Fishy Thoughts At 34000 Feet Above Sea Level

 I am crossing the Sulu Sea, awed by the beauty of small islets dotting the seascape. Amid these serene views, my thoughts linger on President Digong's State of Nation Address where he spent considerable time talking on the nexus of poverty, environment degradation and development: asking why in areas of mining operations, there is abject poverty among the people. In the same token he spoke about the inequity of fishing access in Laguna lake, that by promoting fish farming to address food security, small scale fishers are marginalized.

These observations translate as to how this current administration will envision on .reducing that 40% poverty rate in the fisheries sector: The critical agencies tasked to develop a cohesive developmental agenda between agriculture, fisheries and environment and trade and investments should work towards a new framework. This is exactly the way into the future. This calls for a blue economy approach, promoting a circular economy, improving efficiency and use of resources under a changed climate regime and on the process, getting more value out from less resources.  

With this thought, I will pursue the idea to draft a white paper along with a friend from DENR on an ocean framework for the country, expanding and providing more focus on DENR and the Department of Agriculture (DA) on  their role of not just regulatory but providing leadership in sustainable development.

For this to happen, the departments of environment and natural resources and the agriculture department must work together a long-term sustainable development agenda designed to eradicate poverty in this country. Wishful thinking? Perhaps but change is coming.

Hope for Lake Fishers Coming

Digong was  right.

Fishing area access of small fishers have long been impinged by the operation of fish farming activities in all lakes. Laguna lake is the biggest example. Every time we fly out of Manila, the issue of inequity of fishing access stares upon us. The area of fish pens cover just 25% of the lake, so the argument of the LLDA goes, but the area of that 25% is what used to be the main fishing grounds of the small scale fishers. It is the area that blocks the path of fishers to their fishing grounds.  It is the area that is important for the indigenous fish species in order to complete its life cycle. It is also major source of conflict where many fishers have died in pursuit of claiming their traditional fishing ground that one day was fenced off and guarded by heavily armed guards.

  

Impacts

Sadly, the laguna lake fisheries mirrors how our country’s fisheries resources have been mismanaged all along.  Similar to Taal, Sampaloc, Lake Buhi and the rest of Philippine lakes, fish pens, fish cages and other fish farming have overrun the use of these lakes and on the process, displaced the small scale fishers of their fishing grounds, deprived them of their livelihood. The impact is catastrophic. The great abundance of the traditional fish species are now rarely caught. In its place include the invasive species such as tilapia, janitor fish, the knife fish. These species have all but eaten up the  tasty native fishes such as ayungin, hito, dalag, puyo and guorami.

Taal lake is another fitting example of how not to manage lake fisheries. Tawilis, yes that famous fresh water sardines, is a delicious fish and with high value. Its production in the 1970s and 1980s hovers around 70,000 thousand tons. In 2012,  its  production is barely 100 metric tons. It was replaced by culture of tilapia in cages producing a meager 50,000 tons per year. It gained notoriety when the lake ecosystem collapsed as a result of culturing more fish beyond the lake capacity  to cleanse itself. The economic loss was massive, fish kills fouled the whole region and  impacting even the thriving tourism industry.

Misplaced Priority?

The local government are tasked to managed the resources but has no idea on how to balance development with maintaining the environment. The immediate impacts are with the poor fishers. If the tawilis production were maintained, the value generated from tawilis fisheries will dwarf the tilapia production from the lake and the environment of Taal lake will have remained pristine.

But why did the local government allow it to happen?

Greed. Ignorance or Both. Fish farming are businesses and LGUs get revenues from business permits and taxes. But if we take the value of lost livelihood, amount of subsidies that LGUs give to support the poor fishers, and the value of loss of ecosystem function will be staggering.

It is a no brainer. Wild capture, when properly managed, will enable fishers to live way above the poverty threshold for generations. No fish farming, no matter how efficient, can replace the benefits coming from well managed capture fisheries.  It is sad to note that when fisheries collapses, fish farming is promoted to replace food production instead of investing on rebuilding them.

Why?

Because fisheries bureaucrats are evaluated not how the fisheries is performing but through increase in production, often at the expense of the environment.J

 Today, similar to Laguna lake, fish cages occupy large areas of the lake, depriving local fishers the sufficient area where tawilis could grow in abundance. Escapees of tilapia and introduced catfish called Pangasius (market name: cream dory), feed on tawilis and the wild capture fisheries of the lake has become more of tilapia and catfish fisheries.

