BCNet
In Search of a Cure: Bioprospecting as a Marine Conservation
Tool in a Fijian Community

William G. Aalbersberg1, John E. Parks2, Diane Russell3, and Isoa Korovulavula4

For thousands of years our ancestors have lived off an ocean whose reefs have been and still are home to a wide range of marine life. Our affinity with the land is, therefore, not merely land-based, but literally extends beyond our shores to encompass the ocean and the reefs that surround us. The reefs are part of our vanua, our identity as a people, and it is an essential element that ensures our very survival as i taukei. Without our reefs, we are sunk in every sense of the word.

As major international corporations search for supplies of coral, they look to countries like Fiji, where there is little or no protection for the resource owner, the i taukei ni qoliqoli. Their resources are slowly being depleted, and while these major corporations make millions out of coral, the i taukei receive very little compensation. Logically, they really should be some of the wealthiest people in the country.

–Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, at the Launching of the Pacific Year of the Coral Reef Campaign.

 

Overview

During the colonial era in Fiji, the rights of native Fijians were taken into consideration to a greater extent than in many other colonies. As migrants from other countries and laborers primarily from India moved in to Fiji, a large proportion of the land was reserved for the indigenous Fijians. This land could not be sold or otherwise permanently alienated. As a result of this policy and the continuity of local political structures, indigenous Fijian villages have deep social and ecological grounding. There is a tremendous sense of place. Landowning mataqali or family groups continue to manage lands in their territories, and often that control extends as far into the sea as local boats can go. Government consults with chiefs on fishing licenses and other permits for use of the resources, and outsiders pay leases to the mataqali for such uses as hotels, dive areas, plantations and even access roads.

The picture is not totally benign, however, with respect to biodiversity conservation. While the forests and coral reefs of Fiji house many plants and organisms with medicinal potential, there are both internal and external pressures on these resources. Internally, the population grows and intensifies resource use for commercial and subsistence purposes. Land leases and extractive licenses are a source of income for the mataqali, but lessees do not have incentive to conserve. Waste disposal is a problem. Externally, industries such as logging, coral harvesting and mining encroach on the land and sea resources. From the quote above, one can see that the Fiji government is concerned that communities are not getting a fair share of the revenue from these extractions.

Conservation groups seek ways to help communities to husband their biodiversity in the face of these pressures. These groups know that it is not enough to tell people to conserve. There must be incentives, coupled with awareness of the benefits of conservation. As many of the pressures revolve around increasing commercialization and need for cash, enterprises that generate cash benefits to communities are often part of incentive packages. But community-based enterprises such as small-scale ecotourism and the processing of forest products are risky endeavors with steep start up and maintenance costs.

What are some more innovative, less risky ways to generate benefits that could provide incentives to conservation? If set up in an ethical way in partnership with a reputable company or research institute, bioprospecting offers an attractive alternative: an enterprise that carries little risk to the communities and offers fairly substantial cash benefits. The incentives to conservation include not only the cash from sample fees -- and potentially from medicines produced from the samples -- but the increased awareness of the value of biodiversity as a result of the prospecting. Community members can be trained as sample collectors, processors, to and monitor populations of key species.

Within the bioprospecting partnership, the institutions shoulder any financial risk. In addition, there is usually not a heavy time outlay involved so that community members do not risk losing time away from other important activities. An added benefit is that, further down the line, communities can use cash benefits to finance other enterprise or conservation activities. The skills used can be transferred to other resource management and research and extension functions.

Despite these benefits, many community activists and scholars express profound concern about bioprospecting as an appropriate venture for communities.

Despite these benefits, many community activists and scholars express profound concern about bioprospecting as an appropriate venture for communities. These concerns center on the intrinsic inequality between a community and a large, profit-making corporation as well as the difficulty of figuring out the magnitude and distribution of benefits. As some bioprospecting ventures involve the identification of bioactive species based upon local knowledge, there is worry that intellectual property rights will be respected and rewarded.

There are other downsides to bioprospecting, inherent in the nature of the enterprise. For one, short-term financial benefits from sample fees are not sustained for very long – there are a limited number of samples that can be obtained from any one site.5 Second, while there is low risk, there is also little investment in the community in terms of infrastructure. Finally, the per capita magnitude of benefit may be quite low, too low in fact to present an attractive alternative to extractive activities.

This case study illustrates how a bioprospecting venture, informed by the concerns expressed above, sought to work with a community in Fiji to maximize the economic and conservation benefits. A key feature of this story is the determination of the main partners to work patiently through each step of the process and retain a vision of an equitable bioprospecting agreement with long term benefits for all partners. One result achieved already is significant advance at the national and institutional levels in policies about bioprospecting. Another is the boost given to ongoing conservation and development initiatives in the community.

There are other downsides to bioprospecting, inherent in the nature of the enterprise.

