirically verifiable facts. What’s not to like?
A “beche-de-mer” is also called a “sea cucumber”. They are collected, dried, and sold to some Asian folks. I assume the eventual consumers are in a re-education camp somewhere and for some reason they have been brainwashed into thinking that sea cucumbers are good to eat, or maybe that’s just all that they are fed. I can’t conceive of another reason to eat them. Here’s one in his (her?) native habitat on the ocean bottom, a beche-de-mer, that is to say, not a concentration camp internee:
For self-defense, when you pick them up, beche-de-mer turn themselves inside out and evert their own intestines all over your hands. Sea cucumber innards are really sticky. Believe it or not, looking like the photo above, plus their habit of puking up their sticky stringy guts on the slightest excuse, plus resembling something you could buy in a seedy Times Square shop with batteries not included, that combined picture does not scream “eat me” on my planet … especially after they are boiled and smoked, or buried in the sand, or both as part of the curing process. The smell of them getting treated is enough to make a man lose his breakfast, and not even desire to find it again for some considerable span of time. The only worse smell is trocus drying on the beach. But beche-de-mer are valuable, as are trocus, so the folks bear the smell.
The trocus is a marine snail, whose bad fortune is that its shell is the kind of shell that most shell buttons are made from. You dive down to get them. You have to leave them out on the beach to let the snail inside die, and then you have to get it out of the shell. The rotting snail has a truly remarkably bad smell, an olfactory thermonuclear explosion that insinuates itself into the crevices of your cerebellum and that not even Lady Macbeth could wash out.
Measurements in centimetres, thank goodness. These two products plus copra (dried coconut meat) are about the only sources of income for many islanders around the Pacific. As a result, beche-de-mer and trocus are badly overfished around many islands. The people of Ontong Java, however, have been able to maintain their stocks of both trocus and beche-de-mer without problem up to the present. Here’s a description of how they did it.
Since a significant proportion of the atoll’s cash income is derived from beche-de-mer and trochus, the community understands the critical need for fisheries management.
The management measures adopted on Ontong Java are straightforward and easily understood by villagers. In combination, the measures are effective in achieving sustainable resource use and ensuring that the atoll’s limited income earning opportunities are protected. Because of communal resource ownership arrangements in the atoll, exclusion of fishermen from commercial fisheries (i.e., effort reduction by limited entry) is not a management option so that other measures must be adopted.
Management measures adopted for beche-de-mer and trochus fisheries involve (i) closed seasons, (ii) gear restrictions, and (iii) size limits. To permit resource regeneration in inshore areas, each fishery is closed every second calendar year. This ensures the availability of commercial quantities of both resources for harvesting in alternate years while concurrently providing a degree of stability in fishermen’s incomes.
With respect to gear, SCUBA and hookah diving equipment are banned in both fisheries. Beche-de-mer can only be harvested by free-diving from sail or motor·powered canoes or by using weighted spears on strings. Trochus is collected by free-diving or from along the shore·line at low tide. These harvest restrictions are designed to prevent resources in deeper waters from being exploited so that they will be available to repopulate inshore areas in those years when the fisheries are closed. Minimum size restrictions are also imposed in both fisheries to protect juveniles.
Community-based fishery management in Ontong Java has functioned effectively in facilitating sustainable resource use despite pressures resulting from commercial development opportunities. Ultimate responsibility for management rests with village elders, essentially the local government council. It is reported that there is virtually total compliance with communally·adopted management measures since fishermen who fail to comply incur a significant penalty, exclusion from the fisheries. SOURCE
In other words, one year they would fish trocus, and the next year they’d fish beche-de-mer. In neither case could they use certain gear, to avoid depleting the resource. Pretty brilliant, devised and put into place by the local folks. People in Ontong Java obey their chiefs so the bans were respected.
