Features

Octopus’s garden in Madagascar

Marine Protected Areas

Words by Steve Rocliffe

Cover image

A Vezo fisherman sails out to a reef flat to fish for octopus. For such fishers, who live in very isolated communities, octopus is one of the few ways of earning cash. It keeps for much longer than fish does, and so can be trucked out on ice by commercial collectors and exported to Europe and Japan. The demand from international markets for seafood has driven overfishing even in such isolated places as this fishing village in south-western Madagascar.
Photo by Garth Cripps

The Vezo ancestors can be surprisingly fussy drinkers. Among these master seafarers, lemonade and Fanta are appreciated, Coca Cola is not. On an isolated sandbank off Madagascar’s south-western coast, the small group of village elders I’m with swig mouthfuls of orange and yellow fizz from sticky bottles warmed by the heat of the day. Venance, the village president, sprinkles rum into the sea, offering thanks for the undersea bounty he hopes the community will receive.

The broad reef flat that abuts this remote bank has been closed to octopus fishing for the past two months, but today it is to be reopened. Hundreds of fishers from Venance’s village of Andavadoaka have turned out for the occasion and are waiting expectantly for the ceremony to conclude. Their brightly painted canoes are drawn up on the foreshore nearby, patched sails flapping in the light breeze.

Despite the recent arrival of high-speed mobile Internet, this part of Madagascar feels remote. The potholed tarmac on the drive here ended before sunrise yesterday, a few miles north of the regional capital of Toliara. Over the seven hours that followed, our 4×4 shuddered its way along a rutted sandy track, through forbidding thickets of spiny plants found nowhere else on earth.

Andavadoaka’s isolation is part of its appeal. The Vezo fishers who first migrated here discovered a submarine world of astonishing abundance and diversity. Fishing trips to the expansive coral reefs lying just offshore yielded pirogues filled to the gunwales with the weight of the day’s catch. Villagers didn’t dare to swim at dawn or dusk because of all the sharks.

But this underwater Eden was not to last. In recent decades, overfishing, climate change and population growth have steadily emptied these waters, not only putting at risk the food supply and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people, but also endangering the fragile reefs of an island so rich in unique plant and animal life that it is known as the eighth continent.

With their existence under threat, the Vezo have not sat idly by as this crisis has unfolded. Aptly for a people whose name translates as ‘those who struggle against the sea’, they’ve fought back, village by village. With the support of British marine conservation organisation Blue Ventures and the assistance of an unlikely eight-legged ally, they’re working to return these seas to abundance.

In this part of Madagascar, octopus is a vital source of food and income for local communities. Catches that aren’t eaten locally are exported all the way to the dinner plates of southern Europe. Yet a decade ago, octopus stocks were in trouble. With concern for this important resource mounting, Andavadoaka’s village elders and Blue Ventures hatched a radical plan that would see them temporarily close a small reef to octopus fishing. Since octopuses grow fast but die young and because the bigger they are the more eggs they produce, a ban of just a few months should help numbers to rebound, they reasoned.

Cover image

A fisherwoman ranges over a vast reef flat at low tide, scanning the shallow water for an octopus den, from which she'll tease out the octopus and then kill it using her spear. She pulls along the octopus she has already caught, attached to a string in her hand.
Photo by Garth Cripps

The plan worked. When the closure was lifted, fishers caught far larger octopuses – and far more of them. So impressive were the results that, before long, nearby villages were establishing closures of their own. And within three years, Andavadoaka had joined forces with two dozen neighbours to create a locally managed marine area known as Velondriake, a Vezo word meaning ‘to live with the sea’. Across an area of reefs, lagoons, mangroves and sea-grass beds the size of a quarter of a million football pitches, destructive practices such as poison fishing have been banned, while marine reserves permanently off limits to all fishing have been established.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Inspired by the success of Velondriake, coastal communities across the country have followed suit, grouping together to establish more than 60 similar initiatives. This growing network now covers over 11% of Madagascar’s seabed and has even received a seal of approval from the highest level of government. President Rajaonarimampianina has endorsed this locally centred revolution as a way of helping to protect ever greater swathes of the fragile waters that lap Madagascar’s shores.

Back on the sandbank at the heart of the Velondriake, the tide reaches its lowest ebb. Venance polishes off the rest of the rum and, with a dramatic pause worthy of Harold Pinter, proclaims the reef open to fishing once more. Amid much cheering, the large crowd of fishers quickly disperses across the immense reef flat, faces painted yellow with a natural sunblock of ground bark. Under the beating sun, they scour the shallows for the dens that house their elusive prey, using spears to deftly extract impressively large creatures from improbably tiny holes.

For these fishers, seafood is the only source of protein in almost every meal – and even one meal a day is by no means assured. Income hovers at about $1 per day. But while life remains challenging for the Vezo, they are undoubtedly reaping rewards from this unconventional approach to marine conservation. Researchers have found that in the month after bans were lifted at more than 30 sites, villagers harvested over 700% more octopus than in the month before the bans were imposed. Communities discovered that, on average, a dollar’s worth of octopus left in the ocean had grown to $1.81 by the end of a closure.

By themselves, the closures and the community-managed protected areas that followed will not be enough to overcome the complex environmental and social challenges that lie ahead. But they are undoubtedly a step towards a more hopeful future for Madagascar’s fragile coastal ecosystems and those, like the Vezo, who depend upon them for survival.

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