The case study first describes the bioprospecting project in general, then briefly depicts the community and the site. The next section focuses on project activities with the community, including resource management workshops, relations with community residents living in the capital, and biological monitoring activities. It describes how community leaders were trained in monitoring and gave a presentation on their program at an important international conservation conference. The study concludes with future activities planned for the project and the community.


The Project

Since the University of the South Pacific (USP) was founded in 1968, one of the main research areas of its Chemistry Department has been the isolation of natural products from plants used for medicinal purposes in Fiji. These efforts have been hindered by lack of scholarships for postgraduate research students and dependence on informal contacts in developed country laboratories for spectra required for structural determination and for evaluation of biological activity. A number of overseas researchers made large-scale collections of plant and marine organisms in Fiji. Usually ostensibly for "academic purposes," these samples often ended up being tested by large companies for possible commercial development. In most cases, this work was done with minimal, if any, USP involvement.

In 1995, USP applied for and received a planning grant from the Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN). With funding from the BCN grant, and a close partnership with a pharmaceutical company, USP planned to expand work into the marine area and upgrade its facilities to add value to local samples before they were sent overseas.

From the outset, the developers of the project saw bioprospecting as a means for furthering community development and community-based conservation as well as scientific knowledge. Due to the range of biodiversity and interest in conservation, one coastal community, Verata, and one rainforest community, Namosi, were chosen as source areas. Traditional leaders in both areas were recent graduates of USP and had expressed concerns about environmental threats: overfishing in Verata and logging and mining in Namosi.

Finding a pharmaceutical company partner was at first relatively easy. USP approached Dr Brad Carté of Smith Kline Beecham (SB) who had been collecting marine samples in Micronesia. Dr Carté's professional reputation, his interest in equitable benefits for source countries, and his emphasis on the marine environment that is so important to the Pacific region made collaboration with him and SB attractive. He responded positively to the request that SB extend its work to Fiji.

The discussions leading to the development of an equitable prospecting agreement began in a virtual policy vacuum. None of the parties involved -- USP, SB and the Fiji government -- had any stated policy on bioprospecting. These institutions realized the benefits of using their involvement in the BCN project to develop such guidelines. The development of these policies was aided by a growing literature, including Biodiversity Prospecting put out by the World Resources Institute in 1993, and a number of position papers by Sarah Laird and others.

The discussions leading to the development of an equitable prospecting agreement began in a virtual policy vacuum.

The original discussions on if and how bioprospecting could take place in Fiji were held with the Environment Department. Fortunately, a bright young scientific officer, who also happened to be from Verata, was in charge of these talks. He called together a working group from relevant government ministries that set the parameters for this particular project and eventually for bioprospecting in general in Fiji. Government ended up choosing a regulatory role to define the approval process and also to ensure that the rights of communities were protected.

After the national government approved the project, USP and its partner non-governmental organization (NGO) the South Pacific Action Committee for Human Ecology and Environment (SPACHEE) approached the provincial governments for native affairs with jurisdiction over Verata and Namosi. In both cases, the heads of the provincial government were also traditional leaders and had close connections with USP. Once these leaders were satisfied with the proposed activities, they arranged for someone to accompany the USP team to the villages. In Fiji, the indigenous people own the land, traditional authority is respected, and government is seen as protecting traditional rights. Thus following traditional protocols made approval for bioprospecting by the community very likely.

The next step was the development of the formal bioprospecting agreement. Brad Carté suggested that the project team recruit Charles Zerner, leader of the Natural Rights and Resources Program at Rainforest Alliance, to advise on equity issues. Zerner in turn advocated bringing in Michael Gollin, a leading authority on bioprospecting contracts. In October 1995, USP, SB and other members of the project team met with a representative of the Fiji government and the Verata community.6 Mr Gollin acted as facilitator and the Worldwide Fund for Nature/South Pacific (WWF/SP) agreed to act as rapporteur. Mr Gollin had earlier prepared a questionnaire for stakeholders asking what they wanted from the agreement and any constraints they felt in joining it. For the meeting, he drafted an outline document based on responses to the questionnaire. The meeting was unusual in that it was held in the source country and open to a variety of stakeholder representatives.

One of the first points of discussion was whether there would be a three-way agreement between SB, USP and Verata or whether separate SB-USP and USP-Verata contracts were preferable. People concerned about conservation and community rights believe that contracts that involve the communities as equal partners are preferable as they recognize the crucial role of communities in conservation of resources, knowledge and national development. The drug companies, however, have legal constraints to only pay benefits to legally constituted bodies. This issue was not fully resolved during the meeting. The absence of any firm policy by SB and USP also created difficulties as on some issues no final stance could be given by the representatives at the meeting.

By the end of the week, the parties reached agreement on most points and participants were left with issues that needed to be resolved at a policy level. SB was to write a final draft of the agreement to be translated into Fijian for conclusive discussions with the communities. The BCN grant included funds to pay the costs of legal representation for the communities to review the contract.

