Mohammed Jarrad and his four-man crew left the dock in their slow-chugging dhoni at five this morning. When I meet them unloading the day’s catch just as they sun disappears it means they’ve been at it for fourteen hours, a typical day for a Maldivian fishermen. The haul? About 150 kilos (330 pounds). Not bad, he says, about average. “Though sometimes we have days when we catch 500 kilos … but those are fewer and fewer.”
Photo: Fiona Stewart
As he and his team hand the fish up onto the dock from the back of the flat-decked boat they fill plastic crate after plastic crate with dorado, blue and yellow fin tuna, skipjack and one sizable barracuda. By law, every fish caught in Maldivian waters has to be caught by “pole and line.” No net fishing, no bottom trawling no seining. Which is a good thing for the health of the fishing grounds, which extend 200 miles off the edges of the Maldives 26 atolls. Yet there are still problems.
Sharks, which used to be prolific here, are largely gone due to over fishing (thanks, as in so many parts of the world, to China’s demand for shark fins). Sea cucumber numbers are quickly declining and the government stopped issuing export licenses for fishing for giant clams to prevent serious exhaustion and possible extinction. Tuna and the other popular edibles, while still abundant, have all diminished for a simple reason: Demand. The permanent population of the Maldives has boomed in the past decade, to nearly 400,000. Add to that the 600,000 tourists now coming every year and the pressure mounts.
“Unfortunately we see the pressure on the fish,” says marine biologist Anke Hofmeister, citing the lobster haul as example. “Sometimes the fishermen will bring in female lobsters with the eggs scraped off, hoping we won’t notice (taking female lobsters is illegal), and often they are smaller than the law permits. But the demand is high from the resorts, so too often some buyers are looking the other way.”
As a percentage of the country’s business, fishing has slipped as tourism has boomed. In the 1970s fishing provided thirty percent of the nation’s revenues; in the 1990s, fifteen percent, in 2000, just six percent. By comparison, tourism now provides over forty percent of the country’s GDP.
Watching these tuna fisherman do their job is one of the wildest fishing scenes I’ve ever seen. A commercial fishing boat here is rudimentary in comparison to much of the rest of the world. Twenty to twenty five feet long, wooden, with a long, flat deck interrupted only by a small, three-sided cabin, which is used mostly for shade during the long, hot days at sea. A long rudder, usually manipulated by the captain’s foot, does the steering.
Eight to ten fishermen (always men, never women) bait long poles and cast off the deck simultaneously, and have been known to reel in more than one thousand tuna in an hour. Boats with automated poles can be even more “productive.”
Half the catch in the Maldives is for local use, the other half is frozen or canned and exported to
Southeast Asia, a $50 million a year enterprise. Mohammed J. and his four-person crew go out six days a week, motoring at least two hours from home each morning. His take this day for the 150 kilos will be about $375, split among five men. On average, each man will earn around $350 a week.
As the setting sun turns the sky purple and orange I ask how often they see green turtles – illegal to catch, but once a mainstay of the local diet here – and he says “every day.”
“It is hard to watch them just swim by,” he says of the turtles, which can weight up to four hundred pounds. “But we do.”
I trust that he’s telling me the truth, though he looks away as he is answering. It’s hard in these communities for them to change their habits; certainly his father and grandfather and great-grandfather fed their families off green turtles often.
It has been several years in coming, but this morning the Maldives first waste-to-wealth environmental center opened on Kunfunadhoo Island. The brainchild of Soneva Fushi owner Sonu Shivadsani, the hands-on work of creating and overseeing the building the so-called Eco-Centro is credited to Wayne “Wadzy” Wadsworth, an Australian permaculturist and eco-engineer who’s been hatching the place in the heart of the jungle for many months.
