ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Endangered Turtle Shares Fate With Fishermen

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2002 (IPS) - The key to protecting the endangered Olive Ridley turtle lies in enforcing laws that already protect the rights of traditional fishermen on the coast of India’s eastern state of Orissa, say leading conservationists.

Orissa’s impoverished artisanal fishermen and the Olive Ridley, which happens to have its biggest rookeries or nesting grounds on the sandy beaches of the coastal state, have a common enemy – rapacious owners of mechanised trawlers who are powerful enough to defy the laws of the land.

Twenty years ago, the Orissa government banned all mechanised fishing within five kilometers of the coast, a step designed to protect the fishermen’s rights but one that also helps save Olive Ridleys from getting enmeshed in the nets of trawl and gill nets used by diesel-power fishing vessels.

But today both the fishermen and the Ridleys, which are protected by national wildlife protection laws and classified as endangered by the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), face extinction.

This month, as the Ridleys once again swarm up the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka to their ‘arribada’ (Spanish for arrival) or mass nesting, conservationists are mounting a special awareness programme on these gentle creatures that have survived 200 million years, only to be decimated by a few hundred unscrupulous trawler owners.

Central to that effort is last week’s release of ‘The Ridley’s Last Stand’, a film by the award-winning wildlife filmmaker Shekar Dattatri that proves that all it takes to protect the turtles is the political will on the part of the state government to enforce existing laws.

Working with sea turtle biologists and experts, Orissa’s best-known conservationist, Dattatri has pieced together a story of callousness and apathy toward the Ridley and its ancient and spectacular mass breeding ritual, which he says compares with the annual migration of wildebeest in eastern Africa’s Serengeti.

At the film’s premiere, Mohanty explained how the Ridleys and their annual show were threatened merely for want of initiative to buy ”three well-equipped and manned patrol boats”.

Funds for these boats have long been made available to the state government by various agencies, including the central Ministry of Environment and Forests.

In short, there is no dearth of funding to save the Ridley.

Apart from 200,000 U.S. dollars worth of central government money lying unused with the state government for three years, organisations such as the Australian, U. N. Development Programme, the Global Environmental Facility and the Turner Foundation have shown interest in the turtles, said Mohanty.

In his film, Dattatri captured meetings where trawler owners are seen openly opposing any move to protect the turtle and accusing conservationists of acting on behalf of fishermen in countries like Sri Lanka and Thailand, who slaughter turtles for their meat – considered a delicacy.

Turtles are never willfully slaughtered by Indian fishermen, since the reptile is part of a menagerie of animals that are sacred to the Hindu religion, starting with the cow.

The turtle figures in ancient Hindu myths of creation as a balancing force in nature. In one of his many ‘avtars’ (incarnations), the great god Vishnu, the preserver, appears as a turtle restoring order to cosmic chaos.

The turtle also figures in the creation myths of other ancient civilisations such as the Mayan and the Iroquois, as well as the Chinese.

Turtles continue to be worshipped in many Asian cultures. Temples devoted to the sea creature exist in Chittagong, Bangladesh and in the Buddhist temple of Wat Po in Bangkok, Thailand, where they are regarded as transit vehicles for souls on their way to Nirvana or eternal bliss.

But all that is small comfort to the Ridleys, which continue to be ensnared in trawl and gill nets and flung back into the ocean by impatient fishermen, dead or grievously wounded.

According to Mohanty, some 200 Olive Ridleys have died in the protected Gahirmatha marine sanctuary on Orissa’s coast, the world’s largest single rookery, over the past few weeks.

”All we need is one patrol boat for each of the three ‘reproductive patches’ in the three mass-nesting sites – at the Nasi islands of Gahirmatha sanctuary and the mouths of the Devi and Rushikulya rivers – for just the four months of the breeding season.

Each season has distinct phases involving some 350,000 turtles.

In the first, just before November, the males arrive and are followed by the females in late November and December. After mating, the females crawl ashore to lay their eggs. In the fourth and final phase, the hatchlings crawl out into the sea in February – only one in a thousand survive to adulthood.

”Virtually all Ridleys die by drowning in the nets as a single sweep of a trawl net can trap up to 25 turtle. Gill nets are worse. In February, a gill net washed ashore with 205 dead turtles,” said Belinda Wright, executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) which hosted the premiere of Dattatri’s film.

Wright said the lawlessness on Orissa’s coast was such that even large mechanised trawlers, which are required to stay 12 km from the coast, can be found fishing barely 90 metres away.

”If we continue to do nothing, this awesome spectacle will be lost forever and the Olive Ridleys may well go the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo,” Wright said.

So far, the state government has been unable to enforce the use of turtle exclusion devices (TUDs), gateways built into fishing nets that allow turtles to escape.

Conservationists are agreed that only complete the enforcement of the five-kilometre, coastal exclusion zone ban on mechanised trawlers will help, and that this is best done by empowering Orissa’s traditional fishermen.

Harekrushna Debnath, chair of the National Fishworkers Forum and general secretary of the World Forum of Fisher People, says Orissa’s traditional fishworkers are now looking to global concern for the Olive Ridley turtle to fish them out of their own plight.

”We, the 20 million fishermen and fishworkers of India, are now agitating just to have implemented the recommendations of a central committee approved six years ago which called for the creation of a Coastal Regulation Zone and protection of the traditional and customary rights of the fishing community.” (END/IPS/AP/EN/DV/RDR/JS/02)

ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Endangered Turtle Shares Fate With Fishermen

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2002 (IPS) - The key to protecting the endangered Olive Ridley turtle lies in enforcing laws that already protect the rights of traditional fishermen on the coast of India’s eastern state of Orissa, say leading conservationists.
(more…)

ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Endangered Turtle Shares Fate With Fishermen

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2002 (IPS) - The key to protecting the endangered Olive Ridley turtle lies in enforcing laws that already protect the rights of traditional fishermen on the coast of India’s eastern state of Orissa, say leading conservationists.
(more…)