Here’s where the story gets ugly. Because of widespread depletion and shortages of the beche-de-mer resource in most places in the Solomons except Ontong Java, in 2005 the Solomon Islands Government did a foolish thing. They outlawed the export of beche-de-mer for everyone, sadly including Ontong Java in the ban. So the folks on Ontong Java, who have done nothing wrong and everything right, are being punished by the loss of about half their income. As you can imagine, this is wholly and wildly unpopular in Ontong Java, particularly since it has led to hunger in the atolls. The fishermen in Ontong Java have stored up their dried beche-de-mer, but they can’t sell them … and they are desperate to sell them, in order to feed their kids.
And this is where the climate change question comes in, I guess. Because the only climate change project that I can find in Ontong Java is called the Ontong Java Climate Change Project: Food and Water Security. And it seems to me like nothing would provide more immediate food security for people on the atoll than to buy up the stockpiles of beche-de-mer from the Ontong Java folks … well, that would be the best thing for food and economic security except for the logical thing, which would be lifting the beche-de-mer ban for the Ontong Java atoll. Of course, there is huge agitation to lift the ban, and also of course, the Government has done nothing. As the Solomon Star article goes on to say:
When this paper contacted Environment Minister Bradley Tovosia yesterday, he said he was not in a position to comment, advising us to talk to his permanent secretary.
However, several attempts to speak to the permanent secretary were unsuccessful.
I bring all of this up for several reasons. One is to point out that hastily imposed sanctions can cause harm. The Law of Unintended Consequences still roolz. Sadly, this is a lesson that even the US hasn’t learned—having good intentions is not enough.
Another is to note that some places in the world actually do have customary methods that work to maintain the resources. In the Solomon Islands, these traditional methods go by the generic name of “kastom”, the pijin word for “custom”. When we find kastom methods that do work, we should build on that. I note in passing that not all traditional methods are worth saving, some should be napalmed whenever they are encountered..
Another is to reiterate that funds given for climate change may end up in another arena entirely. Even if these particular funds had not been spent on beche-de-mer, the original project goal was to improve the local gardening practices in Ontong Java … man, that seems awful sketchy to me, trying to teach gardening to some people who have gardened successfully for generations on a pile of alkaline coral sand. Don’t know as how I’d try that.
But anyhow, that’s where the climate change funds would have gone if they hadn’t been hijacked by a bunch of wild rampaging beche-de-mer. And while I would like to believe that a bunch of well-meaning folks could find new ways to farm a pile of alkaline sand, I hardly see much connection to the climate in that quest.
As in many third world countries, what the development funds end up getting spent on may bear no relationship at all to what the funds were supposed to be spent on. Climate funds are among the worst offenders in this regard, propping up ridiculous schemes around the planet.
It seems to me to be just another and not all that major example of the great overarching plan of the IPCC, which is to siphon money off from the industrialized countries and send it to the developing countries. As with many things in the South Pacific, there are lots of parts in the story which are far from clear. One thing that you can depend on, though, one thing is totally clear—that the money used to buy beche-de-mer, the money supposedly intended for climate, didn’t come from the Solomon Islands. They don’t have money to waste on such nonsense … although to be fair, that’s never stopped them in the past.
My thanks to my good friend Mike Hemmer and his blog, The Native Iowan, where I first saw the story.
w.
PS—Please note that I do not mean to single out the Solomons Government or to say that they are unique or unusual. There are dozens and dozens of other examples out there of other countries exhibiting this level of foolishness, including the US at times. I write about the Solomons because I lived there for years, and for some reason, likely a congenital deficiency or genetic defect of some kind, I love the dang place and the people …
“More generally, do people on the “liberal” side of the moral precipice say and do disgusting things just out of their naivete — or do they knowingly, provocatively thrust down our throats their nauseating “preferences,” nutritional as well as political, abusing “each to his own taste” principle, and perverting the objectives of freedom because they cannot tolerate its burden?”
for the record I’m a libertarian. I see nothing disgusting with eating bugs, or live octopus, or dead cow, or sheep brains, or calves liver, or rotted milk, or a balut
Chinese folk belief attributes male sexual health and aphrodisiac qualities to the sea-cucumber, as it physically resembles a phallus, and uses a defence mechanism similar to ejaculation as it stiffens and squirts a jet of water at the aggressor.