In April 1996, SB closed down their natural products discovery division.7 USP immediately began a search for another partner. The project was already into its first six months of implementation. The project team felt that an institution that acted as a broker would most likely be able to enter an agreement on short notice, and so they contacted the Strathclyde Institute of Drug Research (SIDR) at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland. SIDR was at that time in the process of signing an agreement with a Japanese drug company to provide 5000 samples, and so they were quite keen to become a partner. Strathclyde's agreements provide 60% of all funds obtained from licensing samples to the source country. Although they retain a substantial 40%, there are several advantages to this type of arrangement:

  1. SIDR has greater credibility and negotiating power compared to a developing country institution and thus can obtain higher fees from drug companies. As an example, SB had agreed to pay USP US$100 per sample, while the sample fee in the SIDR agreement comes out toUS$200 (as 60% of the total fee).
  2. Because they share fees with the host country institution, SIDR is a partner in the bioprospecting. It is thus more likely that they will represent the interests of the source country. This kind of agreement is different from negotiating directly with a drug company, which must place their profits first.
  3. Although in both cases the primary discussions were held with a concerned scientist, the SIDR scientist had greater influence with the legal department of the organization compared to SB.
  4. Bioprospecting partners such as the government, NGOs and community groups perceive that an entity associated with a university will be more likely to honor its contractual commitments than a large multinational drug company.
  5. The 60:40 split compares favorably with that offered by other collectors/brokers, which may be as low as 10:90. The Manila Declaration of the medicinal plant scientists in Asia/Pacific calls for at least a 50% share of sample fees to be retained for the source community.
  6. It is possible that SIDR can license the samples to other companies once the original licensing period expires, thus increasing the benefit.

The main disadvantage of SIDR over SB was that perhaps SB was in a position to provide a greater range of in-kind benefits such as preparation of a manual of marine biodiversity, training for USP researchers, and possible contributions to a community fund. There are no in-kind benefits from the drug company to SIDR. SIDR does offer to provide assistance in scientific work to USP, but not to communities. Another limitation to dealing with SIDR is that all contracts have to conform to the contract between SIDR and the drug companies. For example, it is considered best practice to give the source community prior informed consent on the possible commercial development of a product based on their resource. Within the SIDR framework, SIDR guarantees the right of commercial development to the drug company partners, so prior informed consent of the community is not possible.

SIDR has a simple pro-forma contract that was used as the basis of the USP agreement. They preferred to contract directly with USP and have USP contract to communities. As samples may eventually be provided from communities other than Verata this contract allows USP greater flexibility to work with different communities. The principles that had been established in the SB draft contract were then used to suggest changes and additions to the contract. A revised document was then distributed to stakeholders and the Rainforest Alliance reference group, a group of international experts in bioprospecting. The draft contract received extensive comments and suggestions which, wherever possible, were incorporated into the final USP/SIDR agreement.

An associated USP/Verata contract was subjected to the same process and translated into Fijian. This contract has been reviewed by a community lawyer who, partly because of her involvement, is now also the Fiji focal point for Article 23 discussions on protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Except for the possibility of joint ownership of any commercial products under collections in Verata and recognition of community stewardship of the resources, IPR issues are not part of these contracts, as the collections are not based on traditional uses. The communities are advised that they can request that certain plants (for example, of special medicinal value to them) not be collected under terms of this contract if that is their desire.

A key feature of these contracts is that a small amount of sample is licensed through SIDR for a limited period (usually one year). This sample remains the property of the community and if not under a licensing agreement can be reclaimed by the community. These agreements set out a broad definition of sample to include derived chemicals and products. They also give Verata first right for recollection and provide for appropriately qualified people from Verata to be employed by the project.

Although this bioprospecting process is perhaps unusual in that it has been supported by outside funding, many of the lessons learned are widely applicable for other conservation projects.

Because USP currently covers its collection costs with the BCN grant, all royalty fees are passed on to Verata. Collection and processing fees come to about $20 per sample, while the cost of machinery used in the grinding of material and extraction comes to about $5,000, or an additional $10 per sample for 500 samples. Under the agreement, the division of royalty benefits will be set within two years. This timing allows further discussion in Fiji and the rest of the Pacific on how benefits can be most equitably shared and best used for conservation and development.

Although this bioprospecting process is perhaps unusual in that it has been supported by outside funding, many of the lessons learned are widely applicable. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the agreements should not be confidential. This openness allows wide international advice on whether provisions accord to best practice or not. It is very useful to have available a register such as the RA reference group, people with experience in negotiating these agreements who are willing to offer advice on draft agreements.


