Text and Photos by Henrylito D. Tacio
Give man a fish, so goes a very popular saying, and he will eat fish for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will fish for his lifetime.
“If we don’t watch out, this adage may soon become obsolete,” warns Roy C. Alimoane, director of the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC) in Kinuskusan, Bansalan, Davao del Sur. “We are already fishing our waters to the limit.”
“Like the other vital resources such as forests, Philippine fisheries are about to collapse — a victim of the almost unabated ‘plunder of the commons,’” Alimoane added.
As defined, the commons encompasses unoccupied land and all waters which are considered God-given set of resources for the people to consume as much as needed. But these resources appear to have been abused to the point of exhaustion.
According to fishery experts, all fishing activities depend on a fragile resource base which, if mismanaged and overexploited, can easily collapse.
While the Philippines is home to the world’s second largest coral reef ecosystem, only 1-2.5% of the reefs are still intact and 60% are heavily damaged. “The destruction of our coral reefs can greatly reduce fish production, thus endangering the fish supply in the country,” said Letecia Ramos-Shahani when she was still with the senate.
An estimated 10-15 per cent of the total fisheries come from coral reefs. About 80-90 per cent of the income of small island communities comes from fisheries. “Coral reef fish yields range from 20 to 25 metric tons per square kilometer per year for healthy reefs,” says Dr. Angel C. Alcala, former environment secretary.
Mangroves are not spared from destruction. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources said that most of the remaining vegetated mangrove areas in the country today are second growth, containing other than the original species.
Marine experts are very worried about mangrove’s disappearance as they are home to 68 species of fish (including bangus, kitan, tilapia, eel and mullet, to name a few), 54 species of crustaceans (shrimps, prawns and crabs), and 56 species of gastropods.
“Fish use the spaces under the mass of prop roots of mangrove trees as ‘delivery rooms,’ and the offspring of many marine species spend their growing period in the mangrove swamps before moving on to the open said,” explained Dr. Rafael D. Guerrero III, former executive director of the Philippine Council for Aquatic and Marine Research and Development.
The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), a line agency of the Department of Agriculture (DA), attributes the decline of fish catch in the country to the continuous use of cyanide and dynamite, which both destroy coral reefs.
Although outlawed, dynamite fishing is still rampant. Dennis Calvan, executive director of NGOs (non-government organizations) for Fisheries Reform, told Business Mirror that on a single day an average of 10,000 blasts occur in various parts of the country.
Dynamite fishing is well documented in the country that it has even been mentioned by Ernst Jünger in his book, Storm of Steel.
“Dynamite or blast fishing became rampant in the Philippines after the Second World War,” wrote Gregg Yan, communication officer of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). “American soldiers would sometimes lob grenades into shoals of fish, providing local fishing communities with a lucrative new means of instantly increasing their catches.”
Unfortunately, it’s an incredibly destructive practice. “These days, blast fishermen use powdered ammonium nitrate (usually from fertilizer), kerosene and small pebbles, which are packed inside a glass bottle and covered with a blasting cap,” Yan wrote. “New designs integrate long metal rods which absorb sound and act as sinkers.”
The impact underwater is devastating. “A single blast’s shockwave typically travels at about 1500 meters per second (the length of 15 football fields), killing or maiming every fish in range and often liquefying their internal organs,” Yan wrote. “The fish are then collected either by divers using hookah air compressors where an on board engine pumps air through a garden hose, or using nets.”
Researchers believe that destructive fishing practices like blast fishing are one of the biggest threats to the coral reef ecosystems. “Coral reefs that may have taken thousands of years to grow are reduced to rubble in a matter of seconds, obscured by wafting clouds of silt,” Yan wrote.
The result: low fish catch. “The damaged coral reefs from blast fishing lead to instant declines in fish species wealth and quantity,” Wikipedia continues. “Explosives used in blast fishing not only kill fish but also destroy coral skeletons, creating unbalanced coral rubble. The elimination of the fish also eliminates the resilience of the coral reefs to climate change, further hindering their recovery.”
Several studies have shown that single blasts cause reefs to recover over 5-10 years, while widespread blasting, as often practiced, “transforms these biodiverse ecosystems into continuous unstable rubble.”
Meanwhile, Calvan said about 150,000 kilograms of sodium cyanide are sold every year. “Cyanide fishing may not be as rampant as in the 1970s and 1980s, it is being done in the Philippines,” says Dr. Alan White, senior scientist of the Asia-Pacific Program of the Nature Conservancy.
When sodium cyanide is dissolved in water, it is transformed into hydrocyanic acid. “This acid is readily absorbed by fish through its gills,” explained Dr. Guerrero. “Cyanide reduces the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood and this incapacitates fish.”
While cyanide fishing is economically feasible, it is environmentally destructive. Like dynamite fishing, it also annihilates coral reefs.
The late Jacques-Yves Cousteau commented after visiting a coastal island in the northern Philippines to examine reefs destroyed by cyanide fishing: “These practices are criminal. They attack the natural productive environment which allows the renewal of marine resources.”
Although the Philippine waters still have fisheries, climate change may further aggravate the problem the country is now facing. “At least three quarters of the globe’s key fishing grounds may become seriously impacted by changes in circulation as a result of the ocean’s natural pumping systems fading and falling,” a report from the United Nations said.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration physicist Josefino Comiso told Philippine media some years back that rising temperatures could reach a point where “various living creatures” would start to die in large numbers. “Such temperatures would vary from species to species,” he said. “But the deaths of these creatures would gravely affect the food supply chain.” — (To be concluded)
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