With government backing and eyes on boosting trade with China, a group of Colombian businesspeople has been pushing plans to build the Tribugá port, a controversial commercial project on the country’s Pacific coast that could clash with the nascent ecotourism industry.

The deep-water port is slated for the forest-lined Gulf of Tribugá, a symbol of Colombia’s immense natural wealth and epicentre of its tourism drive. The inlet is a principal stop on the annual migration of humpback whales.

Local Afro-Colombian communities hope to develop sustainable tourism by capitalising on the area’s biodiversity and improved security following the 2016 peace agreement with the former FARC guerrillas. They are at odds with the port.

The idea of a port in the Gulf of Tribugá is not new and arises intermittently in national conversations.

This time there are two main differences from the last significant mentions in 2005. It has the backing of President Iván Duque. But a community that in the last decade has built a sustainable and vibrant local economy around whale-watching opposes it.

Duque highlighted the project in his presidential campaign last year. “I won’t rest until I see the Ánimas-Nuquí corridor connected to the Tribugá port,” he told an audience in Manizales, one of the main cities in the coffee-growing region driving the project, a week after winning the election.

“The future of Chocó’s competitiveness, the future of the connection of the Colombian coffee region and the Pacific, combined with port opportunities, will undoubtedly involve Tribugá,” he said in Quibdó last November, during one of his Saturday workshops with local communities.

Investors say the gulf is the perfect spot for a port. The sea reaches depths of 20 metres just 2km from the beach. They estimate there would be no limitations to the anchoring and berthing of ships with loads of up to 200,000 tonnes.

According to calculations by the Archimedes Society, the agency responsible for promoting the project, the Tribugá port could reduce freight transport costs by up to 90%. It could become the third-largest port in the country after Buenaventura, further south on the Pacific coast, and Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast, it says.

Its viability also depends on a proposed road between Quibdó and Nuquí, which would traverse the forest and the biodiverse Baudó mountain range.

The re-emergence of the port has whipped up a storm ever since Duque’s government named it in the first draft of the National Development Plan, presented to congress this year. He eventually backed down, but referenced a “deep-water port in the North Pacific” that could only be Tribugá.

If it materialises, the port could bring greater economic opportunities to Chocó, the department with the highest levels of extreme poverty in Colombia. But the environmental cost could be high. Chocó’s coastal region is one of 36 biodiversity “hotspots” globally, with a variety of natural life comparable to the Amazon rainforest.

The proposed location of the port (Image: Sociedad Arquímedes)

Between June and October, more than 800 whales come to reproduce near the dark-sand beaches of Nuquí municipality, where the Gulf of Tribugá is located, during their annual trek from Antarctica via Chilean Patagonia.

Thousands of tourists follow the whales, watching them breach the waves with their calves. It is a remarkable turnaround for the mostly Afro-Colombian inhabitants of Nuquí, which until two decades ago was synonymous with poverty and armed groups like FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN).

Last year, 4.3 million tourists visited Colombia, more than double the number in 2014. In 2018, 9,100 tourists came to this remote Pacific destination, despite poor air connections and roads. For people of the local municipality, who number 8,958, this is significant.

“That is economy on a very good scale,” says Josefina Klinger, who has been promoting community tourism together with her organisation, Mano Cambiada (Lending a Hand).

“Our vision of development is one based on the gifts of the land. It may not be so in Medellín or Manizales, but we – the ancestral peoples who have lived here for centuries – are defined by water and the forest, which have traditionally been associated with poverty,” she adds.

According to Harry Mosquera, of the General Community Council of Los Riscales, which brings together the nine Afro-Colombian communities directly affected by the port, the construction could be disastrous:

“It is a detrimental project that seriously compromises our means of subsistence, such as fishing, the extraction of molluscs like the piangua (ark clams) and community tourism associated with whale-watching.”

Since it’s close to their collective territories, local communities must be consulted on the project, which has both detractors and defenders locally. So far, discussions have been “more external than with us”, Mosquera says.

In 2014, the Afro community declared the entire coast of Nuquí, including the proposed port area, as the “Regional Integrated Management District of the Gulf of Tribugá–Cabo Corrientes”, which they now manage.

This status, designed for sensitive sites that already have some oversight, has allowed them to continue promoting local development that reconciles their livelihoods with the environmental services provided by these ecosystems.

“Not only is Nuquí’s beauty on display, but also the community processes of organising the territory and developing alternative economies that allow it to maintain its relationship with the land,” says Julián Idrobo, professor at the University of the Andes’ Interdisciplinary Centre for Development Studies (Cider).

