Zimpapers Logo

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 that is 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 — currently estimated at around 10,000 tonnes 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.

Moses Taylor, a former village chief known locally as Lord Moe, recalls the visitors’ promises with bitterness.

“They said they would build water pumps in the street, they said they would build street lights,” he said, sprawled in a flower bed smoking cheap cigarettes. “They said they would build community centres. But they did nothing for us.”

“They just used us and dumped us like rubbish,” said Abu Bakar Kanu, a cucumber diver smoking marijuana with friends down the street.

The locals say after it became clear the development promises were not likely to be met, they banned diving with the oxygen tanks and air-compressors that they themselves cannot afford, and called on all cucumber buyers to pay 200,000 Leones ($46) to the chief before they could operate.

Local cucumber dealer Reginald McCarthy said these rules have been ignored. “Now they come from Kent with boats and oxygen,” he said. “You can’t stop them.”

Chinese traders running their export businesses out of Tombo village on the mainland a few kilometres away did not want to talk to Reuters about the locals’ complaints. But Mohamed Bangura, who works for one exporter who asked to be identified only as Cham Jr, denied they were breaking any laws.

The going price is 150,000 Leones ($35) for a 7-kg (15-pound) 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 $133 a kg.

Victor Sawyer, the official in charge of sea cucumber research at Sierra Leone’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 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 told Reuters.

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 said. “We strain a lot.” — Reuters