Haitian Divers Hope to Aid Ailing Reef

Only one thing stood in their way: For most of them — like Jessika Laloi, 21 — this was their first time swimming in the ocean. Until a few months ago, Ms. Laloi had not even known how to dog paddle.

Now she was wading into the ocean in shorts and a tank top, with a life preserver strapped to her torso, a welcome distraction from the tumult of life since her home collapsed in the earthquake a year and a half ago.

“Diving and swimming is a way of showing you that you are in the environment,” Ms. Laloi said. “You are part of it. You don’t have to destroy it.”

Environmental degradation is rife in Haiti — deforestation, erosion, pollution — and for the most part it is hard to miss. But for decades the country’s marine environment has suffered unseen. Its extensive coral reef system, an attraction to foreign scuba divers in the 1970s and ’80s, has largely died off — partly from sedimentation and climate change, but mostly from overfishing.

“It’s probably the worst overfishing I’ve seen anywhere in the world,” said Gregor Hodgson, the director of Reef Check, a nonprofit organization in California that monitors reef health around the globe. Mr. Hodgson, who has been leading the training of Ms. Laloi and her fellow Haitians, said his organization had worked on reefs in 90 countries.

Months after the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, this nation’s capital, Mr. Hodgson flew to Haiti to inspect reefs, checking for quake damage. Instead, he found something more alarming: dead coral as far as the eye could see, and almost no fish. He estimates that about 85 percent of the coral reef has died.

In Haiti 54,000 fishermen rely on the ocean for their livelihood, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, which oversees fisheries management. In recent decades, as their usual catches of Nassau groupers and snappers have dwindled and disappeared, many of them have subsisted by netting and spearing small reef fish that keep coral clean of algae. Now those too are almost gone, and the algae have taken over.

On a recent dive near La Gonâve Island, Mr. Hodgson floated through a wasteland of intact, dead coral, overgrown with algae and sponges and nearly devoid of fish.

Haiti has the second-longest coastline of all the Caribbean countries, yet it is the only one that has not established marine protected areas where fishing is restricted or off-limits, according to the United Nations Environment Program. So Reef Check decided to survey the reefs and propose that the Haitian government create marine parks where fish can feed, grow and reproduce.

“It’s an unusual situation to come into a country where there are no marine ecologists with respect to coral reefs and no marine biology programs in universities,” Mr. Hodgson said. “We’re starting from square one.”

Pierre Guy LaFontant, Haiti’s director general of fisheries, acknowledged that overfishing was a problem and said that officials were receptive to the idea of establishing protected waters. But if the government cannot enforce its existing fishing regulations, can fishermen be persuaded to abide by an invisible line in the water?

“That would be my deepest dream,” Mr. LaFontant said, “but the reality is totally different. For fishermen, there are no alternatives. Poverty is the law.”

Henry Hilaire, who has fished for 36 years, gathered nets from a sailboat with several other Haitians in waters that Reef Check hopes will eventually be protected.

“We don’t find enough,” Mr. Hilaire said of his catch, “but we have to take what we found. It’s not enough fish for us to make a living.”

Mr. Hilaire pulled two small fish, each about five inches long, from his basket. “It’s really too young to keep,” he said, but “circumstances are such that if we didn’t keep them, we’d go hungry.”

Many of Reef Check’s divers in training were sympathetic to the fishermen’s plight.

“They’re desperate, trying to survive, so how do you tell them not to fish here?” asked Romain Louis, 37, a literature teacher hoping to become part of the eco-diver team.