Sustainable artisanal beche-de-mer fisheries in PNG

• National Fisheries Authority, Papua New Guinea
• National Research Institute, Papua New Guinea
• Milne Bay Provincial Fisheries Administration, Papua New Guinea

Rural people in PNG need cash for school fees, supporting the local church, other cultural obligations, clothing and to a lesser degree, food. For remote-island and many coastal families, a major proportion of these funds comes from the harvest of sedentary inshore resources such as bche-de-mer. The pressure on these resources has steadily risen in recent years and there are signs of serious overfishing.
The proportion of sandfish (a shallow water, easily harvested and valuable species) exported has dropped dramatically. Deeper, less accessible species comprise an increasing proportion of the catch. Similar pressures are being applied to trochus and pearl shell. Fishers have also had to fish more remote areas as they deplete resources close to their villages. This problem pervades most inshore regions in the Asia-Pacific region where overfished or declining bche-de-mer fisheries are the norm.
The government of Papua New Guinea enunciated a policy of promoting community-based management but had no mechanism or legislative backing for such an outcome. The Fisheries component of an AusAID/World Bank Rural Development Sectoral Review recommended that 'Project assistance could be provided for the development and trial of processes for the establishment of community-based management of resources within areas of customary marine tenure'.
This project provided the first real attempt at establishing realistic and achievable community-based fisheries management. It was designed to increase levels of environmental awareness in target communities, also to develop a process of considerable benefit to the environment and readily transferable throughout PNG.

The goal of the project was to establish sustainable artisanal bche-de-mer fisheries. The overall objective of the project was thus to develop and trial a management mechanism that established sustainable artisanal bche-de-mer fisheries, through the incorporation of socioeconomic considerations in the development of community-based bche-de-mer fisheries management plans.

The approach adopted was based on the Facilitated Community Action Process (FCAP) that had been used through a three-year AusAID project in Samoa. The first steps of the process were to establish the willingness of the community to participate, to assess their awareness of community problems and to agree on a plan to solve these problems. On reaching agreement, project staff members (acting as facilitators) were invited to work with the community.
The second step included interviews with key people in the village in order to recognise the traditional leaders, to gain knowledge about community activities and to identify people to work with in the community. The facilitators (two graduates from the University of Papua New Guinea contracted by the National Research Institute and trained at the Australian Maritime College) initiated this phase. The traditional leaders asked the facilitation team to work directly with the individual clans.
Separate meetings were held with the six-clan leaders to gain their support and to encourage them to involve all their members in the process. After this a series of meetings was held with each of the clans. Initial participation in these meetings was achieved by encouraging people to identify pictures of key marine species and then provide the local name, and also by promoting discussion about posters depicting 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' marine environments. Finally, community members were made aware of different ways of maintaining a 'healthy' marine environment. The discussion generated concerns within the community about the present situation and an awareness of actions that could be taken to improve this situation.
Project staff then facilitated meetings with the different clans to identify problems and their impacts on the community. After a clear identification of the problems, causes and solutions were discussed, and actions that were required to achieve the solution were proposed. The research team then compiled the information into 'problem and solution trees' for the whole village.

The community selected to participate in the development of community-based management arrangements was Obulaku village on Kiriwina Island in the Trobriand Islands. Obulaku village consists of 62 households, with a population of 298. The village contained six separate clans. Most people only speak the local language Kilivila with only a few speaking English or Pijin. The approach adopted was based on the Facilitated Community Action Process (FCAP) that had been used through a three-year AusAID project in Samoa. A series of meetings were held with each of the clans to identify problems, causes, their impacts on the community, solutions, and actions required. Some of the actions generated from the process included a set of precautionary measures, for example size limits, a ban on the use of destructive harvesting techniques, and bans on dumping of rubbish in the marine area, to improve the marine environment.
A series of surveys established baseline data about the village and assessed the relative importance of bche-de-mer to the community. Although the survey results confirmed that bche-de-mer provides a significant proportion of the income of Obulaku households, the villagers do rely on a number of other sources of income, which will become more important if bche-de-mer catches decline further or there is a reduction in the amount that can be legally harvested.
As part of the community-based management program in Obulaku, the community agreed to monitor their bche-de-mer harvest. The project staff developed a simple diary for recording the daily harvest of bche-de-mer. It was observed that the value of sandfish harvested by fishers from Obulaku was significantly higher than landings by fishers from other villagers, and there were less rejects. The researchers concluded that the community-management process made fishers from Obulaku aware of the importance of harvesting the larger size classes of sandfish from both a conservation and economic perspective.