CEBU CITY–Local leaders of coastal communities in Cebu and Negros came up with a general management plan to help protect the Tañon Strait protected seascape from overfishing and illegal commercial activity.
The plan invoked the participation of about 400 municipal and barangay leaders from 298 barangays and 42 coastal towns to come up with a framework to harmonize otherwise uncoordinated local policies and overlapping political boundaries in terms of the 15-km fishing zone on municipal waters.
“A piece of the solution to overfishing is to separate small-scale fisher folks from commercial fishermen but it only works if you can enforce that separation.
Mayors in the area raised the challenge of how to do that and we hope their framework will adopt the guidelines provided by scientific experts to produce more informed policies,” says Dr. Mike Hirschfield, chief scientist and strategy officer at global conservation group Oceana.
Oceana, together with the Department of Environment & Natural Resources’ Protected Areas Management Bureau, and Rare Philippines, spearheaded the first Tañon Strait Stakeholder’s Summit and General Assembly as part of its efforts to expand projects in the country.
Tañon Strait became a marine protected area in 1998 when then President Ramos signed into law Presidential Proclamation 1234.
Despite this, overfishing by local commercial fishing vessels (described under the law as those that have a tonnage above three tons) is an open secret in the region.
This left community fisher folks who rely on traditional hook-and-line fishing methods left with dwindling catch.
Hirschfield explains that commercial fishing can efficiently scoop out fish that is equivalent to six month’s worth of catch for community fishermen in just a day so it is not a very sustainable way of fishing, especially for those living along the reserve.
Some 43,000 fishermen depend on the 27-km wide Tañon Strait for their livelihood. A daily fish catch of two kilos today by local community fishers is barely for sustenance–a big departure from an easy catch of five kilos in the 1970s.
Protecting the reserve is crucial, both for the community and the biodiversity in the area, the scientist notes.
Spanning 521,018 hectares of fishing grounds, Tañon Strait is the largest marine protected area in the county and is about five times bigger than Tubbataha Reefs in Palawan.
It is also a pathway for migrating dolphins and whale sharks, sightings of which have led to income-generating ecotourism projects in different parts of Cebu and Negros.
That is why Mayor Nelson Garcia of of Dumanjug in Cebu (brother of former Gov. Gwen Garcia) earned flak after declaring that dolphins and whale sharks “are parasites and must be killed.”
In an ambush interview ouside the conference halls, Garcia notes: “Dolphins and whale sharks are parasites. They take the fish that we can catch. If a fisherman catches a whale or dolphin in my area, I will tell them kill it.”
During the summit’s open forum, Garcia admitted that majority of his constituents work under commercial fishers that operate payaw or fish aggregating devices in Dumanjug’s municipal waters.
One of the attending lawyers dismissed Garcia’s stance as mere political grandstanding to get his name on papers ahead of the upcoming 2016 elections.
Lawyer Rose-Liza Osorio, Foundation for the Philippine Environment chairman notes that Garcia’s opinions about the role of dolphins and whale sharks and man’s supposed supremacy over all natural resources highlight the need to re-educate public officials about environmental laws in the country and their administrative role to enforce it.
Marine scientist Dr. Lemmuel Aragones, associate professor at the Institute of Environment Science & Meteorology at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, notes that the new management plan should follow the recommended conduct of scientific baseline studies to determine the total fish catch volume in the reserve over the years.
The recent data on Tañon Strait is based on a 2004 policy paper written by the team of renowned marine scientist Stuart Green.
“The lack of baseline data is a setback. An effective management plan is based on sound science and solid information. Otherwise, it will tend to fail like most Philippine plans on managing natural resources,” says Dr. Aragones.
The management plan will undergo a final technical review before it will be submitted to the DENR Secretary, says Tañon Strait Park Superintendent Viernov Grefalde.