Unless we do drastic measures, these lakes will all die from pollution arising from bad culture practices. The tawilis and the ayungins will disappear from our plates, depriving us of our culture eating our staple food consisting of rice and fish coming from our lakes. BFAR has set standards for culture but business permits are given by LGUs without due regard to the negative impacts of overproduction. Monitoring of  these farms against this standards are yet  to be undertaken. Sadly, its always the poor wild capture fishers that are impacted by this bad practice.

With the directive of President Digong to give back their fishing grounds, brings ample  hope that with proper management of the capture fisheries, poverty among lake fisherfolks will be a thing of the past.

Solving Poverty Among Fishers:

The future of the wild capture fisheries industry looks very bleak, Overall catch is declining resulting in continued reduction of incomes among fisherfolks. In the last six years, poverty rates among fisherfolks increased from 30% to 40%. If the number of fishers is 1.6 million, we are talking about 450 thousand families!

 What the new leadership in the agriculture and fisheries sector could do is focus on the single most pressing problem: declining fisheries productivity caused by inability of BFAR and the LGUs to effectively address OVERFISHING.

The issue is not new. As early as the mid 1970's, groundfish- and reef-based resources and in the mid 1980's for the pelagic resources, fisheries scientists have brought the issue to the fore. But this issue was addressed not be regulating fishing but by expanding to new fishing grounds and allowing the number of fishers to increase to a level that no sane politician will touch this issue with a ten feet pole. Regulating the number of fishers has social and economic consequences. The mantra of previous leaders to address this issue using paltry solutions and leave the next leadership to tackle this problem, has allowed the problem to reach a level of humongous proportions!

Today, we have exhausted all fishing grounds up to our EEZ and some of our fishers, both large and small scale poach in neighboring countries! No wonder, fishers travel for 4-5 days non stop to reach the highly volatile fishing grounds of the Spratly Island groups, creating another subgroup of OFWs: overseas fisheries workers that are separated from their families most of the time under high risk.

It is of no surprise too that fishers that opted to remain fish in nearshore waters undertake illegal fishing as they have nowhere to go and they need to feed their families.

How do you solve the problem of OVERFISHING:
Simply said, solving overfishing means reducing the amount of fishing pressure to a level that will generate the sustainable yield. What are the necessary actions to solve this problem?

1. Find innovative ways to reduce fishing intensity - it takes  a combination of policies to effectively reduce fishing intensity. The ways to do this will depend on the amount of excess capacity to be reduced and in consideration of the socio-economic impacts.

2. Generate Science to support policy - getting the accurate information on level of fish biomass and fishing effort are the two essential information to determine how much reduction of fishing effort to be done and what level of population is aimed for.

3. Invest in capacity building for research - we need more scientists to analyze information that process data into bases for policy.

4.  Provide sufficient funds for fisheries research. BFAR will need to invest at least 10% of the of its budget to undertake research, in order to fund cost of research.

5.  Reform governance framework that provides a seamless management of fisheries resources irrespective of fishing area or fishing grounds between municipal and commercial waters.

With Change Given a Chance, Fishview09 reemerges from hibernation

Im back! After six long years of hibernation, my desire to write again was inspired or better said, triggered by hope that change is happening. I am from the Philippines and I care about this country. But during the past administration where people elected a weak president and backed by greedy politicians,  I stopped writing as there is nothing to expect from an elite leadership that is ignorant of the plight of the poor.

Today, you see lots of changes,and that brings a lot hope. Peasant leaders, anti poverty advocates, social entrepreneurs are appointed to take on leaderships on these areas. The blogs I will write will be personal opinions, observations and permutations of my wayward thinking. My objective is to provide unsolicited advice and ideas which I hope will catalyze debate and discussions.

Selectively, I will veer away from political analysis, except in areas of environment, particularly in the agriculture and fisheries sector where most of our farmers and fishers live below the acceptable level of income to live and enjoy life comfortably.

So  hang on, dear fellow bloggers and readers, you will enjoy posts from fishview09. The first few blogs will dwell on fisheries and agriculture.