Her: Indus Mangroves Threatened

[Nadeem Jamali <jamali@CS.UIUC.EDU>]

From International Rivers Network's mailing list:


    Pakistan Asked to Create a National Park for Mangroves

                       By Ahmar Mustikhan

KARACHI, Pakistan, June 18, 1999 (ENS) - A World Bank organized
seminar in Karachi has called upon the government of Pakistan to stop
the degradation of the mangroves forests in the Indus Delta region by
declaring the Arabian Sea coastal area a national park.

Seminar participants are urging that the government ensure that at
least 35 million acre feet of water reaches the delta region each
year.

Less than 10 million acre feet of water has been reaching the delta
downstream of a damlike structure known as the Kotri Barrage. From
November to April there is no flow of the water downstream of the
barrage.

This week's three-day seminar "Mangrove Ecosystems - Dynamics of the
Indus Delta," was a brainchild of the Marine Reference, Collection and
Resource Center, Karachi University, and was co-organized with the
World Bank by the Forest Department of the southeastern Sindh
province.

Seminar participants urged the government to designate mangrove
forests in the delta region as a national park and hand over its
control to one department so that multiple management problems can be
better addressed. Right now three departments - the Sindh Forest
Department, Port Qasim Authority and the Board of Revenue - each have
different patches of the mangroves under their control.

Pakistan authorities should chalk out a management plan to
rehabilitate those patches of the mangrove forests that have been
badly degraded, seminar participants said. They pointed out that if
the multi-dimensional threats to the forests are not checked, an
ecological disaster with huge economic losses could result.

Besides reduction in the flow of silt-laden sweet water from the River
Indus, the other threats to the mangrove forests are camel, buffalo
and sheep grazing, cutting of the trees for fuel, and other pressures
due to increasing population.

Presently, 120,000 people are dependent on the mangrove forests for
their livelihood - 70 percent fishermen, 10 percent livestock owners
and 20 percent woodcutters. "Before the barrages, agriculture was
flourishing here and there used to be a rare red rice cultivation in
the coastal Badin and Thatta districts. A few years after the Kotri
barrage was built in 1955, the landowners who had up to 200 acres were
so pauperized that they came to work for a pittance in the cities,"
mangroves forest researcher, Noorunnisa Ganghro, who also manages the
non-governmental organization Learn, told ENS. Ganghro said that
recently non-fishing communities have migrated into the delta region,
taking over the fishing activities from traditional communities and
this has pushed the vanishing mangroves further towards extinction.

"The traditional fishing communities used to engage in sustainable
harvesting. They knew how to fish, without depleting the fish stocks
or harming the mangroves," she explained. The newcomers are interested
only in making afast buck and have thrown the age-old fishing
practices to the winds, Ganghro said.

The seminar heard that mangrove forests once extended over 160,000
hectares in southeastern Sindh with shrimp landing of 27,390 metric
tons. In the neighboring state of Balochistan the forests covered
7,340 hectares with a total shrimp catch of 838 metric tons.

Before the construction of the barrages and dams, the River Indus used
to bring 150 Million acre feet (MAF) of water and 400 million tons of
nourishing silt to the mangrove forests. After the construction of the
Kotri barrage, the water flow was reduced to 35 MAF water and 100 tons
of silt.  Today the water flow is less than 10 MAF, though an accord
between Sindh and Punjab some years ago had guaranteed at least 10 MAF
of water. The water and silt depletion has meant a catastrophe for the
fragile coastal eco-system.

The River Indus is the sixth largest river in the world. Its delta
region once covered over 600,000 hectares, ranking as the world's 14th
largest mangrove forest. The reduced flow in the River Indus has
resulted in seawater intrusion up to 30 kilometres in the coastal
towns of Thatta and Badin, playing havoc with agriculture by
increasing the salinity of the sub-soil water.

The Forest Department in Sindh, with World Bank sponsorship, has
launched a seven-year Rs 87 million project and claims to have planted
mangroves over 40,000 acres and rehabilitated another 20,000
acres. Mangrove forests are the breeding grounds of shrimps, prawns
and other exportable species of fish that fetch millions in foreign
exchange for dollar-starved Pakistan.

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