I had it once, in Taiwan, out to dinner with my girlfriend’s family, had to eat it to be polite. No taste, but the texture made it a challenge to swallow, and keeping it down another. Chinese people will eat things for strange reasons.. They have this comment: “Good for men,” said with a wink, that explains it all.
OK Mosher, I can see maybe, possibly, eating a fertile duck egg. With a blindfold on. But I draw the line at bugs. You can have my share.
Steven Mosher, being a libertarian does not necessarily mean abusing a liberty to post videos that are obviously disgusting to others. It is being rather tasteless, IMO.
Jessie
For the interplay of traditional harvesting and national park management the following article is instructive, although the traditional haresting is implied rather than demonstrated, IMHO.
Ashmore Reef lies between Australia and Indonesia. It is Australian territory, but was fished by Indonesian fishers for, amongst other things, trochus and sea cucumbers. I am not sure what is available on the web but there have been systemic marine assessments of Australian waters as part of a national process to establish marine parks.
Ceccarelli, Daniela M., Beger, Maria, Kospartov, Marie C., Richards, Zoe T. and Birrell, Chico L. (2011) Population trends of remote invertebrate resources in a marine reserve: Trochus and holothurians at Ashmore Reef. Pacific Conservation Biology, 17 2: 132-140.
I believe there was an earlier study involving Ashmore (and Cartier reef) going back to the 1980s some time which assessed holuthurian and trochus populations. The picture then was fairly grim and the trends worse, as I recall.
For WUWTERs who are interested in history, the Solomon Islands (the Guadacanal campaign) were the very first step for the US on the road back to Tokyo in World War Two.
Please, some cephalopods are truly remarkable creatures. The Octopus not only alters its skin color but also the texture to match its surroundings; and it has 3 hearts, not to mention copper based blood. The intelligence is at or above that of a cat (by standards humans have tested), but the presence of 3 hearts may put it in a class by itself in terms of feeling and perception. Their mating is quite mysterious, and the mother starves to death while caring for her eggs. These really are beautiful creatures, and while I would not outlaw eating them entirely, at least properly kill them first.
BTW, those who decry statism and the role of government might learn something from the Solomons.
A few years ago the main source of government revenue and foreign exchance – the gold ridge mine – was closed by a group of armed thugs who closed the road to the coast. In the events that ensued governance in the Solomons collapsed completely, as did the rule of law. Groups of locals, groups of criminals, etc, etc ruled their bits and pieces. Murders occurred. For a while the Solomons was a failed island state. Governance has been patched up with the help of the UN and in particular Australian aid and police. But the state is very, very fragile.
“I had it once, in Taiwan, out to dinner with my girlfriend’s family, had to eat it to be polite. No taste, but the texture made it a challenge to swallow, and keeping it down another. Chinese people will eat things for strange reasons.. They have this comment: “Good for men,” said with a wink, that explains it all.”
############
Taiwan has one of my most favorite delicacies. Duck blood. If you have never tried it you should. When you go for “hot pot” your host may very well offer it to you, don’t say no. Visually it looks like liver colored tofu. It is delicious.
Climate Ace says:
January 5, 2013 at 2:58 pm
“BTW, those who decry statism and the role of government might learn something from the Solomons.”
There can be too much of a good thing. When your government makes 30,000 laws a year (if your American, that’s your government) you better reserve some days to read them. You must obey them all. And the ones before.
Good luck.
This is why, if you live in an Asian country, it is absolutely essential that you learn the language at least to the level needed to read the menu.
(Of course, it is very rude not to learn the language anyway.)
Philhowerton
Whichever way the quill pointed when it hit the ground would determine where they fished.
The proposition is that fish behave randomly with respect to wind direction.
