What is left today are fraying ropes that once demarcated the lush expanse of seaweed into neat rows.
On the seabed are remnants of a once-thriving underwater crop.
Salleh Abdul Salleh, a fisherman and seaweed cultivator, blames it on a marine conservation effort that not only banned fishing but also led to an increase in the turtle population in the waters.
The conservation effort was made possible through the gazettement of the body of water into the Tun Sakaran Marine Park in 2004.
“Now the turtles are also destroying our seaweeds,” Salleh, who is chairman of the Semporna Fishermen Association, told FMT.
Seaweed cultivation was a thriving industry and, apart from fishing, was a major income earner for the Bajau Laut community there. But the conservation plan has effectively taken away both their sources of income.
Each seaweed farmer used to earn up to RM7,000 a month from their crops alone.
Salleh said almost all the seaweed farmers in the area have already lost their main source of income.
“We are not against conservation, but when the rules mean we lose our income completely, how are we supposed to survive?” he asked.
He said while seaweed farming is still allowed in selected zones, and there areas where the crop is still cultivated, there is now a high risk of them being destroyed.
Seaweed is a main ingredient in some foods, as well as fertilisers, cosmetics, medicines, plastics, and others.
“It has great potential and there is a high demand for it abroad. However, the supply is low,” Salleh said.
Seaweed farming, once the mainstay of Semporna’s coastal communities, has been in decline for years.
According to a 2022 Borneo Post report, Sabah once exported about 20,000 tonnes of seaweed annually, but output fell to around 18,000 tonnes after the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2010, the federal government listed seaweed cultivation as a high impact, high value national key economic area under its Economic Transformation Programme. However, that has not helped reverse the situation for the farmers.
Salleh said the loss of income has triggered a migration of young people to other towns or across the South China Sea to West Malaysia.
Proposed solution
Salleh said the government could help to protect traditional fishing grounds by recognising “hak adat laut” or customary sea rights to protect traditional fishing grounds, similar to indigenous land rights for the Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia.
“The government could designate an area in the sea as a customary community zone. This means that once a customary fishing zone is established in Semporna, other economic activities such as tours are disallowed,” he said.
He said legislation similar to those in place in the Philippines and New Zealand could safeguard both marine biodiversity and community survival.
In the Philippines, the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997 explicitly includes coastal areas and bodies of water within ancestral domains, enabling communities like the Tagbanwa to secure legal title over traditional fishing grounds.
In New Zealand, the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act 2011 recognises the rights of Maori tribes to manage and protect their ancestral coastal and marine areas.
“We are not against development or the gazettement of parks, but fishing communities must be given their rights to the sea because fishing is our tradition and culture,” Salleh said.
“If we do not fight for these rights, I can guarantee our coastal fishing communities will one day disappear,” he added.