View towards Negros Island, Philippines, in the Sulu Sea. The Sulu and Celebes Seas are part of the Coral Triangle, the planet’s richest centre of marine life and coral diversity. — LEODB/Wikimedia Commons
THE nearest, southernmost Philippine island to Sabah is only 50km – or a 30-minute boat ride – from Tawau.
Panguan Island, a 6ha place of blindingly white sand lapped by turquoise blue water that sits in the municipality of Tawi-Tawi, is one of the many hundreds of islands making up the Sulu Archipelago.
Inhabited by just a handful of families from the Sama Bajau ethnic group, the island has long been a stopover for seafarers travelling in the Sulu-Celebes region.
But behind the idyllic paradise lies a murky past.
It was once said to be the hideout of kidnappers from the Abu Saayaf militant group that used to terrorise divers and holidaymakers along Sabah’s east coast; the island was only reclaimed from the notorious gang by Philippines marines in 2017.
While the danger from such gangs has abated somewhat, the island, and the region, continues to be a hotbed for other illegal activities: the poaching, smuggling, and trafficking of wildlife.
And it’s not just marine life that is being poached and smuggled in this region that is crisscrossed by transnational shipping lanes and traditional sea routes.
A recent report from wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic, “Baseline For Monitoring and Law Enforcement in the Sulu-Celebes Seas”, showed that between June 2003 and September 2021, there were 452 recorded wildlife seizures, ranging from parrots and pangolins to giant clams weighing hundreds of kilos. However, only 119 – or 36% – of the incidents resulted in arrests. Of the 392 people arrested, only 26 – a measly 6% – were convicted.
Sadly, shark fins for sale is not an uncommon sight in Kota Kinabalu. — Filepic/The Star
Of particular concern to Malaysia in the report is the smuggling of turtle eggs and online posts touting the sale of sharks and rays.
Eggs accounted for 95% of the items seized, according to the report, with almost 80% of this confiscated in Sabah, while over 58% of online posts on sharks and rays originated from Malaysian social media account holders, mostly on Facebook.
The online trade survey by Traffic found 601 posts offering marine turtles, sharks and rays, and pangolins for sale on six platforms across Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines between September and December 2021.
At least 28 taxa of sharks and rays were identified in 562 posts offering whole bodies, meat, bottles of oil, bones (ie, cartilage), fins, and ray tails.
The posts included four species listed under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. All these were recorded from Malaysia.
Enforcement efforts
In a recent email interview, Kanitha Krishnasamy, Traffic director in South-East Asia, says the percentages in the report only reflect data that was publicly available, with seizures in each port presenting only a proportion of cases for the whole country. This is because the seizures in the report are relevant only to the provinces within the Sulu-Celebes Seas; in Malaysia’s case, Sabah.
Kanitha: Monitoring the illegal wildlife trade in the Sulu-Celebes region is complicated by the spread-out geography. — Pic provided
At the last count, the report showed that 45 different law enforcement agencies across the three countries worked on these seizures.
“The fact that the seas border several countries, including archipelagic ones that are widespread geographically, certainly makes it complicated,” says Kanitha, referring to monitoring and curbing the trade in wildlife.
“It means authorities have to invest in distributing resources to tackle poaching and trafficking across the many entry and exit points, both legal and illegal,” she explains.
This, she points out, makes cross-border collaboration, supported by dedicated intelligence- led investigations to identify perpetrators, very important.
“Given the geographic complication and the general scarcity of resources to fight wildlife trafficking, maximising the capacity and expertise of agencies that have presence in the various locations is necessary.
“This ensures that no one agency is left bearing sole responsibility for tackling such a huge and complicated problem.”
To give an indication how uphill the task is for any enforcement agency, just the Sulu Archipelago itself – off the south-western coast of the Philippines and extending up to Borneo – is made up of over 900 volcanic islands and coral islets.
The region is also located right smack in the north-western corner of the Coral Triangle, the planet’s richest centre of marine life and coral diversity. And despite making up only one-sixth of the Triangle’s six million square-kilometre area, the Sulu-Celebes Seas boast over 2,500 species of fish, five species of marine turtles, and at least 22 species of marine mammals as well as 75% of the world’s coral species.
It’s a treasure trove of biodiversity through which an estimated 100,000 ships move every year. The Traffic report shows that wildlife commodities are being moved across the seas in various ways, from small-scale local trade to large foreign vessels trafficking on a vast scale.