Verata

The USP-BCN project proposal originally sought to involve two Fijian communities in the bioprospecting activities: Namosi in a rainforest area, and Verata on the coast. When the project budget was reduced, the project was only able to work in Verata, although the idea of involving Namosi has not been forgotten. This section describes some of the key activities undertaken with Verata people during the life of the project, and how the community has come to view bioprospecting and other environmental issues. It focuses on the role of community leadership in Verata in mobilizing not only its own community but serving as a model for others as well.

Verata is a tikina, or county, comprised of eight villages within the province of Tailevu, on the eastern shore of Viti Levu. It is a highly important locale in Fiji, being one of the first sites where Fijians consider their ancestors to have settled -- the equivalent of Plymouth Rock in the United States. The chiefly families retain great prestige, and Verata people maintain ties to many other mataqali throughout the land. Activities carried out in Verata thus have resonance throughout the country. In addition, Verata is not far from Suva, so there is very active participation of Suva residents from Verata in the development of their area. The project has been able to draw on Suva dwellers' participation along the way. Most critically, however, the project has been able to work with local leaders who care deeply about the way resources are managed and have learned new skills in the process. (See inset box for a synopsis of Verata's demographic and ecological setting.)

Tikina Verata is a highly important locale in Fiji, being one of the first sites where historians consider the first Fijian ancestors to have settled – the equivalent of Plymouth Rock in the United States.

The relationship between Verata and USP is woven from many threads. One strand goes back to the early 1970s to the relationship between USP Professor of Natural Products Chemistry William (Bill) Aalbersberg and his teacher of Fijian during Bill's stint as Peace Corps Volunteer. Another strand was added in 1993-1995 with the Community-Based Biodiversity Conservation surveys carried out by USP Professor of Pacific Islands Biogeography, Randy Thaman.

One of Professor Thaman's mature students was the son of the paramount chief of Verata. He had expressed concerns about diminishing natural resources in Verata. As part of a project funded by the McArthur Foundation, two villages in Verata developed biodiversity lists of useful organisms using Professor Thaman's rapid rural assessment method. In this method, different groups generate lists of a certain number of various types of organisms (e.g., grasses, medicinal plants, fishes, and shellfish) and their cultural significance. These lists were collated and discussed with the communities. The follow-up development of plans to conserve this biodiversity was taken on in association with the BCN project.

The Demographic and Ecological Setting of the Tikina Verata Project Area.

Total area of Verata:

140 km2 tikina (terrestrial area);

95 km2 qoliqoli (marine waters under customary control).

Number of villages:

8

Population

(1995 census data):

1571 residents in 319 households. In addition, there are 643 urban residents who claim resource governance rights within Verata.

Number of mataqali:

49, all living in Verata with direct control over land and sea areas.

Principal revenue generating activities:

Sale of yaqona (kava) and other cash crops such as dalo (taro); sales of marine resources such as beche-de-mer, mud lobster, clams, reef fish; land leases and fishing access permits sold to outsiders.

Key habitats:

Coral reefs, mangrove forest, seagrass beds and intertidal mud flats, riverbanks, grasslands, and secondary forest (both agroforest systems and abandoned garden areas).

Marine resource sustainability indicators being tracked:

Populations of mana (a mangrove lobster, Thalassina anomala) and kaikoso (a seagrass-associated clam, Anadara antiquata); coral reef fishes.

Populations of these indicator species are being monitoring within five tabu, or no-take, fishery areas in Verata as an effort to use science to test the utility of this traditional practice as a fisheries management tool.

 

As the idea of a bioprospecting project was conceived within USP, partnership with Verata seemed a natural choice. The project team, which by then included SPACHEE, contacted traditional and government authorities to vet the idea of a bioprospecting project that would use their resources. The team then met with the community to discuss the concept and the nature of participation.

Lively discussion ensued. People were interested in having their medicinal plants evaluated and receiving financial benefits, but linking these activities with conservation raised questions. For example, if certain marine areas were declared tabu for gathering, would bioprospecting proceeds adequately compensate for the loss of commercial or subsistence returns from the non-use of tabu sites? What timeframe would be adequate to regenerate the key species in the tabu areas? These are complex questions that biological and socioeconomic monitoring are helping to answer.

Full community support is critical because the central objective of the project is to link the process and benefits of bioprospecting to conservation. These communities were accustomed to people coming and taking plants with minimal, if any, benefits so the idea of communities receiving substantial benefits was warmly received. They were also concerned about environmental issues such as overfishing, mining, and coral harvesting. The project provided an example of how benefits could be obtained through conservation rather than extraction.

People were interested in having their medicinal plants evaluated and receiving financial benefits, but linking these activities with conservation raised questions.


Project Activities in the Community

Direct community participation during the initial phases of the project conveys the message that community voices will be heard throughout all project activities. What becomes clear to local participants from this message is that their knowledge and input from the outset will become the foundation upon which all project activities are structured. While this may seem at first to be a 'common sense' approach, the history of integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) shows that, according to a recent review, "ICDPs often do not spend enough time identifying community institutions and their relationships…[they] should devote more time and financial resources to working with community institutions" (WWF 1997).

