Vietnam scuba diver favorite Nha Trang rapidly losing coral

Jun 12, 2007, 14:02 GMT

Hanoi - With Vietnam's scuba diving capital of Nha Trang hosting a week-long maritime festival, a local marine biology expert said Tuesday the area could lose all of its coral within 30 years.

'The coverage of coral in Nha Trang Bay shrank from 52.4 per cent in 1994 to 21.2 per cent in 2005,' said Nguyen Van Long, head of the seafood resource department at the Nha Trang Oceanography Institute. 'The bay may not have any coral left in 30 years if the coverage keeps shrinking at that pace.'

Nha Trang kicked off its 'Sea Festival 2007' on Friday. The festival, featuring musical performances and a 2.5-meter-tall statue of a salangane bird constructed entirely out of coconut shells, is intended to attract tourism by highlighting the city's maritime beauty.

Tourism and fishing are the mainstays of Nha Trang's economy. Tran Son Hai, director of the tourism department of Khanh Hoa province, said the city received 1.1 million tourists last year, of whom 30 per cent were international. Diving is one of the city's main attractions.

But the tourism and fishing industries come into sharp conflict over the area's coral reefs. Long said overfishing is the main reason for the coral's decline.

Many fishermen in the area employ explosives or poisons like cyanide to stun large numbers of fish for easy harvesting. Those techniques are deadly to the coral reefs, Long said, though tourist activity also plays a role.

'We are very concerned about the shrinking of the coral,' said the tourism department's Hai. 'If it keeps shrinking like this, the local tourism industry will be badly hurt.'

In 2002 the government established a Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Area to try to halt the decline of marine life. But bans on dynamite and cyanide fishing have been inconsistently enforced, and recent surveys show biodiversity and marine life density have continued to decline.