The Philippine government should prosecute commercial fishers encroaching municipal waters and fully implement the management plan for participatory and science-based fisheries management in fisheries management areas (FMAs) to address declining fish stocks, according to international advocacy organization, Oceana.
“We are already feeling the pinch of the global crisis on food including fish. The country’s marine resources should be prioritized as an integral source of nutrition for the Filipino people but these continue to degrade because of lack of political will to fully implement the fisheries laws and the reforms initiated by the decision-makers,” Gloria Estenzo Ramos, Oceanavice president, said in a statement.
Ramos said while the FMAs now have the required 12 management boards as well as corresponding scientific advisory groups, management plans are needed to effectively restore local fishing grounds and ensure that municipal fisherfolk have enough assistance for their livelihood by way of post-harvest facilities and fuel and food subsidies.
Oceana added that government should implementthe amended Fisheries Code which mandates the protection of the 15-kilometer municipal waters from commercial fishing operations.
To support such goals, Ramos noted the need for the mandated installation of vessel monitoring devices in all registered and qualified commercial fishing vessels to augment monitoring, as well as the control and surveillance efforts of local government units and enforcement agencies.
Meanwhile, Wilfredo Campos, chairperson of the University of the Philippines Visayas’ Biological Sciences division, warned of the steady fisheries output decrease.
He cited data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) which showedan average decrease of 49,449 metric tons (MT) each year from 2011 until 2020, or a total of 494,490 MT worth of lost fisheries production.
“The decline from 2010 is a manifestation that stocks have breached their threshold in productive capacity. An analogy would be stretching a rubber band until it breaks. One can stretch it out seemingly a lot and keeping it stretched out long enough will cause it to break, similar to overfishing stocks for decades. While they are naturally resilient, their productivity eventually breaks down after decades of overfishing,” Campos explained.
Based on latest data from the PSA, production of the country’s fisheries subsectordecreased by 2.3 percent during the second quarter of the year.
Increases in the value of production were registered for bigeye tuna, squid, fimbriated sardines, yellowfin tuna, seaweed, grouper, skipjack and big-eyed scad for the period.
However, contractions were recorded for tiger prawn, blue crab, frigate tuna, mudcrab, talakitok, milkfish, tilapia, tamban, sapsap, bisugo, galunggong and alumahan.
In the first half of 2022, production of the fisheries subsector went down by 3.9 percent. – Jed Macapagal