There is a significant correlation between wind direction and probability of fishing success in some circumstances. In lakes where winds whip up waves and create a local surge in water height, some species will move in to the newly-disturbed areas to pick over worms etc that get disturbed.
Dirk
There can be too much of a good thing. When your government makes 30,000 laws a year (if your American, that’s your government) you better reserve some days to read them. You must obey them all. And the ones before.
I agree that there needs to be a balance between what governments do and what the private sector does. Getting the balance right and maintaining it there is difficult.
BTW, 30,000 is around 100 laws a working day. Where does the figure come from?
Climate Ace says:
January 5, 2013 at 1:01 am
Indeed, it is inspiring, and attempts have been made to replicate it. It’s widely known in fisheries circles, which is why the 2005 closure for them is even more puzzling.
My dear friend, you probably don’t realize how funny it is that you think this is an unusual, or out of the ordinary, or “cherry picked” example. I could give you lots of them, and for lots bigger dollars. To demonstrate that this is not cherry picked, consider the Clean Development Mechanism, which I discuss in Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t. There I discuss the oddity that money comes from Greens and others in Europe, where they wouldn’t dream of building a hydroelectric dam because it’s so bad for the environment and injurious to the climate. The oddity is that the Green money went mostly to China … and in China, most of it was used to build hydroelectric dams. The Chinese must have laughed at the Europeans giving them money to build hydroelectric dams, I’m glad none of my bucks went to that fiddle.
Then in CDM-ania I discussed the case of India, regarding which the usually pro-AGW Scientific American says “… most of the carbon-offset projects in India fail to meet the CDM requirements set by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.” And man, “fail to meet” is definitely an understatement in some of the cases.
And of course, we have the egregious examples of the factories that produce (or more accurately threaten to produce) CFCs, and then are paid climate change monies to not produce them. That’s a huge climate money-making scam involving millions and millions of dollars. Then there are whole forests that only exist on paper, where they soak up imaginary carbon and are sold over and over to each new sucker. In addition, fraud is legendary in the selling of carbon indulgences, where supposedly the money pays for some flavor of carbon-offsetting activity.
Here’s the problem. All of the carbon indulgences that are being bought and sold represent something that is invisible. There’s no way to photograph a forest, or even visit a forest, and determine if it is absorbing carbon. All that people are selling is a piece of paper that says that people somewhere halfway ’round the world are planting trees. Or even better, that those people promise to forego chopping trees down …
Here’s the question, Ace. How much corruption would you predict there would be in a market where a bunch of promoters are selling invisible indulgences to a host of guilt-ridden Westerners who mostly can’t be bothered to see if their dollar actually plants a tree?
Call me crazy, but I’d say it would be corrupt as hell, and guess what? The number of prosecutions for fraud bears me out.
So, far from being a single “cherry-picked” example of the spending of “climate change” funds on other than climate, it is one of many examples of a totally common occurrence that climate funds go awry. Curiously, in this case it’s a pretty innocent example, less fraud than the righting of a grave wrong.
Because I’d say that if that the money went to the fishermen and their families in Ontong Java, to me, that’s a very different and far preferable outcome than having the money line the pockets of some corrupt factory owner in Singapore …
My regards,
w.
Alexander Feht said…”Steven Mosher, being a libertarian does not necessarily mean abusing a liberty to post videos that are obviously disgusting to others. It is being rather tasteless, IMO.”
Alex! Get a grip my friend. Until Mr. Mosher ties you to a chair, inserts hooks into your eyelids, ensures that you are awake and then plays the video in front of you, where is the abuse? You don’t have to watch unless you want to. It was you who was going on about ‘liberal’ while espousing what might well be deemed the very ‘liberal’ concept of abuse of you by what someone else likes. What? Really?
