Misguided puff piece
I read with dismay the review by David Frazier in the Around Town section of the Chao Li restaurant in Nanwan ("Restaurants," March 28, page 19). Frazier seemed oblivious or insensitive to the fact that this restaurant serves up the increasingly scarce puffer fish and parrot fish that have been caught within the boundaries of the Kenting Marine Park.
He also boldly announced that the owner of the restaurant encourages local scuba divers to poach fish from the park and then purchases them.
As a scuba diver with more than 600 dives within the Kenting Marine Park, I have observed over the past 14 years the steady decline of every species of fish living in this area.
It is a sad fact that the puffer fish, once a common sight in the park, are nowadays quite rare. One reason is that these gentle, slow moving fish are an easy target for predatory divers who enjoy the "sport" of killing fish for a cheap meal or an even cheaper thrill. Or perhaps they turn the dried skin of the dead fish into a ghoulish souvenir to hang from their ceiling.
The other even greater danger to this and other endangered local species, once abundant, such as the Moray eel and the parrot fish, is the type of restaurant so thoughtlessly reviewed by Frazier. How much longer is it going to be before the tourists and the local people in the Kenting area wake up to the fact that the marine resources in Kenting are finite and in desperate need of protection?
The once beautiful coral gardens of Kenting and the fish that inhabit them should be regarded as a national treasure and protected.
With protection, Kenting and its marine park could become a mecca for divers and snorkelers in the region and provide good business for the local people.
Unfortunately, if the present spate of uncontrolled fishing, poaching and pollution of the park's resources is allowed to continue, the next decade will see not only the passing of the puffer and parrot fish but possibly those of many other indigenous species of coral and fish, and with it the local dive industry.
Perhaps the only good thing to come out of this sorry situation will be the demise of restaurants serving, as your writer put it, "dishes truly local to the Hengchun peninsula." Will the Chao Li restaurant eventually serve up the last puffer or parrot fish to be caught in Kenting?
For a supposedly pro-environment newspaper like yours, your shortsightedness in frequently publishing glowing reviews or advertisements for restaurants that serve up endangered species such as shark and, most recently, that gentle giant, the sunfish, is not only in my opinion ignorant but also sets an extremely bad example.
Restaurants such as Chao Li ought to be boycotted, not advertised and encouraged by reviews in your or any other newspaper.
Andrew Gray
Kaohsiung
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