Conservation efforts are not restricted to Nuquí. In the surrounding coastal corridor, there is now a whole mosaic of protected areas created by local communities, national and regional authorities, and some environmental NGOs. Many didn’t exist a decade ago, which has complicated the port’s construction.

Just north of Nuquí is the Utría National Park, which contains 543km2 of mangroves, coastline and ocean also populated by whales. In 2013, an exclusive 207km2 artisanal fishing area (Zepa) was established. White fish found here, known as wok and takami, are sold to restaurants.

“Tribugá was the laboratory where, based on community planning, the country’s fishing standards were established,” says economist José Andrés Díaz, former director of the NGO MarViva. These were later implemented in Costa Rica and Panama and should be scaled up to different Colombian regions, he says.

South of Nuquí, another regional integrated management district, called Encanto de los Manglares del Bajo Baudó (The Enchanted Lower Baudó Mangroves), was established two years ago. Now, the environment ministry aims to declare the entire Tribugá area a biosphere reserve under a UN classification that recognises territories in need of sustainable management.

Humpback whales visit many parts of the Pacific Ocean but have a special predilection for the gulf of Tribugá.

“It is a key habitat for mothers and their calves because it is well protected from adverse oceanographic conditions and predators such as killer whales and sharks,” says Natalia Botero Acosta, a marine biologist.

According to Botero, Tribugá’s deep waters, relatively close to its quiet shore, are geographically exceptional. Some whales spend up to 15 days with their calves in this sala-cuna (nursery).

The main concern over the deep-water port is noise pollution driving whales away. For several months, researchers have recorded the marine soundscape, using hydrophones submerged at 15 metres. Early indications suggest it is one of the quietist places in Colombia’s ocean.

(Image: Fundación Macuáticos Colombia)

“The quality of the habitat would decline considerably if their acoustic communication were blocked, affecting their behaviour and distribution,” says Botero, who coordinates the sound project from the Macuáticos Foundation.

“We have already seen that the engine of a boat like the ones we see today produces sounds that can block out their song. What will happen with a merchant ship?” she asks, adding that collisions with boats and pollution are other major concerns.

Botero’s team will also begin taking tissue samples from whales to study the stress hormone cortisol. They will then compare these with those from Buenaventura port’s bay.  

Although Colombia straddles two oceans, it only has two cities on the Pacific coast. This has made it difficult to design an effective economic strategy for greater integration with Asia. Most countries in the region already have China as their main or second largest trading partner, though Colombia has yet to join the Belt and Road Initiative.

The Archimedes Society hopes to boost trade with China through the port but it has also noted the ecological sensitivity of Nuquí.

“Areas of greater environmental sensitivity than Tribugá coexist with ports. The secret is to fashion environmental management plans that establish commitments and obligations,” says William Naranjo, Archimedes’ project lead.

Naranjo aims to borrow ideas from overseas. Port Douglas, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, forces ships to cut engines by connecting them to shore power when loading and unloading, a practice known as “cold ironing”. Vancouver limits vessels’ speed to 11 knots to avoid collisions with whales. Rotterdam applies special tariff breaks for ships with low emissions. Oslo uses zero-emission forklifts.

“That is how those two constitutional principles of economic growth and environmental sustainability will be reconciled,” Naranjo says.

Its managers say the port’s economic benefit lies in affording access to the sea for three departments where half the industrial infrastructure is underutilised.

“Since half of the cost is transport freight, it is impossible to be competitive. The port alone will ipso facto boost the other 50% that is not used today,” Naranjo promises. Half the project’s partners are public entities from the region, including provincial authorities in Caldas, Risaralda and Chocó, the metropolitan area of Pereira and two public universities.

Yet Colombia’s national trade strategy for Asia is unclear. President Duque recently visited Beijing and Shanghai, hoping to diversify exports, of which 94% are commodities, with oil making up 77.8%.

Asked which sectors would benefit from the port, Naranjo said: “I don’t know off the top of my head,” before promising to find out. Unhelpfully, the telephone number listed on Archimedes’ website connects to a bakery.

This lack of clarity has led many to question the justification for a port in Chocó. “It is not necessary to build another one when, according to 2018 data, in Colombia we are operating at half our port capacity,” says congresswoman Catalina Ortiz, who prefers the option of dredging Buenaventura to improve its access channel.