If sustainability and treading lightly are the goals on this remote island Eco-Centro should go a long way to achieving that end. From the burning of fallen trees and those cleared to make paths, comes charcoal which is used for cooking on the island, saving $50,000 a year previously spent on … charcoal. Compost is turned into bio-gas which, among other things, helps power all those hot showers. Cardboard is composted, glass and coconut husks are shredded (by separate machines) and reused. Bamboo – a great carbon dioxide vacuum – has been planted to offset any carbon put into the blue sky above the island. Alongside the island’s organic gardens and drinking water filtering system, self-sufficiency is getting closer. Now they’ll just have to work on the organic wines. In casks, not bottles.
In the audience for the grand opening were the country’s vice president, a handful of local elected officials, journalists, students from nearby Eydhafushi and even a few ”spies” – employees from nearby resorts keen on potentially mimicking the enviro center … which would be the highest form of compliment.
Sonu Shivdasani and his wife Eva Malmström Shivdasani, respectively Founder/Chairman/CEO and Creative Director of the Six Senses resorts scattered mostly around Southeast Asia, hardly need another pat on the back. Virtually every travel magazine and association in the world has at some point during the past dozen years awarded them every “best of” award in the book and every “green” group in the world has lauded their sustainable approach to the resort business. What they do need – and nothing would make them happier – are imitators.
Photo: Fiona Stewart
I’ve been around the world and seen a variety of hoteliers trying very hard to reduce their property’s footprint as well as every bizarre stretch imaginable to claim “eco-resort” status … whatever that term has come to mean. In far too many cases resorts add “eco-resort” to their promotional literature based simply on having placed a card on the side table next to the bed that says if you hang your used towel on the back of the door rather than toss it on the floor, they won’t wash it … thus saving all that hot water and suds. Which is a start. But Sonu, Eva and their teams around the world go so much farther. If every hotelier and resort followed their model, carbon neutrality would quickly become the status quo among resorts of all stars.
Here in the Maldives, Soneva Fushi is nearest to Sonu and Eva’s hearts because it was their first hotel (today their portfolio boasts 26 resorts either open or under development and 41 spas they either own or manage). Sonu – born in London to an Indian family that made a fortune exporting oil and more from Nigeria – leased the jungled island in 1990, in the heart of the Baa atoll. Then in his late 20s, he intended it as a gift for his wife, a former Swedish fashion model.
His idea was to build a kind of Robinson Crusoe escape for the two of them. But … one thing led to another and five years later they opened their first hotel; today the 65-villa island hideaway has made all those lists of both the most luxurious and most green in the world. Which was the goal from the beginning. (Forty percent of their guests are returnees and have been labeled Slow-Lifers: Sustainable – Local – Organic – Wholesome Learning – Inspiring – Fun – Experiences.)
Photo: Fiona Stewart
So … what does qualify as a super-green resort these days? Here it includes a brand new, island-wide recycling eco-center. Air conditioning provided from a unique underwater system that delivers cold water from the depths of the ocean (a $1 million investment that Sonu anticipates will pay for itself in four years.) An organic garden. Recycled … everything, from jute garbage bags to elephant dung paper. A carbon offset program (two percent of every villa rental goes into a fund to offset pollution created by the international flights, float plane and boat rides necessary to get here.) A heat recovery system, which captures heat off the island’s generators for all those long hot showers. Filtered drinking water and sparkling water made on-site. And, by September, the whole operation will be entirely solar.
“We have committed to being completely carbon neutral by the end of next year (2010),” says Sonu, who I first met here in 2005, just weeks just after the tsunami waves raced across the Maldives and through his resort.
The country’s new president is following Soneva Fushi’s example closely. One week ago Mohammed Nasheed committed to making his country the first carbon neutral country in the world by 2020. Among the first persons he called was Sonu. “The minister of tourism and minister of environment have been here many times,” Soneva Fushi’s general manager Philippe Cavory says. “They are all very interested in how we actually do the things we say we’re going to do.”
Cavory points out that most hoteliers would look at Sonu’s way of doing business and scoff at its seemingly high cost, i.e. 400 local employees when 200 could do the job or the experimental air conditioning system that required $1 million up front. “Most people in the hotel business would see that as too much. But the thing about Sonu is that he’s not looking at what’s going to happen ten years from now, he’s looking at 200 years from now. He wants to keep this area clean and growing and he wants to keep the employees happy because he imagines their great-great-grandkids working as waiters here one day.”