Moreover, where projects succeed in facilitating local input from the start, some fail to revisit this message later during more technical phases of the project (e.g., monitoring and evaluation, empirical data analysis). Project managers assume that these project activities are not appropriate within a rural community context or of any procedural value to local decision-makers.

A comprehensive review of the ICDP process conducted by the World Wildlife Fund's further states that:

[I]ntegration of local knowledge is difficult because ICDP planners and implementers frequently do not share the same values or world views regarding people and nature as local peoples. Traditional conservation approaches separate people and nature…Planners need to understand and use local names, land-use classifications and terminology to facilitate discussions with the community regarding management of resources. ICDPs must work to make the dialogue between ‘projects' and communities more of an equal, two-way process" (WWF 1997).

As is outlined through this case study, the project activities in Tikina Verata are fully in line with these recommendations.

Local ownership of the project process is a direct consequence of the commitment to community participation from the project outset. An appreciation of the value of local concepts within the most technical aspects of the project (monitoring, sample collection) strengthens this sense of project ownership even more. In some cases, participation in resource management workshops and monitoring rekindles pride in traditional practices as participants see how their concepts compliment applied scientific principles during fieldwork to provide a fuller, more comprehensive perspective towards resource management issues.

During the planning phase of the project, SPACHEE organized three participatory workshops in Verata that focused on natural resource management. These workshops included a one-day environmental awareness workshop in all the seven villages, a participatory rural appraisal workshop in Ucunivanua (the chiefly village in Verata), and a community integrated resource management workshop held in Kumi and Ucunivanua.8 At present these activities are funded under the BCN project but, lacking such external funds, sample fees could be used for these important purposes.

The series of one-day workshops were held in February 1996, organized and conducted by SPACHEE together with the Fiji Department of Environment. The two main objectives of the workshops were to identify the ten most important problems in the village and opportunities/solutions to these problems. One of the significant results of these workshops was the willingness of the villagers to be open in discussing a broad range of environmental issues. Some of the major environmental issues raised by the villages were:

The workshops screened environmental videos as well as videos of the village environmental issues. These videos sparked intense discussion about problems and solutions. The participants sketched their own village and area maps to show where resources, activities, problems and opportunities are located, to see the dimension and scope of issues to be investigated, and to know the boundaries of resources. The maps included information such as:

A participatory rural appraisal (PRA) workshop was then held for a week in June 1996. Representatives from six of the seven villages in Verata came to the workshop. The main focus of the workshop was biodiversity conservation. Participants looked at the ecosystem role of habitats such as mangrove and coral reefs in their areas, after which they ranked community problems. They prepared a community action plan for their own villages at end of the workshop. Resource people from some government agencies, NGOs and USP came to assist in the PRA workshop.

The organizers felt that, on the whole, the series of one-day workshops and the PRA exercises were an effective way of raising environmental awareness because community members actively participated in the discussion as well as coming up with resolutions. It was not a one-way communication.


Integrated Village Resource Management Planning

SPACHEE came again to Verata in July 1996 to help facilitate the design of a Village Resource Management Plan. The overall objective of this workshop was to assist villagers to develop the skills needed to plan the sustainable commercial and subsistence use of their natural resources, including the protection and rehabilitation of those resources -- in particular plants and animals that are rare, endangered or of particular cultural, economic or ecological importance.

The initial pilot villages were Ucunivanua and Kumi Villages, with the remaining five villages in Verata to be covered after the first two workshops had been evaluated. The workshop was held overnight in each village to take advantage of informal discussions at night and to avoid hurrying to return to Suva. The aim was to develop a model that can be adapted for rapid application to many villages.

The participants included a wide range of men and women, older and younger people who could play a central role in the promotion of the protection and sustainable use of resources and biodiversity. Representatives from other villages in Verata were also invited. This workshop was supposed to train them to be facilitators in their villages.

The main issues discussed were: a) the concepts of sustainable development; b) the importance of the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity and ethnobiology as natural and cultural capital (the bank account) needed for the development and maintenance of this generation and of future generations; and c) the need for community-level management and planning of the use of natural resources.

First, there was a brief discussion of the nature and importance of biodiversity and ethnobiology and its management as a basis for sustainable village development, and the distribution of lists of plants and animals and uses generated during the 1993-1995 Community-Based Biodiversity Conservation surveys. There was also some discussion on the types of development that seem to be unsustainable and destroying the biodiversity of the area.

Then the workshop broke up into smaller groups to identify and discuss: a) the various types of plants and animals (both marine and terrestrial species) becoming scarce or extinct; b) the types of ethnobiological knowledge that should be preserved and protected; and c) actions that can be taken/strategies (both traditional and modern) that can be used to protect or sustainably use biodiversity for both commercial and subsistence purposes.

