The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has begun a tree-planting and waste-removal programme on St Martin's, Bangladesh's only coral island, during the tourist off-season. It plans to plant 20,000 native trees suited to the island's soil and climate, and volunteers are collecting all plastic and polythene on the island over four days to ship back to the mainland.
State Minister for Environment Sheikh Faridul Islam said St Martin's is unique and another could not be created even for a trillion dollars. The monsoon and off-season are the right time to plant and clean up, he said, so that an orderly environment is in place before tourists arrive in winter.
The restrictions have hit permanent residents hard. Locals say about 2,200 families live on the island and at least 2,000 of them are now unemployed. Tourism used to run six months a year and the fishing ban lasted only 22 days; now there is a 65-day fishing ban and the tourist season has been cut to two or three months.
In 1999, 509 hectares of the island were declared an ecologically critical area, and later about 1,743 square kilometres of sea a marine protected area. Even so, hundreds of unauthorised hotels and resorts have been built, the beach's keya (screw pine) forest has been cut, and over-extraction of groundwater is letting salt water into the freshwater layer.
November to April is the sea turtles' nesting season, but hotel lights, noise and stray dogs are spoiling nesting sites. The island has six to seven thousand stray dogs, yet the local hospital has no rabies vaccine. Red crabs and turtles have returned somewhat to the beaches since tourism was curbed, but finding other livelihoods for thousands of jobless islanders is now the big challenge.
Source: Dinajpur TV
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