Best of all, no luxury sacrificed due to all the green-ness. Sonu is not against fun either; Soneva Fushi boasts the only drive-in theater in the Maldives, though everyone arrives by bicycle rather than car.
Photo: Fiona Stewart
While I admire all of Sonu’s sustainability efforts, what I most admire is the resort’s commitment to the local community. Soneva Fushi recently paid for a new pre-school on the nearby island of Eydhafushi. Each year it hosts week-long Nature Trips bringing one hundred kids from the capital city of Male to the island to teach them about the wildlife here … and often how to swim. “It’s amazing,” says Anke Hofmeister, the resort’s fulltime marine biologist, “that many of these island kids have never learned to swim, nor know anything about their own backyard.”
In June Soneva Fushi – and its sister resort, Soneva Gili, water bungalows located just a 20-minute boat ride from the country’s lone airport in Male –will start promoting what they’re calling a “win-win” program. Come for 14 days and volunteer four days as a teacher, hospital worker, farming assistant or with the resorts’ waste-to-wealth project and they’ll give you fourteen more nights’ accommodation … free.
Photo: Fiona Stewart
Late on a Sunday afternoon, hardly a day of rest in this part of the world, the small island of Eydhafushi is quiet. The men, most of who go to sea each day to fish or work at one of six nearby tourist resorts, are absent. School is out for a week’s holiday so kids of various ages scamper up and down the short, dusty streets. The women of the island of 3,000 are mostly in doorways or small backyards or sitting in laid-back sling chairs made of strong twine strung from metal frames lining the streets.
Like all Maldivian towns this is laid out in squares. From the start of any street you can stare down it and see blue ocean at the other end. A four-hundred-foot tall, red and white striped telephone tower adorned with a variety of satellite dishes shouts modernity has arrived; the head scarves worn by all women over thirty suggests a powerful connection to centuries-old tradition hangs on. As I walk the streets, obviously an outsider, I stop to chat people up and the responses are friendly, smiling. Everyone I meet – man, woman, child – gives me good, hard handshake as a hello. Though poor, this is not an impoverished place.
Despite the booming tourist business that exists on islands all around, most of these people have little contact with outsiders. Tourists in the Maldives are confined largely by geography to the resort islands. Water surrounds and there aren’t shuttles or ferries or water taxis to take people easily from island to island. During the recently ended thirty-year dictatorship, locals were strongly discouraged from mingling with visitors, concerned that negative influences from the west might rub off. Tourists drink alcohol, run around mostly naked and come to party, after all. By comparison, the local populace does not imbibe and is called to prayer several times a day (though there is reportedly a sizable heroin habit among many of the Maldive’s young people).
Concrete-block-and-cement walls lining the streets are painted in bright orange and purple and faded blue; older walls are made from pieces of coral, a construction now forbidden due to efforts to preserve the fragile reefs. Many of the walls bear stenciled black-and-red “Vote for Saleem” signs, which rather than feel defacing are actually a reminder of a positive thing that’s come to the Maldives in the last few years: Democracy.
I visit with a woman dressed in purple from head to toe; she is bundling reeds for roofs, explaining she is the breadwinner since her husband is sick. Fifty-two, she came here thirty years ago from a nearby, smaller island. In that time, she says, everything has gotten better. The economy. Politics. The way of life, including fifty channels of satellite television. And yes, she worries about rising sea levels, but primarily for her kids. “The seas are climbing … but what can I do?” is the plaint I hear from most here.
On the far side of the island a Woman’s Collective has turned out for a late-afternoon communal sweeping of a corner of the island. Bent at the waist, wearing headscarves and long dresses, they whisk brooms over the sand/dirt ground along the edge of the sea. Paid a small salary by the local government, the clean up is a good thing. But a bad side of island life here is evident just behind where they sweep: Piles of plastic garbage bags, which apparently did not make the once-a-month barge that carries garbage away to a nationwide rubbish-island near Male.
