Bringing Taal Lake to Life: Preventing Another Fish Kill

In a very recent news release, the BFAR warned of another fish kill. This is expected and as I predicted, will continue to occur in such regularity. The reason is obvious, the damage inflicted on the lake has seriously undermined the ability of the lake to sustain life. The cages continue to operate because of the lifeline provided by the 50 pumps.

BFAR (Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources) should take action to bring back the ecosystem to a life sustaining mode. This is a very tall order that would have a very high social and economic cost. While actions of BFAR to monitor the oxygen levels and enhance oxygenation of water by running 50 pumps a short-term option, these are pallative solutions.

BFAR should develop a restoration plan that aims to reduce the anoxic stratum. There is no other way but to do this:
1. Suspend operation of ALL CAGES for 6 months. Allow cages to finish the harvest before the 6 month ban. The potential loses of this action is prohibitive but much cheaper than the value of the damage to the ecosystem.
2. Provide safety nets for all workers directly affected. Compute the value of the cost for the safety nets.
3. Let the owners of the fish cages and the local governments that gave the permits to shoulder the costs.
4. During the 6-month lake recovery period, BFAR should continue to monitor the lake conditions, stop the engineering solutions to aerate the lake and undertake a modelling study to determine the biological capacity of the lake to accommodate cages, a cost benefit analysis of different scenarios on usage of the lake like a) a no-cage scenario with only small scale capture fisheries in the lake; b)a combination of wild capture cum cage culture;

The decision to take would rest on the results of the study. The 6 months reprieve would also show us the restorative capacity of the lake, providing us with knowledge of how nature works, and the guidance to handle similar future events.

Should BFAR choose the status quo, recovery of the lake would take forever because:
1. the cages present would continue to pollute the lake and improvement, assuming the cages are doing good practices, would be slow with no guarantee it would be restored back.
2. it would be more expensive as the pumps would continue to make the fish survive but this additional cost in form of subsidy and is not incorporated into the price of the fish. I suggest BFAR stop the use of the pumps to artificially sustain cage culture, the money instead should go to providing support for the displaced workers.
3. At the current state of the health of the lake, it is highly possible the fish disease outbreak risk is high because with lower oxygen levels, the fish in the lake are under stress.This could compromise the palatablity of the fish from the lake.

In the end, a status quo scenario would end up more expensive, providing us with less healthy fish that is subsidized by taxpayers money. NOT A VERY PALATABLE OPTION