Biodiversity Prospecting in the Seas around Verata Tikina,Fiji

by University of the South Pacific

Partners:

University of the South Pacific (USP) The Rainforest Alliance SPACHEE

Success Stories

Strong leadership is a powerful force for change. Through his participation in various project workshops, Tomujani Boginivalu, the administrative leader of one of the seven Verata villages, has developed a passionate commitment to monitoring and sustainable resource use. Tomujani recently presented his concerns about coral harvesting in an area near Verata, to a Verata council meeting. The council endorsed these concerns, and presented a motion for a ban on coral harvesting to the Tailevu Provincial Council meeting, to which Verata belongs.

The council also asked the South Pacific Action Committee for Human Ecology and Environment (SPACHEE), which is the local NGO counterpart of the BCN project, to conduct a training workshop on the uses of coral. With the assistance of the Fisheries Department, the coral workshop was held for representatives of all Tailevu. The workshop recommended that coral harvesting cease in Tailevu and this was endorsed by the Provincial Council.

Malakai Tuiloa, the assistant director of the Fisheries Department in Fiji, was one of the 30 NGO and government representatives who participated in the workshop on the use of community-based participatory methods in resource management and monitoring. At the end of the meeting he declared, "In sixteen years of government service, I have never attended a workshop in which I worked like this with members of NGOs. I had previously viewed their intentions with suspicion but now realize they can be valuable partners in our conservation work."

All workshop participants were amazed at the skills of the Verata people -- their ability to monitor their resources and explain the importance of the results. The participants exclaimed that they thought such skills could only be developed through formal university education. The development of these monitoring skills certainly represents a major success for the project.

The Fisheries Department also called a meeting with the BCN project personnel to discuss the regulation of marine bioprospecting. The Department had previously allowed fairly unlimited collection of non-edible resources by researchers, not appreciating their potential worth. A policy of consultation has now been developed between the Department and USP to discuss any proposed marine collections.

Challenges

The major challenge of this project at this point is time. The project start-up was delayed due to protracted negotiations first with the pharmaceutical giant SmithKline Beecham, which eventually dropped out of the project, and then with SIDR. Hence the project implementation period is only two years. The BCN project needs to complete many activities in a relatively short time. The level of activity needed to accomplish the project goals is often difficult to accomplish if we seek to respect the communities' many other demands on their time. Community members have busy schedules made even busier by often unexpected traditional obligations. We have sought to meet this challenge by having project meetings dovetail with scheduled village meetings, but these meeting times often change at short notice.

Lack of leadership in some villages is also a challenge. Two of the seven villages have seemingly less effective leadership than the others, and it is difficult to work through them to include the participation of members of their villages in tikina-wide activities. We hope to address this constraint by making them the focus of some of the socioeconomic development activities.

	"OK...So What?"
... or, return to this Project's Main Menu

WHY BIODIVERSITY   FIELD STORIES   PARTICIPATE   RESULTS   MARKETSPACE ABOUT THE NETWORK   WHAT'S NEW   LEARNING MATERIALS   SEARCH   LINKS   SITE MAP   HOME