A new port reinforced by thick cement walls has been dredged in the last year, long enough to accommodate thirty to forty fishing boats. It was needed post-tsunami, which turned the local fishing fleet into matchsticks in December 2004. “You ask where the tsunami hit,” responds a 70-year-old man in green polo shirt, faded madras skirt and red Nike flip-flops. “Everywhere. That wave came from every direction at once.” He lucked out when the wave hit, since he was twenty feet up a coconut tree knocking off cocos.
Deeply tanned, his shaved head boasting a thin veneer of graying stubble, he tells me he still fishes when there’s a bit of wind, necessary because his boat has only a sail, no motor. A jack of all island trades, he’s fished, collected coconuts, worked construction and, not so long ago, was paralyzed over half his body due to some unexplained (to him) malady. Today he shows off his good health with the strongest handshake yet.
Swimming along the coral edge of what transplanted marine biologist Anke Hofmeister calls her “home reef” the line dividing the shallows and deep blue is exact. To our left in the brightly sunlit coral, hundreds of shiny reef fish dart and feed; in the dark blue, just to our right, which descends straight down a dramatic hundred foot wall, swim the Maldivian big guys – jackfish, tuna and red snapper, each over one hundred pounds. An occasional spotted eagle ray elegantly flaps its way past in the dark blue below the surface of a calm Indian Ocean.
Photo: Fiona Stewart
During a mile-long swim paralleling the beach we spy an incredibly beautiful and vast variety of wrasses, clown, surgeon and parrot fish. A dusky moray eel peeks out of its coral hideaway. A solitary hawksbill turtle flippers past. And a square-headed porcupine fish attempts to hide itself deep inside a rock crevice. As Anke dives to tickle an anemone hugged tight to the coral, a nasty titan triggerfish nips at her; they can be aggressive little buggers and when they bite literally take a chunk of flesh. The shallow, sandy floor running to the beach is heavy with gray-beige coral, colorful clams and even a few handsome sea cucumbers (black with red dots).
The relative health of the coral is somewhat remarkable because recent history here hasn’t been particularly kind to it. In 1998, thanks to shifting ocean patterns associated with El Niño, sea temperatures rose above 32 degrees C for more than two weeks badly “bleaching” the coral (the killing of the symbiotic algae that lives within the coral and gives it color). Between seventy and ninety percent of all the reefs surrounding the Maldives 26 atolls are estimated to have died as a result. Slowly they are trying to come back.
Photo: Brian Skerry, National Geographic Magazine
While that temperature rise was considered a fluke, today after our swim I ask Anke to guess at the water temps now. “Around 31 degrees C (88 degrees F),” she says, though she not guessing since she’s worked and swum here nearly daily for the past four years. “For this time of year, that seems to be normal now. In two more months it will be colder, down to 27, 28 degrees.”
In 1998 scientists were astonished that the water temperatures could rise so high, so fast. Now they are worried it may one day become the norm. With approximately 80 per cent of the 1,192 coral islets that make up the island nation just three feet or less above sea level, making it the world’s lowest country, the temperature of the ocean is very important. If the temperatures stay high and the coral continues to suffer and die, there goes another barrier protecting these already fragile, at-risk islands.
While warming and rising seas and coral die-offs are everyday concerns throughout the Maldives, as Anke and I walk back down the beach another environmental worry is evident: Many of the beautiful white sand beaches are narrowing, on some islands quite dramatically. It’s estimated that fifty percent of the inhabited islands and forty five percent of those with resorts only are suffering from some degree of coastal erosion.
Some of the beach loss is due to man. Continued development demands more sand for cement (though much of the sand used for building in the Maldives today comes from Sri Lanka or India). Increased wave action due to more boat traffic takes a toll. But a major blame is placed on the tsunami of 2004, which sucked massive amounts of sand off the beaches, and it never returned.
When you fly above the Maldives it’s easy to see there is no one shape characterizing the outline of the exterior of the atolls or the hundreds of islands sheltered inside them. Strong tides and powerful currents shape each, there is no one pattern thus no single way to reduce or limit the erosion. On different islands different attempts have been made to save the beaches, including building of seawalls or jetties, dredging and pumping. In some cases it is working, in others not.