One of the important outcomes of this particular workshop was the development of an integrated Village Resource Management Plan. On the last day of the workshop the villagers had reached the point where they were able to compile their own resource management plan, integrating both terrestrial and marine resources. Since the workshop, the plan since has been adopted by the Tikina's governing council and implemented. Highlighted local policies resulting from the implementation of plan include: a) bans on the use of poisons and dynamite in fishing activities; b) reductions on mangrove deforestation; c) a moratorium on granting further licences to allow commercial fishing operations legal access to Verata's waters; d) ban on the extraction of live coral for commercial cement manufacturing; and e) the declaration of marine reserve areas through traditional practices across various habitat types to encourage fisheries sustainability.


Project Relations with the Suva-Based Committee

The community of Verata is not only a locale but also a network of kin and neighbors that stretches from the ancestral homelands to the cities of Fiji and on to the rest of the world. These Verata people remain by and large concerned about and involved in the development of their lands, and their heritage. Thus the Suva-based Verata Development Committee got involved at an early stage of the project to advise project planners.

The group met regularly on an ad-hoc basis. Professor Aalbersberg or a SPACHEE representative often attended these informal meetings, at first to explain the idea of the project. Later, once the group had agreed to the project and assisted in getting approval for it from the paramount chief, advice was sought on the conduct of the project. The role of this group highlights a key factor often missed in community resource management: that the community is not just the people living in a given area, but those who may have migrated, temporarily or semi-permanently, from the area. These people are often the main source of investment capital and ideas for community ventures.


Training of Community Sample Collectors and Collection Activities

Each village was invited to appoint two members interested in and knowledgeable about local plants to become sample collectors. About ten people, several of whom had been part of the biological monitoring training, assembled at the training site. Mr. Marika Tuiwawa, a botanist in the Biology Department at USP, had worked with Professor Aalbersberg to develop a list of plants to be collected based on those desired by SIDR and those identified in Verata by Professor Thaman's rapid rural assessments.

A half-day was spent in discussing the purpose of the collections, how plants would be collected, and voucher specimens prepared. The collection required about one kilogram of plant material to be placed in labeled bags together with a name card, location, and the name of the collector. The list of desired plants was distributed and collections made using local knowledge about where the plants could be found. Sixty-five plants were collected in one day and a half days of the first meeting, and another forty on a collection day a few months later. Verata has a much richer marine than terrestrial biodiversity, as much of the land consists of grasslands and secondary forests. During 1998 and 1999, sampling from Verata's rich diversity of marine biota became a focus within the bioprospecting enterprise.

In November 1997, two of the members of the collection team were asked to participate in a People and Plants Workshop organized by the WWF/SP and conducted by ethnobotanist Dr. Gary Martin. Participants learned how to prepare voucher specimens and use them to develop a community register of their important plants.


Community Involvement in Ecological Monitoring

Because a semi-structured, highly participatory methodology was used to develop the Community Action and Village Resource Management Plans (VRMPs) during the initial phases of the project, by the first year of project implementation (1997) the community was prepared for the more technical phases of the project, such as design and implementation of project monitoring and evaluation (M&E) techniques and biota sample collection training for the enterprise.

During the middle of 1997, BCN (with assistance from SPACHEE and WWF/SP) held a participatory M&E 9 workshop for the Verata project during which interested community members were trained in ecological monitoring techniques. The goal of the workshop was to design an ecological monitoring protocol that was a useful management tool enabling local fishers to 'keep watch' over their marine resources, while also generating periodic indicator data to assess the overall health of the project's nearshore marine system and fishery populations. The structure of the participatory M&E workshop was intentionally constructed as a follow-on to the earlier PRA workshops conducted. Thus, previous outputs such as the VRMPs were revisited in order to provide a community-developed framework from which to discuss M&E, develop a monitoring plan, and bring about a seamless integration between community exercises conducted by the project.

The goal of the workshop was to design an ecological monitoring protocol that was a useful management tool enabling local fishers to 'keep watch' over their marine resources, while also generating periodic indicator data to assess the overall health of the project's nearshore marine system and fishery populations.

The workshop employed local concepts of resource use, ecological principles, and scientific sampling and analysis to develop a biological monitoring program that would be totally implemented by the community teams. Through a series of participatory exercises, representatives from the seven Verata village communities determined which fishing grounds within their nearshore marine habitats were to be monitored, as well as which indicator species populations within these areas they would track through time and why it was useful to do so. In addition, pursuant with their Village Resource Management Plans, these representatives selected a fishing ground that was declared a tabu, or no-take, area for comparative study against resource populations within other harvested fishing grounds. Local participants were trained in simple, appropriate sampling techniques to collect indicator species population data within 1 m2 quadrats along systematically distributed 100 m line transects within randomly determined sample sites within both harvested (i.e., treatment) and tabu (i.e., control) study areas. Participants also learned how do complete simple descriptive analyses with data collected, including the development of histogram graphs of monitored results for presentation and discussion with the broader Verata community. In the end, participants came away from the workshop with a monitoring plan that they had developed, and more importantly, felt empowered in that they were now well positioned to implement the plan and use the information collected for resource decision making. A report in Fijian and English detailing all the workshop activities and outputs was also produced shortly after its completion to encourage sustainability of the methods employed (Parks 1997).

