During a recent budget hearing at the House, a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources official had an exchange of views with Rep. Arlene Bag-ao over the agency’s proposal to introduce amendments to the existing Fisheries Code that would allow commercial fishing companies to operate inside municipal waters, particularly at depths of 20 fathoms and beyond.
This policy debate is significant, particularly for Palawan, because BFAR wants fishing grounds within the 15-kilometer municipal waters that are not accessible to artisanal fishermen to be opened to commercial fishers. BFAR cited Roughton Reef, also called Onok Island, in Balabac as a case in point.
“Pwede dapat pumasok ang commercial [fishing] dyan para hindi naman masayang ang stocks,” the official said during a budget hearing livestream on December 3. He claimed that this policy recommendation is “science based” and that there are many other municipal fishing grounds similar to Palawan’s.
I find BFAR’s logic fundamentally skewed and its assertion of being science based a false claim. The fact that individual fish die of old age is irrelevant to fisheries management. What matters is whether the population can sustain itself and regenerate. Removing fish before they reproduce multiple times depletes the breeding stock, regardless of whether those fish would eventually die naturally.
BFAR itself admits that municipal fisheries production has been consistently plummeting due to overexploitation and the degradation of coastal marine resources. Municipal fisheries production has declined because of overexploitation, not underutilization.
BFAR’s “unutilized resource” framing is plainly cynical. Since artisanal fishers lack capital for larger boats and deeper-water equipment, the solution is to transfer those waters to commercial operators? This is not resource management. It is redistributing public resources from the poor to the wealthy.
The 20-fathom threshold is also arbitrary and not science based. BFAR’s own science arm, the National Stock Assessment Group, stated in 2019 that additional fishing in municipal waters would prevent fish reproduction and worsen overfishing.
“The government is contradicting its own study in saying our municipal waters should be open to commercial fishing operations,” the civil society group Oceana warned in a recent statement.
Oceana pointed to published data from the 2017 National Stock Assessment Program by the DA’s National Fisheries Research and Development Institute, which indicated that about 90 percent of the country’s 190 assessed fish stocks, including top species such as sardines and galunggong, are overfished.
BFAR’s duplicity is alarming. While it has appealed the so-called Mercidar ruling of the Supreme Court allowing commercial fishing in municipal waters, it is contradicting itself with this proposed amendment to the Fisheries Code.
BFAR claims this proposal respects local control because LGUs must approve the entry of commercial fishers. In reality, it does the opposite by placing enormous pressure on LGUs from commercial fishing companies with the resources to lobby local officials and open the floodgates to corruption disguised as local fees and “partnerships.”
When BFAR argues one position in court but contradicts itself through this policy amendment, when it calls maximized fish extraction “science” and depletion an economic opportunity, it is not managing fisheries. It is calling for economic opportunism clothed in false science