On one hand it’s easy to think of these coral atolls and the islands they protect as tough and impervious, imagining that they’ve been here a long time and will be here for a longer time to come. But a short swim and a simple walk on a beautiful, hot, hot day quickly reminds just how fragile, how vulnerable they can be.
Photo: Fiona Stewart
The call to Friday prayers on Eydhafushi are spread island-wide by plastic loudspeakers affixed to poles and buildings scattered around the Maldivian sand-spit, home to three thousand. When it comes I’m floating a quarter mile offshore and it wakes me from a heat (90 degrees F) and calm-sea reverie; a reminder that here, near where the Arabian Sea melds into the Indian Ocean, we are in an all-Muslim nation. (I was reminded last night too, with a chuckle, when the man in matching linen who brought me a bottle of chilled rose and bragged about it’s ‘fruity’ taste admitted his lips had never touched alcohol.)
Earlier in the morning, before the day’s heat arrived, I’d walked a nearby jungled island, crows and rails darting among the pandanas and palms, camouflaged lizards and introduced rabbits scooting across the sandy paths. The foliage was dense and green, the island far more substantial than most in the Maldives, which are typically little more than sand and sea rubble piled up on coral. Given that even a substantial island here rises just six feet above sea level, as much as anywhere in the world the Maldives are threatened by rising sea levels.
A fisherman I met early this morning shared what I expect will be a drumbeat of anecdotal reports I hear during the next couple weeks of small islands that used to be habitable at least for day fishermen have already disappeared under rising seas.
It’s been a big week and a big past few months politically and environmentally in the Maldives, thanks largely to last November’s election of Mohammed Nasheed as president. A human rights activist who had been imprisoned and tortured by the man he ousted, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed – the first democratically elected president in the nation’s history – has quickly turned into a vocal leader, especially among island nations, on the environmental issues facing his 1,200 island country.
One of his first pronouncements upon election was that he was going to start setting aside money for and start looking at land to buy to move his people, to get them out of harm’s way if sea levels in fact rise as expected. He began diverting a portion of the country’s billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into a new homeland account, an insurance policy against climate change. “It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,” said Nasheed, also known as Anni.
Yesterday Nasheed was on an atoll near to where I float, assuring its five hundred people that he would at least help them find an island nearby where they could start growing crops. He also assured them he would grow its school to extend to 11th and 12th grades. Just last Sunday, in an op-ed piece written for The Observer, he announced that by 2020 the Maldives would be carbon neutral.
At 41, Nasheed is a rising star in Asia, where he has been compared to Nelson Mandela. Before taking office the new president asked Maldivians to move forward without rancor or retribution – an astonishing call, given that Nasheed had gone to jail 23 times, been tortured and spent 18 months in solitary confinement. The Gayoom “sultanate” was an iron-fisted regime that ran the police, army and courts, and which banned rival parties. Public flogging, banishment to island gulags and torture were routinely used to suppress dissent and the fledging pro-democracy movement. Gayoom was “elected” president six times in 30 years – but never faced an opponent. However, public pressure grew and last year he conceded that democracy was inevitable.
One good thing Gayoom helped implement was a booming, high-end resort economy; as a result the Maldives are the richest country in South Asia, with average incomes reaching $4,600 a year. Corrupt officials, unfortunately, skimmed much of that wealth, off; official figures show almost half of Maldivians earn less than $1 a day.
To make his environmental pledges come to reality, there will have to be sacrifices. To raise cash, his government will sell off state assets, reduce the cabinet and turn the presidential palace into the country’s first university.
“It’s desperate,” the president says. “We are a 100% Islamic country and democracy came from within. Do you want to lose that because we were denied the money to deal with the poverty created by the dictatorship?” Like so many young, out-of-the-good-old-boy leaders taking reins around the world, the Maldives has quickly and forcefully jumped on the bandwagon. It should be fun to watch.
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