Perception results from the awareness or knowledge about a phenomenon that an individual or a population directly or indirectly experienced. The concept of ethnoscience anchored on perception has emerged from anthropologists investigating the local population’s constant interactions with their natural environment, subsequently influencing social relationships and resource utilization. The local population has a system of making sense of their environment.
In fisheries management, perceptions must be generated from several knowledgeable individuals for a subjective fish stock assessment to become relatively reliable and useful if past data and objective monitoring are non-existent. The long years living in coastal communities and fishing experiences must have produced local fishers across generations with excellent knowledge of their fisheries. They also have a personal understanding of the seasonality of fishing and climate change impacts on their livelihoods. Local fishers are experts in their own lives.
Such local knowledge is vital in the current efforts to protect, conserve, and rehabilitate the marine ecosystem to have sustainable fisheries and fishing communities.
However, the culture of poverty must have overtaken the sustainable use of their resources through illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing, as the needs of their families at present overwhelm them in thinking about the future.
Bahala na, (come what may) attitude, is often resorted to when poor people are in the worst situation. Ironically, as implied earlier, poverty has been used to rationalize the abuse and depletion of fisheries—a cause or reason rather than the result. However, the fact is that the two are symbiotically connected—both cause and result of each other’s conditions.
Fisheries management requires data on fish stock and the factors that determine the changes in its condition over space and time, including conflict or competing interests among stakeholders and natural changes. These data sets guide the formulation of evidence-based policies and programs to address problems related to the deteriorating quality of marine ecosystems and declining fisheries.
However, real-time fisheries data or regularly updated statistics are not easily and readily available to local government units in the Philippines. One would wonder why there are national fisheries statistics but no local data up to the level of the LGUs is accessible.
Often, the data are present when non-government conservation organizations or local academic institutions work in their municipal waters.
Budgetary constraints may have significantly contributed to the absence of quality fisheries data at the local level. Not only is it expensive to collect biological data regularly, but the LGUs also lack the personnel with the needed expertise and equipment to collect such data.
Moreover, the lack or absence of a fisheries monitoring system at the community level in some LGUs resulted in the under-reporting and non-accounting of fish catch in subsistence or municipal fishing. The missing data could have helped the LGUs regulate or restrict fishing in certain areas of the municipal waters during particular periods to reduce fishing pressure.
Fisheries management is a balancing act of ensuring marine ecosystem quality and securing human well-being — of life below and above water. While marine scientists exercise their methodological expertise in fish stock assessment for the effective and sustainable management of fisheries, the local knowledge of fishers accumulated through their long years of fishing experiences and observations could complement them in monitoring fish catches.
Recognizing fishers as local experts with their knowledge of the complex fisheries management process, fisheries managers and scientists must open up more spaces for stakeholder participation. Treating all types of fishers as always driven by self-interest for economic gains and defiance of fishing regulations must be avoided. The poor fishers should not be viewed as only waiting for ayuda or assistance but as people with dignity who can contribute to designing and implementing fisheries management plans.
There are bad and good fishers as there are bad and good people in the local governance system.
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Author’s email: enriquegoracion@su.edu.ph