It is concerning, points out Kanitha, because of the major impact that trade is having on marine resources in the area.
“Protecting the biodiversity here becomes all the more important,” she says.
Fishing for trouble
The seas’ rich marine life is also bringing in other crowds: tourists, specifically divers, and also, according to the Traffic report, fishers, many of whom are unlicensed and unregulated.
While the report did not look at the impact of these activities on the three countries’ tourism image – though “It is certainly something the three governments should be looking into,” says Kanitha – it noted that illegal, unregulated, and unreported (commonly known as IUU) fishing activity is an issue in the region.
This includes fishing without a legitimate licence or vessel registration papers; having vessels with more than one flag; using destructive fishing gear; landing products in unauthorised landing sites; and nonreporting, misreporting, or underreporting of catches.
The last certainly includes sharks and rays, which, in Sabah, contribute a chunk to tourism receipts.
In 2018, the Australian Institute of Marine Science estimated that the diving industry on Pulau Semporna, off the east coast of Sabah, was worth US$72mil (RM332.2mil at today’s rates) a year. Of this, US$22mil (RM101mil) was based on shark diving.
Currently, not every shark or ray species in Sabah waters is protected, and any ban on fishing is only imposed in the state’s marine parks, with social media occasionally erupting in outrage whenever meat is spotted being sold in local markets or, worse, when images of sharks and rays being slaughtered in diving spots like Pulau Mabul emerge.
Among the totally protected species are the hammerhead shark, smooth hammerhead shark, winghead shark, and oceanic wingtip shark.
There is usually an outcry when pictures like this of shark hunting in the waters off Pulau Mabul show up on social media, but it will take more than outrage to protect sharks and rays in the area. — Filepic/The Star
“There is most definitely a shark fishing industry. Not dedicated, but not shying away from it either,” says Dr Nicolas J. Pilcher, founder and executive director of the Sabah-based Marine Research Foundation.
Fishers, he explains in an email interview, do not go out to catch sharks and rays specifically but rather, they “go out to catch anything”.
“If sharks and rays are caught, these are landed and sold. Once landed, it is not illegal to remove the fins and sell them separately, which also happens, and there are likely posts about selling these sorts of products on social media,” he says in commenting on the Traffic report.
“So the challenge is that it is not yet illegal to catch most sharks and rays, and therefore not illegal to sell them or sell their fins. Until such time as the capture, sale, and processing of many more species of sharks is made illegal, this will continue,” he says.
Thus, it is not common, according to Pilcher, for people to use social media to sell fishery products.
Pilcher: More investigation needs to be done to see if the local fishing of sharks and rays is impacting the dive industry in Sabah. — Marine Research Foundation
“The truth is that many posts are less related to sharks and rays and are more about turtles,” he says, pointing out that as turtles are fully protected, this drives the trade underground and, hence, online.
The sale and consumption of turtle eggs is illegal in Sabah, as well as in the rest of Malaysia.
More investigation, he cautions, needs to be done to see if the local fishing of sharks and rays is impacting the dive industry in Sabah, as many of the species involved are not those generally seen by divers. He adds that there can be sustainable fishing as well.
Mountain, not molehill
When we ask if social media companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, should be more proactive and remove posts offering illegal wildlife or wildlife parts for sale, Pilcher says that any action needs to be multifaceted.
“Buyers need to stop buying, fishers need to start protecting, government agencies need to proactively manage for tomorrow, political leaders need to appreciate that safeguarding these resources is safeguarding our ocean rice bowl.
“And yes, online sales platforms need to step in and limit online sales too,” he concludes.
There needs to be, says Pilcher, a careful long-term masterplan for state fisheries, embracing all the fisheries management measures used all over the world – such as “Time-area closures; size limits; quotas; seasons; gear restrictions; bycatch reduction devices; and juvenile and trash fish excluder devices”.
These “safeguard both fishers’ livelihoods and endangered species”, he says.
“Without them, fisheries degrade and, one day, will be worth mere pennies,” he points out.
Besides poaching and smuggling, like the rest of Malaysia and the two other countries it borders, the Sulu-Celebes Seas are also facing another mountain of serious issues: pollution from plastic waste and run-offs of pesticides and soil erosion from rivers.
Pointing to the Marine Research Foundation’s recent work in Kota Kinabalu as well as that by other groups on plastic pollution, Pilcher says “It’s a mountain that people still see as a molehill”.