A few months following the workshop, the resulting monitoring program attracted the attention of NGOs and government officials who were interested in hearing that community members could learn and employ skills involving scientific measurement and data analysis (Baron 1998). Consequently, a second workshop jointly organized by the University of the South Pacific and WWF/SP and facilitated by BCN, SPACHEE, and WWF Staff was held for government managers, NGOs, and other individuals interested in the use of a community-based methodology. Held in Suva with a one-day field trip to Verata, the workshop was a great success and formed collaborative partnerships between Fijian NGOs and government officials in working at a community level. One high-ranking government official noted that "In my 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 that they can be valuable partners in our conservation work."

"I had previously viewed the intentions of NGOs with suspicion, but now realize that they can be valuable partners in our conservation work."

Since 1997, local participants in the monitoring activities have been so encouraged by the replenishment results of the trail tabu area in comparison to resource populations within harvested areas that they have decided to appended their VRMPs by replicating the comparative approach at four other village areas and have independently established four new tabu areas across two other habitat types using three new indicator species (BCN 1999). This adaptive management example of how local communities are capable of using science to systematically collect information on marine resources and use such information to make informed decisions was one of two BCN-supported examples that were highlighted with a broader Indo-Pacific scientific and academic community audience at the 1999 Eleventh Pacific Science Congress in Sydney (Parks 1999). The peer feedback received at the Congress on the community monitoring results from BCN's marine projects echoed BCN's own reaction regarding the Fiji results: cautious enthusiasm, with acknowledgement of the need to ground-truth and further test this approach before definitive conclusions on its management application are drawn.

The peer feedback received on the community monitoring results from BCN's marine projects echoed BCN's own reaction regarding the Fiji results: cautious enthusiasm, with acknowledgement of the need to further test this approach.

BCN assumes that due to the local ownership over the adaptive management process, there is a greater probability that such marine resource monitoring activities will be sustained in the future, even beyond BCN support. In addition, locally-managed fisheries no-take areas and simple data collection techniques lend themselves toward lowered project monitoring costs. In fact, BCN has found some evidence that suggests that such local efforts, while associated with much lower costs than those of formal monitoring conducted by outside scientists, may exhibit a corresponding increase in monitoring efficiency (BCN 1998). However, it should be noted that BCN strongly cautions the idea that community monitoring could be used as a substitute for formal scientific study, but instead suggests that the two be done hand-in hand. While this recommendation may at first appear to be somewhat idealistic, BCN advocates that such an approach is necessary to accurately triangulate results of local residents with those of independent experts and thereby (hopefully) corroborate local observations regarding changes in their natural surroundings.

The systematic collection and analysis of both ecological and socioeconomic data are essential activities in determining whether or not project interventions are leading to conservation objectives being achieved. Thus, as demonstrated in Verata, locally-employed quantitative techniques can play an important role in project management, acquainting community participants with their role in the more technical aspects of project management and the value of such activities within their own decision-making processes. As illustrated in the Verata case (and also demonstrated elsewhere in the BCN project portfolio) direct observation and simple resource population are neither beyond the scope of local stakeholders nor incompatible with customary notions of natural resource ecology. In fact, the Verata example has become a model being replicated by other conservation groups such as WWF/SP in other areas of Fiji of how to fuse scientific principles with traditional management practices to sustainably manage marine resources (BCN 1999).


The Next Phase

The BCN program is slated to end in September 1999, but the partnerships will remain, and in all likelihood, expand. A list of some of the key activities that will be undertaken during the next phase of the project life follows:

  1. Sample collections in Verata are ongoing, and may be developed with other emerging links to both additional potential prospecting clients and other communities sites where samples can be sourced.
  2. Community leaders from Verata will continue to work with other community projects in Fiji and perhaps elsewhere in the region on community conservation activities and ecological monitoring replication.
  3. The most appropriate form of benefit distribution of incoming revenues was recently decided by the Verata communities to be through a Tikina Trust Fund, but decisions on what types of community projects or improvements are to be funded through the Trust Fund is still undetermined.
  4. In an effort to diversify sustainable income-generating activities and reduce dependency on the bioprospecting enterprise, one option of interest to the community is the processing of kava (Piper methysticum) residue. Kava is a popular drink in the Pacific that is receiving wide renown in the world for its medicinal properties, and the residue of the drink can be used as well for certain products.
  5. Another monitoring workshop conducted during late 1998 focused on helping the community to monitor the socioeconomic impacts of the project – not only the cash benefits being generated from the enterprise, but the also the impacts of monitoring on household cash income and workshops and awareness raising on behavior.


