Sea cucumber trade sparks sea of discontent
Print Edition
AS evening falls over Sierra Leone’s Banana Island archipelago, bats stream from their beachside roosts to circle in their thousands over the jungle village of Dublin.
Below them a struggle is playing out over an unexpected commodity — the lowly sea cucumber, a fleshy, sausage-shaped creature that scavenges for food on the seabed.
It is a struggle familiar to many in the West African country.
Sierra Leone’s resources — diamonds, gold, fish and more recently iron ore — have been extracted and exported in great quantities throughout its history, yet the country remains one of the poorest in the world.
While the Banana Islanders have no use for sea cucumbers, in China they are prized for their medicinal properties and as a natural aphrodisiac.
Growing demand — estimated at around 10,000 tons per year — has depleted stocks around the world, leading traders to search ever further afield for new harvesting grounds.
Locals say when the first Chinese traders arrived in Sierra Leone four years ago to harvest the island’s little-known, red-spined variety of Stichopus sea cucumbers, they called themselves investors.
When prices skyrocketed, the islanders hoped the windfall would both make them wealthy and bring development to the village.
Chinese traders run their export businesses out of Tombo village on the mainland a few kilometers away. Mohamed Bangura works for one exporter who asked to be identified only as Cham Jr.
Cham’s father was one of the first to export sea cucumbers from the Banana Islands.
Bangura acknowledged the villagers’ expectations were high, but he said the region was still better off. He notes his company had supplied a generator to Tombo village, for example.
“The islanders are the main beneficiaries of our trade,” he said.
Without access to international markets and lacking the capital to start sea cucumber trading operations of their own, the locals say they feel powerless, however.
Sea cucumber diving is a lucrative option compared with the meager earnings offered by a fishing industry hard hit by illegal and unregulated foreign trawlers.
Abu Bakar, who is in his 20s, has been diving since the beginning of the cucumber windfall. Selling his catch to Chinese buyers enabled him to invest in land on the coast to the south of the capital, Freetown.
“We thank God the sea cucumber has pushed us forward,” he says.
Diving must take place in the dark, when the slug-like echinoderms emerge from their daytime resting places.
“The sea cucumber knows only darkness,” says Lord Moe.
Every night during the season, Matthew Ray pushes off with a team of divers in a rickety, brightly painted canoe from a beach beneath a towering cotton tree. After a half-hour boat ride through water glowing yellow with bio-luminescence, he reaches the cucumber fields, where collectors, sporting wetsuits and waterproof flashlights, dive for hours on end.
The work is arduous and repetitive. Many of the men use marijuana and other drugs to ease their burden. On one recent trip a man intoxicated with the ethoxylated alcohol, Tomadol, capsized a boat, prompting panicked bailing to keep the team afloat.
High price
This particular trip yielded just two sea cucumbers, which were hastily boiled and salted to be stored until Matthew has enough to sell to his Chinese buyers and Sierra Leonean middlemen.
The going price is 150,000 Leones for a 7kg bucket. How much they are resold for is not clear but Selina Stead, professor of Marine Governance and Environmental Science at Newcastle University, said by the time they reach the wholesale markets of Guangzhou, dried sea cucumbers similar to the Sierra Leone variety can fetch as much as US$133 per kilogram.
Sierra Leone government says conditions are improving in the country, pointing to a set of impressive economic indicators.
The economy grew by 15.2 percent in 2012 on the back of an iron-ore bonanza. Projections for 2014 are not far below that, at 14 percent, according to the World Bank.
China has been a big part of that boom, with trade predicted to hit US$2 billion this year.
But many Sierra Leoneans say they still have yet to see the benefits in their daily lives.
The jobs created by the major mining companies have had little impact on Sierra Leone’s unemployment crisis, and firms have faced criticism from civil society over importing too many foreign workers and contracting foreign companies to do jobs local companies could have done.
Life expectancy remains just 48 and the country ranks 177th out of 187 countries on the human development index.
The sandy streets of Dublin village, once trodden by slaves destined for the Atlantic trade, reinforce the point that very little of the sea cucumber wealth has remained on Banana Island.
Decaying clapboard houses, built in the distinctive style of the returning slaves who arrived in Sierra Leone from the late 18th century, lie scattered through the bush. The only street lights are rusting wrought-iron relics left behind by early Portuguese settlers.
Clean water is scarce and electricity is enjoyed only by the few who can afford to run costly diesel generators.
There are also concerns the sea cucumber boomlet may already be busting.
Victor Sawyer, the official in charge of sea cucumber research at Sierra Leone’s Environmental Protection Agency in Freetown, said the government intends to regulate the sector but has yet to conduct basic research.
“We don’t want to get into a situation where it is overexploited. But we don’t know the growth rate; we don’t know the stock. We don’t know anything now,” he says.
Abu Bakar, one of the few islanders to have enjoyed modest profits from the trade, agrees the supply appears to be dwindling.
“Now it is not easy to find them,” he says. “We strain a lot.”
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