"There is almost nothing left down there," the
environmental project manager says, wading toward a sign planted on the
shore reading "Lampi National Park."
Some 50 meters behind it,
secreted among the tangled growth, lies the trunk of an illegally felled
tree. Nearby, a trap has been set to snare mouse deer. And just across
the island, within park boundaries, the beach and sea are strewn with
plastic, bottles and other human waste from villagers.
The
perilous state of Lampi, Burma's only marine park, is not unique.
Though the country's 43 protected areas are among Asia's greatest
bastions of biodiversity, encompassing snow-capped Himalayan peaks,
dense jungles and mangrove swamps, they are to a large degree protected
in name alone. Park land has been logged, poached, dammed and converted
to plantations as Burma revs up its economic engines and opens up to
foreign investment after decades of isolation.
Of the protected
areas, only half have even partial biodiversity surveys and management
plans. At least 17 are described as "paper parks" — officially gazetted
but basically uncared for — in a comprehensive survey funded by the
European Union.
So rangers rarely see a tiger in the
21,891-square-kilometer (8,452-square-mile) Hukaung Valley Tiger
Reserve. It's the world's largest protected area for the big cats, but
has been overrun by poachers supplying animal parts for traditional
medicines in nearby China.
And Burma's first nature reserve, the
Pidaung Wildlife Sanctuary set up in 1918, has been "totally poached
out and should be degazetted," says Tony Lynam, a field biologist for
the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Inaugurated in
1996, Lampi fit squarely into the paper park category until possibly
last year, when six rangers from the Forestry Department were finally
assigned to protect this 79-square mile (204-square-kilometer) marine
gem. It had been, and still largely remains, a do-as-you-please place.
Local
residents and staffers with Italian Instituto Oikos, the group Tedesco
works for, say dynamite fishing persists even within earshot of the
ranger station. They say Thai and Burmese trawlers encroach into
no-fishing areas, and that natural forest on one park island, Bocho, is
being converted to rubber, encouraged by government policy.
Without
any management plan in place, four settlements in the park and a fifth
within a proposed buffer zone have grown dramatically and now total
about 3,000 people, many of them Burmese migrants from the mainland.
Blast fishing has become so intense that the Burma navy sent four
vessels to the area in January in an attempt to curb it.
Despite
the ongoing depredations, the park retains an incredible variety of
natural life, according to a report by Oikos and the Burmese
non-government group BANCA.
Its evergreen forests harbor 195 plant
species, including trees soaring as high as 30 meters (98 feet), and
many of the park's 228 bird species. Sea life ranges from dugongs —
large mammals similar to manatees — to 73 different kinds of seaweed.
Nineteen mammal species, seven of them globally threatened, are at home
here, including macaques seen on rocky headlands hunting for some of the
42 crab species. There's even a wild elephant, lone survivor from a
herd earlier transported from the mainland.
These wonders have
sparked a recent push by tourism developers into the once isolated
Mergui archipelago where Lampi is embedded amid some 800 stunning,
mostly uninhabited islands. Tedesco says that a Singapore company has
already been granted permission to build a hotel within the park "even
before a management plan is in place."
She says the onset of possible mass tourism carries risk, but also potential benefits.
Pressure
from scuba diving outfits and divers was largely responsible for
halting blast fishing in many marine areas of neighboring Thailand,
where some parks have curbed illegal activities by providing
tourist-related income to the local culprits who once carried them out.
Tedesco says the Moken, the sea nomads who have inhabited the Mergui archipelago for centuries, would make ideal nature guides.
"We need community participation to preserve the parks," says Naing Thaw, director of Myanmar's Forestry Department.
He
says the government intends to expand the protected areas from 5.6
percent of the country to 10 percent by 2020, adding eight more
reserves. But he says authorities face "material, human resources and
financial constraints" in turning demarcated areas into viable havens
for wildlife and natural habitat.
Plans are underway for a major
infusion of funds from foreign donors to focus on upgrading more than
half a dozen parks. Inland wetlands, estuaries and marine areas, which
contain Southeast Asia's largest remaining coral reefs and some of the
world's most important biodiversity, and underrepresented in Myanmar's
parks, and environmentalists are pushing more of them to be protected.
Before
the civilian government took over, foreign conservation funding
amounted to roughly $1 million a year. It is expected to reach up to $3
million in 2014 and jump to more than $20 million with major players
like Norway and the U.N. Development Program coming in.
"The most
critical intervention is to expand the marine protected area to protect
it not only from tourism but more serious impacts such as bottom
trawling and blast fishing before emerging vested interests render the
designation of marine protected areas impossible," says Frank Momberg,
based in the country for Flora and Fauna International.
Last
month, the group said it hoped the formation of a new park in Kachin
state would help save a primate species discovered by scientists just
four years ago. At most, 330 snub-nosed monkeys survive in the northern
frontier area, and they are threatened by illegal logging.
In
this Feb. 12, 2014 photo, a Myanmarese illegal logger smokes a
cigarette at one of the illegal logging camps on army-controlled Jar
Lann Island in Mergui Archipelago, Burma.
Foreign
experts working with Burmese are impressed by the high level of
dedication and professionalism by some in the government, especially
given the powerful forces they must challenge to guard depredation —
generals, government cronies, Thai and Chinese dam builders.
Lynam,
of the Wildlife Conservation Society, works with elephant protection in
several parks and says patrols he has accompanied have caught villagers
hauling timber out of parks who confessed to working for the local
police and forest rangers. Even some Buddhist monks are involved, he
says, with logs "donated" by illegal loggers who split the profits with
log-laundering monasteries.
He sees the accelerating infusion of foreign funding for the parks, and the general environment, as a two-edged sword.
"As
the resources are made available, I think you are going to see some
very good parks emerging in five to 10 years. There's lots of hope," he
says. "But foreign money can also help empower the powerful guys who
abet corruption. I've seen it in other countries.
Lynam says a lot
of foreign money intended for conservation will be "going through the
system and into somebody's handbag, but even if a fraction of it is used
it will be a great help."
A number of international environmental groups have already set up operations and more are eager to come in.
"We
know the experiences of other countries that have so-called opened up,
like Vietnam, where most of the mangrove swamps were lost in a decade.
We can see the dangers of what could also be lost in Burma in the next
10 years or so," says Robert Mather, Southeast Asian head of the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
"It's a moment in time with golden opportunities to save something that is still out there."
![Myanmar's 'paper parks': A warning sign saying 'No blast fishing': In this Feb. 11, 2014 photo, a warning sign saying 'No blast fishing' stands in Ma Kyone Galet village, inhabited by Moken and Myanmarese fishermen, on Bocho Island in Mergui Archipelago, Myanmar.]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/b3/2b96427956a74caab795992a4ca427/_h366_w650_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg","fill":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/b3/2b96427956a74caab795992a4ca427/_h338_w600_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg","snap":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/b3/2b96427956a74caab795992a4ca427/_h210_w320_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
![Myanmar's 'paper parks': A Myanmarese illegal logger]({"default":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/5e/c5b0adbf4ff419bd4da4f86535d46/_h0_w305_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg","fill":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/5e/c5b0adbf4ff419bd4da4f86535d46/_h0_w282_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg","snap":"http://newsbcpcol.stb.s-msn.com/amnews/i/5e/c5b0adbf4ff419bd4da4f86535d46/_h0_w141_m6_otrue_lfalse.jpg"})
