Ethical Tourism Hits Male’s Souvenir Shops

Ali Sodiq, like many Maldivians, earns a living from the tourism industry. He owns and runs “Dhivehi Collection”, one of around forty souvenir shops in Male’. But unlike the other stores, Ali refuses to sell shark jaws, or shells.

“I hear voices like many divers saying, ‘why would you keep shark jaws hanging all over the Maldives?’ It’s not only from a few divers, but all the divers complain, and that has inspired me to sound my voice, being a local in the Maldives.”

Ali has decided it is time to take a stand over the trade on shark products. He says he is fed up of the sad sight of all the jaws staring back at him from all the shops on Chandanee Magu – the tourist strip in the capital, where workers line the streets trying to coax tourists into their shops.

He says he thinks a large proportion of the tourists who come back to the Maldives are divers, and they tell him they do not want to see shark jaws for sale. “They don’t want to see hanging shark jaws just in front of our big flag in our capital city,” he says.

For a long time Ali worked in hotels, on reception and as a manager. After a while, he decided to move jobs and began working in one of the many souvenir shops in Male’. Not long after starting work, he asked the owner of the shop if he would stop selling shark jaws. He refused and soon after Ali resigned.

“I thought to myself that I can do it without shark jaws…Within a blink of eyes it came to life.” He explains how he sat down on his computer and drew up the logo for his new business. He persuaded a “very kind person” to fund his scheme, and the Dhivehi Collection souvenir shop was born.

Ali says that, at first, he thought it would be easy to gain support from the other tourism business men in the Maldives. But after visits to old employers, he found few were willing to give his ethical, no shark jaws policy any support.

Since then he has managed to gain help from a few sympathetic businessmen, but not enough to achieve a ban on the sale of shark products in the Maldives. That is his final aim, he says.

At the moment, he says he could be making far more money if he chose to sell the jaws and shells. They sell for a premium, and are one of the most expensive items in most of the souvenir shops. But Ali believes that the sharks are more important than the money.

“You know what? Russians – they used to bring a lot of money with them on their travels. Everybody knows it. They pay like 2000, 3000 dollars for shark jaws, which is nothing to them,” he says, explaining why most Maldivian souvenir shop owners continue to stock the jaws. He says there is a market for the fins as well, which are exported to East Asia for sale there.

Last week Ali’s small campaign from his shop in Male’ gained a little bit of international attention, as he was given the Shark Guardian award by the German-based Shark Project, an organisation which works to protect sharks around the world. The award will be personally handed over by the group’s President, Gerhard Wegner, in February in Male.

The group also decided to nominate the President, Maumoon Abdul Gayyoom, for a shark enemy award. In the end, he was runner up to Jack Ma, CEO of alibaba.com, which claims to be the biggest internet site for the sale of shark fins. The sale of shark products, and many types of shells, continues to be legal in the Maldives despite a growing level of concern over the conservation of the reef sharks that are killed for their teeth. When asked what it would take to ban their sale, Environment Minister, Mr. Ahmed Abdullah said: “We are already working on revising our laws so we can protect our environment in a better way.”

“This is a wonderful initiative!” the minister said of Ali’s campaign. “We have been thinking about this from some time ago and we need the support of the NGO and media sectors to move these things forward,” he added.

Abdullah said he wants to help involve the Maldivian people more in protecting the environment around them: “What is important is to engage into educations to create awareness to change their actions and to make them feel partners in protecting the environment.”

Courtesy: By Minivan News
01 February 2007