For Klinger, Nuquí’s model of tourism is working, although it could use an injection of cash: “The only thing needed is economic capital, because the social and territorial capital are already there.”

This article was originally published on Dialogo Chino.

Andrés Bermúdez Liévano
Andrés Bermúdez Liévano is Latin America editor for Diálogo Chino (Andean Region), based in Bogotá.

Opening an app on his mobile phone, Liu Feng, secretary general of COMRA, showed a real-time map indicating the tracks and positions of all China-owned vessels conducting seabed mining exploration assignments. At that moment, two vessels were shown in the Pacific Ocean.

“They are Haiyang No. 6 and Xiangyanghong No. 10,” Liu told me in his office in Beijing. “Another vessel, Dayang No.1, will leave Qingdao for the eastern Pacific on August 28 to conduct the 56th voyage under COMRA’s seabed resource exploration assignment.”

To enhance the development of high technology for deep-seabed mining and help apply for permission to explore the deep seabed to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the state enterprise COMRA was established in 1990. It authorises prospecting and mining on the seabed in international waters, which is known as “the Area”. The following year, COMRA, along with six other pioneer investors which included the governments of India and South Korea and the Deep Ocean Resources Development Co. Ltd from Japan, was registered to start preparatory research on seabed mining in the Area at the Preparatory Commission of the ISA and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).

In 2001, COMRA signed its first exploration contract with the ISA for polymetallic nodules and gained the exclusive right for exploration and preferential right for exploitation in the contract area in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone in the northeast Pacific, a deep ocean area as big as the continental US. Then in 2011 and 2014 COMRA signed two more exploration contracts for polymetallic sulphides and cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts with the ISA.

Apart from being the key Chinese contractor to the ISA on seabed mining exploration, COMRA also acts as a body to provide a national institutional platform to coordinate both scientific activities and international affairs.

I interviewed Liu Feng in mid-August on issues relating to China’s technological breakthroughs on deep-sea exploration over the past two decades and its plans for future exploration.

NewsChina: Can you give us a brief outline of China’s progress in seabed mining?

Liu Feng: China started negotiations on joining the negotiation on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in the early 1970s, but since China was also experiencing the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) at that time, it had not much intention nor the ability to carry out any deep-seabed exploration activities.

The first stage could be defined from the 1980s to 1991, before COMRA was set up, when four institutions including the State Oceanic Administration were responsible for seabed exploration, mining and metal-refining preparations.

The second stage ran from 1991 until 2000. The establishment of COMRA was the foundation for China to apply for contracts and start research and development in seabed-mining technology. Since the late 1980s, China started working on exploration contract applications, and it was registered as one of the seven pioneer investors in 1991, which indicated that COMRA was required to offer half of its surveyed area of 300,000km2, or 150,000km2, of valuable seabed mining resource area to the ISA as a reserved area [for ISA enterprises or other developing countries]. In the following decade, we assigned scientific vessels to conduct comprehensive surveys including on meteorology, hydrology, physical sampling, environmental conditions and geology in our contract area. Following instructions from UNCLOS, we signed the first formal exploration contract with the ISA in 2001. Over that 10-year period, we had also launched test mining activities simulating seabed mining situations in some inland lakes. In addition, we had also started “leaching tests” for polymetallic nodule samples we collected through exploration voyages in our contract areas. By 2001, we were able to process one ton of nodules per day and successfully attain metallic elements, including copper cobalt, nickel and manganese. We also did comparative studies through attempting different ways for smelting to discover the most cost-effective way to recover metals for potential future industrial purposes. It was a decade for the initial development of technology in deep-sea transportation, resource investigation, exploitation and processing.

The third stage has lasted from 2001 until now, when China started to invest intensively in deep-sea investigation and in exploration technology. In the meantime, China gained another four additional contracts from the ISA for all three seabed mining resources across the Pacific and Indian oceans [polymetallic nodules found on abyssal plains, polymetallic sulphides at hydrothermal vents, and ferromanganese crusts on seamounts and ridges]. During the past two decades, China’s deep-sea exploration technology gained momentum. COMRA has developed deep-sea survey equipment to deliver more efficient scientific surveys of the ocean floor, represented by the manned submersible Jiaolong, which dived to 7,000 metres in the Mariana Trench in 2012, the unmanned Qianlong and the unmanned remote-controlled Hailong, both of which can descend to 6,000 metres below the ocean surface. On exploitation, we carried out a successful nodule collecting test 500 metres under the surface this May in the South China Sea. We have also attained state-of-the-art resource-processing capability.

