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At first glance, the Seychelles’ Alphonse Island is your archetypal desert island escape: white sandy beaches backed by swaying palms; warm azure waters; and coral reefs and sand flats teeming with marine life.
Add a luxury hotel with stunning beach bungalows that go for upwards of $1,000 a night and you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a destination that reveled in its rarified air.
Yet, this private island in the Outer Islands of the Seychelles, some 250 miles southwest across the Indian Ocean from the main island of Mahé, is actually home to a pioneering, wide-ranging sustainability project.
At the forefront of Alphonse Island’s sustainability charge is Keith Rose-Innes. As director of the island, he has overseen a transformation that places eco-friendly practices at its core, not least The Farm.
This project sees organically grown fruit and vegetables supply the island’s own restaurants, as well as other Blue Safaris properties on Astove Atoll, Cosmoledo Atoll, Farquhar Atoll and Poivre Atoll. The aim, explains Rose-Innes, is to slash food miles and lower carbon emissions in the process.
“If you’re flying in produce, it’s not sustainable,” he says. The other option is to bring in produce by boat, which can take two days and is extremely polluting.
“We only take a barge every two months, which means we can only really get in heavy fruit and vegetables every two months.”
A massive game-changer
According to the World Bank, in 2021 the Seychelles imported vegetables from India, United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Tunisia and Turkey. A massive 90% of food eaten across the islands is imported from overseas.
By focusing on growing their own, however, Rose-Innes says he and his team at Alphonse Island have been able to tip the balance, at least among the Blue Safaris group of properties.
“From a sustainability point of view, it’s a massive, massive game changer for us. You’ve got all the fruit and veg that you don’t use that can go straight back into the ground again and obviously you’ve got fresh produce, so it’s much easier from a sustainability point of view, but also from a service point of view. The quality is so much higher.”
The Farm, he says, works to a seasonal calendar, growing everything from bananas, figs, limes and honeydew melons to beetroot, cucumbers, pumpkins and Chinese cabbage.
This has been a challenging process that involved plenty of trial and error. With salt in the soil at a depth of only 30 centimeters (about 12 inches), Rose-Innes and Alphonse Island’s farmers have had to develop plans to grow produce that can not only survive, but thrive.
The Farm at Alphonse Island currently grows 27.6 tonnes of fruit, vegetables and herbs a year, with an average monthly yield of 2.3 tonnes. This is a closed system, where anything not eaten is used for compost to help grow the next batch of produce.
Rose-Innes explains that a new redevelopment has helped take things to the next level.
“With the help of consultants we’ve installed fully shaded tunnels, tunnels with 20% shade, tunnels with 40% shade. We have seeding beds, seeding trays and seeding tunnels, automated watering systems and different planting regimes.”
He has also hired a microgreens expert from South Africa, who is able to produce different plants to supplement and enliven dishes every day.
“We do proper audits of when to plant and make sure that you have the continuation of all the fruit and vegetables as best you can throughout the season,” says Rose-Innes.
The result is that Alphonse Island now grows around 75% of its own produce, massively cutting down on the need for imports in the process.
Taking sustainability further
This initiative has seen Alphonse Island become a finalist in the inaugural Star Sustainability Initiative Awards 2023, a new category in the prestigious Travel Bulletin Star Awards, now in its 25th year.
However, Rose-Innes has been looking to take things further. He has a strict rule about not importing mineral water to the island, with no single-use plastic bottles arriving to cause pollution. Fresh water is either desalinated or pumped from roofs after rainfall and taken to a central pump to water the farm. More than 2,000 solar panels provide 80% of the island’s energy.
Meanwhile, all fish are caught using lines from deep water on the far side of Alphonse Island’s coral reef.
“We don’t purchase any fish from anywhere around the world. We believe in fishing sustainably, so we fish away from the reef away from the dive areas in deep water for species of fish which we know are in abundance,” he says.
Serving fish caught using nets or drag nets, “…defeats the purpose of the business,” he adds.
This goes beyond food, energy and power. The island has a team of scientists and conservationists dedicated to caring for and preserving the fragile waters and sand flats that make the ecology here so fascinating.
“Every guest that comes to the island donates $30 per person per day, to the independent foundation which is set up to protect these destinations. We are dictated to by the scientists and the science that’s coming out from their work. So everything from the activities we do on the flats to how we can be responsible is all monitored.”
These scientists, from the Island Conservation Society, have a deep knowledge of the island and its wildlife, helping to point the way for Rose-Innes and his staff to make the best decisions for the area.
A pristine environment
Rose-Innes first came to the Seychelles 25 years ago, initially as a fly-fishing guide. He fell in love with its beauty and undeveloped nature. The arrival of hotels and tourism has helped fuel the local economy, but, he says, it’s incumbent on the hospitality industry to maintain the islands’ natural wonders.
“If you walk in the flats, if you look at the rays, the sharks in the shallows, you look at all the microorganisms, go on a dolphin safari or on a mantaray safari, it is action packed. There’s so many different activities that are unique to us, because the environment, from an underwater perspective, is as pristine as you’ll ever have.
“If you walk on the beach here, you’ll see 40 or 50 Hawksbill turtles swimming around. They’re nesting every single night, coming up from the beach, hatching all the time. So it really is a unique destination, it’s not a fake destination.”
There is, understandably, a growing concern around the balance between tourism and an environmental crisis that’s sharpening rapidly and disproportionately impacting communities in countries such as the Seychelles.
Rose-Innes believes that balance can be struck.
“If we can do it, anybody can do it,” he says. “It’s so much easier to be responsible on land or closer to a main island. If we are able to be responsible in these destinations, that’s setting an example. You can be responsible anywhere.
“Everything is dealt with in a sustainable way. Unfortunately, it is way more expensive to do it this way, but it’s the right way to do it.”