Conclusion

This case study has shown how a community can play an active role in a fairly sophisticated conservation and development project, both in relation to technical aspects of the enterprise (such as collection and processing) and monitoring (using 'appropriate science'). It also illustrates how bioprospecting as an enterprise intervention can be linked to wider community-based conservation objectives. We have seen how the project was conceived, how the community involvement was structured, and how knowledge of the concepts and issues in conservation has accrued over the life of the project.

The Verata communities and their wider, urban residents have continually and collectively decided upon the path the project has taken, and their decision-making processes have had a direct correlation with the evolution of the project into what it embodies at present – an intervention achieving a notable degree of conservation. The fact that there has been a high degree of 'hand-shaking' between the project partners' vision and the communities' vision of where the project should go is partially reflective of the project partners' ability to: a) clearly hear and internalize local residents' expectations of what decisions need to be made for which resources; b) in both enterprise and monitoring activities, effectively act as facilitators, rather than manipulators, towards the communities' perceived end result of the project; and c) ensure that consensus is built between communities and project participants involved, inclusive of the national policy makers and end-market clients.

A project is not a community. Life goes on in Verata: people have to make a living, get food, send their children to school and contribute to their church. A project can only do so much in a short time span. The relationships are strong, however, and the commitment to conservation has come from the beginning from community leadership. In a few years we will see the fuller impact of these activities as people continue to take steps to conserve their biological resources. The Fiji government is increasingly active in this arena and interested in Verata as a model. So too are other communities in the Pacific and the world that are grappling with rapid deterioration of their resource base. Innovative ways to obtain the financial, social and intellectual capital for development that can conserve resources are sorely needed. If bioprospecting is carried out respectfully and judiciously, the benefits can be solid, and the risks minimal. Linked to community resource management and tied into other enterprise options, community bioprospecting can provide an important catalyst for sustainable rural development.

 

References

Baron, Nancy. 1998. Keeping Watch: Experiences from the Field in Community-Based Monitoring. A Biodiversity Support Program Lessons from the Field. Biodiversity Support Program, Washington, DC, USA.

Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN). 1998. The Biodiveristy Conservation Network's 1997 Annual Report. Biodiversity Support Program, Washington DC, USA.

Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN). 1999. The Biodiveristy Conservation Network's Final Annual Report. Biodiversity Support Program, Washington DC, USA.

Parks, John E. 1997. Na I-Tukutuku ni Vuli 1997 Monitoring Sasalu ni Waitui Tikina Verata, 22 Epereli - 2 Me, Koro Ucunivanua (Summary Report on the 1997 Verata Tikina Marine Resource Monitoring Workshop, 22 April - 2 May, Ucunivanua Village). Unpublished report prepared for the University of the South Pacific and the South Pacific Action Committee on Human Ecology and the Environment, Fiji.

Parks, John E. 1999. Coastal Communities and Adaptive Management: Marine Resource Sustainability Results from the BCN Program. BCN paper presentation given at the Eleventh Congress of the Pacific Science Association, 4 - 9 July 1999, Univeristy of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

World Wildlife Fund. 1997. Lessons from the Field: A Review of World Wildlife Fund's Experience with Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, 1985-1996. World Wildlife Fund, Washington DC, USA.


 

1 University of the South Pacific, Institute of Natural Resources, P.O. Box 1168, Suva, Fiji; Tel: (679) 212 416; Fax: (679) 302 548; E-mail: aablersberg@usp.ac.fj

2 Biodiversity Conservation Network, c/o World Wildlife Fund, 1250 24th Street NW, Washington DC, 20037, USA; Tel: (1 202) 861 8370; Fax: (1 202) 861 8324; E-mail: john.parks@wwfus.org

3

4 South Pacific Action Committee for Human Ecology and the Environment, c/o University of the South Pacific, P.O. Box 1168, Suva, Fiji.

5 Recollection, milestone fees and of course potential royalties could bring benefits down the line.

6 Due to US budget cuts the project had to be cut back to only one community as described below.

7 Dr Carté is now based at Singapore University and plans to collaborate with USP in the future.

8 Since the workshops, another village has been added to Verata tikina to make a total of 8 villages.

9 The participatory M&E approach employed by BCN at its grantee projects is inherently designed so that as community members collect relevant information on their natural surroundings, this information can be used to enhance local resource decision making, and improve capacity to address threats facing natural resources. This process of collecting, analyzing, and using information systematically to address newly arising challenges and adapt existing management strategies to meet them is defined by BCN as adaptive management. Thus, BCN's participatory M&E process has inherently been associated with such issues as community empowerment, self-sufficiency, and long-term project sustainability.


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