NC: How does China’s seabed-mining technology compare internationally?

LF: In my view, China’s deep-sea research is getting closer to the most advanced sphere in world deep-sea exploration. We have five contracts, the most of any country, and these cover the largest geographical area. From the technological perspective, we have developed almost all the state-of-the-art technology needed, from resource exploration to processing.

Now, there are advanced countries including Germany, Japan and Belgium which have successfully launched mining tests on the deep-sea floor at over 2,000 or even 6,000 metres deep, but we have only succeeded in an underwater exploitation test of merely 500 metres in depth.

Though China has attained significant breakthroughs in deep-sea exploration technology, due to our comparatively weak industrial foundation as a developing country, seabed resource exploitation which requires more complex systematic coordination remains a challenge.

Our next step is to increase the depth of our resource exploitation capability. For example, we are prepared to conduct underwater exploitation tests at depths of 1,000 metres next year.

.A sample of cobalt-rich ferromanganese crust collected by the Haiyang No. 6 research vessel

NC: What contributions has China made to international research on seabed exploration?

LF: I want to highlight China’s self-motivated contributions, in particular on environmental preservation aspects for seabed mining exploration. Through the ISA platform, China has proposed quite a number of constructive suggestions, some of which have been adopted.

For example, we proposed the setting up of a regional environmental management plan (REMP) within an area of the western Pacific where China, Russia, Japan and South Korea have exploration claims for a cobalt crust exploration contract area [on underwater mountains known as seamounts]. Considering each individual contractor owns independent scientific data on marine ecological conditions in the same area, it is important to share the data and research results to decide future conservation plans for certain areas once commercial seabed mining starts. Endorsed by the ISA and supported by the other three countries, COMRA held a workshop in Qingdao [on China’s north-east coast] to start development of the REMP, which is regarded as an essential environmental tool to assess regional characteristics and environmental needs. In order to foster mutual trust, we’ve invited representatives from the other three countries to join our 56th scientific voyage which will set sail in late August toward the proposed REMP area.

In the Indian Ocean, we also proposed a U-Loop REMP among four regional contractors, China, India, Germany and South Korea. Cooperating with the ISA, we plan to hold a workshop on marine scientific research in the mid-ocean ridge area to promote the setting up of the REMP in that area.

We have also contributed our wisdom in conducting environmental baseline studies. For example, in 2000 we proposed to the ISA a “natural viability baseline study” in the contract area to monitor long-term human interference on the marine ecology. After more than a decade of monitoring and scientific analysis in our contract area, we found natural climate situations, such as the occurrence of El Niño or La Niña, may exert an even greater impact on the survival and living environment of marine life than human exploration impact and even the impact of pilot mining test.

Another achievement is the adoption of China’s Law on Exploration for and Exploitation of Resources in the Deep Seabed Area in 2016 to regulate Chinese enterprises or citizens in conducting activities relating to seabed exploration or exploitation. The seabed mineral samples collected by our previous scientific expeditions are now mostly preserved at the China Ocean Sample Repository in Qingdao, and they are available for academic study and research for all institutions or universities in China.

Overall, so far China has made significant contributions based on the common heritage of mankind principle in seabed exploration, including providing reserved areas for the ISA, providing training opportunities for 37 people from over 20 developing countries including small island states, and providing our wisdom in the setting up of REMPs and on the regulations relating to prospecting, exploration and future exploitation.

NC: What are the plans for next phase of research, exploration and international cooperation?

LF: Since our first scientific expedition, we’ve conducted 55 voyages. Now there are five or six voyages every year in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, and the 56th trip is setting off soon.

During the recent ISA meeting [in Kingston, Jamaica], the proposal by the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources to join with the ISA on establishing a training centre based in Qingdao to promote developing countries’ capacity building was approved by the ISA assembly. So starting next year, we will try to provide a minimum of 20 free training opportunities for developing countries.

For exploitation, we are planning to trial our mining system of 1,000 metres below the surface next year or so in the South China Sea to prepare for the setting up of an environmental impact evaluation system for seabed-mining activities. We aim to set up our own environmentally friendly seabed mining system, also providing a reference for the ISA’s decision-making on related issues. For exploration, our vessel the Jiaolong is scheduled for an over 250-day global voyage through the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans for the purpose of encouraging international cooperation.

The interview was originally published by NewsChina and is republished here with permission.

Wang Yan
Wang Yan is editor and journalist at NewsChina Magazine, the English edition of China Weekly, covering environment issues.