Liberty should always mean that you have the right to say whatever you want, even all the un-PC terms and words that are currently on the banned list. But liberty should also mean that I can turn my back and walk away if I do not care for it. I didn’t watch the video and guess what? I didn’t feel abused either.
eo says:
January 5, 2013 at 1:23 am
I’ve read that in the first half of the 1900s they were taught by the Japanese how to harvest and prepare beche-ce-mer for shipment.
w.
McComberBoy,
There are things people do and say to annoy others. Yes, this is a part of the burden of liberty to make an effort and ignore their attempts. On the other hand, it is a part of the joy of liberty to be able to point out the provocative and tasteless character of these attempts.
Wills
My friend, as we have seen recently in during the GFC and the near-destruction of the global economy, the private sector, including notably in the US banking and financial industries, can be just as corrupt as the public sector – but arguably more efficient at being corrupt. Think derivatives, for example.
Corruption is, therefore, neither an argument for or against either government or private sector activity. Nor is it an argument for or against AGW – although there is certainly a trend of BAU folk on this blog who focus on government corruption but who do not spend a nanosecond on, for example, the record of fossil industry corruption. IMHO, this cherrypicking is, in itself, quite revealing.
IMHO, where there is corruption whether public or private, corruption itself is the issue and should be addressed as such.
As for AGW, we appear to be starting from a different assessment of the science.
IMHO, AGW represents a massive market failure. IMHO, while economists, the CEOs of industry, consumers and governments persist in viewing the environment as an externality, as well as something of an infinite source and infinite sump, AGW or the like is more or less inevitable.
Sooner or later, like it or not, we get environmental blowback.
Climate Ace says:
January 5, 2013 at 1:01 am
“In relation to the transport job ad, it is easy to be a smartarse with ads like that, but a bit of serious thought shows that it may well be money well spent.”
========
Smartarse? I assumed that the WUWT context would indicate why I posted the ad. I should have spelt that out. Mea culpa.
If my Government chooses to help the Solomons Govt with the unarguable transport problems you outline, I have no objection at all (provided they keep within their AusAid budget). What I do object to, and strongly, is the job’s listed association with ‘climate change’, which I regard as dishonest. And given the WUWT context do I need to spell out why?
UN-schmoozing. Junk science. Just plain wrong. Our current Australian Government at its deceitful worst.
My problem? As a member of the pre-WW2 generation I was brought up to value the truth, rather than accept lies or misrepresentation. As in ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’. My mother would have punished me otherwise, and I would have deserved it.
I’ve done a lot of scuba diving and seen many a sea cucumber. Revolting is the word that comes to mind. Are they edible? How are they eaten?
The first time I saw a grouper, I ordered one in the restaurant that night; never a sea-cucumber.
Sea cucumbers are considered in Asian male magical thinking as empowerment of masculine physicality.
Don’t ask me why, they just are.
Like oysters, I suppose. Don’t ask me why about them, either. Dried, powdered rhino horn, bear gallbladders and tiger bits. All I can think is that magic, like gold, is where you find it.
(Not true about gold either, BTW.)
Old Ranga
What I do object to, and strongly, is the job’s listed association with ‘climate change’, which I regard as dishonest. And given the WUWT context do I need to spell out why?
If you accept AGW science, which is the official position of both the Australian Government and of the Australian Opposition, there is absolutely nothing dishonest about placing an ad in the context of AGW, particularly when the engineering works include repairing flood damage and re-routing roads (I assume from coastal erosion).
In fact, the reverse is true. It would be dishonest to pretend that the job has nothing to do with preparing for AGW.
BTW, our money sort of looks like it is mostly being spent on useful things like repairing and replacing bridges and on road infrastructure more generally.
http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ausaid.gov.au%2Fcountries%2Fpacific%2Fsolomon-islands%2FPages%2Feconomic-infrastructure-init1.aspx&ei=GwTpUMiCOovHmQXppYHoDw&usg=AFQjCNETAh_-oTWuXrIN1QJk842zcaIeCQ&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.dGY
Phil Howerton says:
January 5, 2013 at 8:48 am
Phil, thanks for an interesting story. I fear it sets off my urban legend alarm, for several reasons. First and foremost, when your health, well-being, and very survival depend on your ability to find the fish, after generations of fishing the same area, the local fishermen know a whole lot about the local ocean. Local fishermen’s knowledge in most Pacific Islands is very specific and detailed.
