The Great Sea Reef (GSR) is the third largest coral reef in the world and it’s located a few miles off the coast of Fiji’s Macuata province in the north of the country’s second biggest Island, Vanua Levu.
The Macuata province has a committee consisting of local community leaders called the Qoliqoli Cokovata Management Committee (QCMC) – Qoliqoli means fishing ground in Fijian.
Now might be a good time to talk about the Fijian language – Qoliqoli is pronounced Ng-goli-Ng-goli and Cokovata is Thokovata. Fijian in its written form was in fact created by a couple of missionaries in 1835 – before that there was no written form.
In written Fijian sounds requiring two consonants together were replaced by an unused consonant. So ‘c’ is sounded ‘th’, ‘b’ sounds ‘mb’, ‘d’ is ‘nd’, ‘g’ is ‘ng’, and ‘q’ is ‘n-ng’.
Anyway, the QCMC aims to manage the natural marine resources of the Macuata province and the WWF works closely with them to help them achieve their objectives.
The GSR has, for many years, been over fished. This has of course resulted in the numbers of fish declining and the obvious solution to this would be, unsurprisingly, to reduce or stop fishing it. So that is what has happened, there has been a ban, known traditionally in Fijian as a Tabu, for the past 5 years.
The ban has proven to be undeniably successful and the number and diversity of marine live has increased considerably. HOWEVER….. recently there has been a serious rise in poaching. I went diving on the GSR the other day (more details about that in a future post) and saw plenty of people fishing illegally.
The communities involved in the QCMC don’t have the money or resources to deter these poachers so the WWF tugged on the heart-string of every Fijian – 7s rugby.
We hosted a 7s tournament to the raise money needed to help enforce this Tabu and by all accounts it was a great success.
[...] in a recent post that a WWF rugby 7s tournament has been raising money for a local community group called the Qoliqoli Cakovata Management Committee [...]