Plus, of course, there is status in being a good fisherman. So I’ve met lots of local Pacific fishermen, but I’ve not met any who would resort to such an ephemeral method. Instead, they’ve studied the ocean their whole lives, so they would say “I think the bonito are going to be on the south of the island” or “no use fishing for coral trout today, the wind is wrong”. And more often than not they were right.
Second, in many of the islands there are traditional fishing grounds that are actively defended by their historical owners. On most islands, it wouldn’t be wise to front up and explain to the traditional owners that you have the right to fish some random location just because some freakin’ feather told you to fish there.
Third, very, very few of the Pacific Islanders I’ve know have been of the “let’s flip a coin” variety. The idea of appealing to some random chance rarely comes up in Pacific societies that I know of. Some societies love to gamble, the Asian folks and the Native Americans come to mind. They gambled since forever.
Other traditional societies, like those of the Pacific, know little of the turn of a card, the roll of the dice, or the flip of a coin. In traditional Pacific societies, none of those existed. So there’s little historical precedent for picking fishing grounds on the fall of a feather.
Fourth, the lack of detail. Which islanders, where? Which Europeans? When did it happen?
Fifth, the ways of the noble fishies, though mysterious, are far from random. Even when you can’t tell where they are, you may be able to tell where they aren’t. Feather points that way, only a fool follows it.
Sixth, fishermen are proud. They would not want to be seen relying on dumb luck, even when they do. If they have a good catch, it’s not dumb luck, it’s because they have a “nose for fish”, or the like.
Seventh, I’ve never seen a serious scientific study that has said that where the fish went was random and totally unpredictable.
Eighth, it’s too neat in a moralistic sense. The wisdom of the noble savage is upheld, the European scoffers are humbled, nature is shown to not favor anyone, science reveals the truth. It’s a whole little morality play, neatly wrapped up in ribbons and bows.
So with all due respect to you and your professor, my opinion as a man who has fished and hung around with South Pacific fishermen is that the professor believed and repeated an urban legend. Gotta admit, I’ve done the same.
w.
Willis
I have heard a story that I have been curious about ever since.
Have you ever seen islanders fishing for Long Toms using a small kite dragging an artificial lure skipping along the surface, and spider web to tangle in Long Tom teeth rather than a hook? If so, did it work?
Willis, another fine article. One minor nitpick in the 2nd to last sentence, maybe a couple of extra words …
I think we can safely assume now that there are no unspoiled garden spots on Planet Earth safe from the lure of corruption, resulting in a non-stop network of rent-seekers. Agendas are the order of the day, the most ubiquitous being ‘how to take someone else’s money using red and green political strategy’. Wherever there remains an enclave of common sense, it will soon be put upon by the local true-believers with urging and assistance from their international red and green comrades. At the end of this game everyone is on welfare, that is to say everyone is picking somebody else’s pocket. The inevitable crunch at the conclusion when there are no pockets left to pick should be spectacular. Sorry about the digression.
Proof positive they will let anyone in these days, even those that are gullible enough to swallow the AGW Hoax hook, line and sinker and working non-stop to excuse the foolishness and corruption of the Climate Syndicate. There was a time “libertarian” fell squarely on the side of fiscal responsibility, but apparently that now includes writing blank checks with space for at least 13 digits ( Trillions ) and before they’re through they will no doubt demand quadrillions.
There was a time “libertarian” meant staying out of other people’s business but apparently that now includes modern liberalism and its God complex of dictating what fuel they should and shouldn’t use to keep warm (not to mention what they eat, drink, smoke, wear, farm, thermostat setting, etc … ad nauseum). When did the new Libertarian outreach program officially begin?