by ALECKS P. PABICO

BOLINAO, Pangasinan—In 1998, Congress passed the Fisheries Code or Republic Act 8850, which said that permits to operate fish pens and cages were to be given only to municipal fishers and their organizations.

The problem was that most small-time fishers had neither the considerable money nor the technical know-how needed to set up aquaculture projects. They also lacked the political connections that facilitate the granting of licenses and permits to operate such potentially lucrative activities.

Thus, in many places in the country, profitable aquaculture enterprises have ended up in the hands of wealthy, politically well-connected entrepreneurs. This has meant the further marginalization of small fishers and the increasing concentration of the control over aquatic resources. Small fishers saw their traditional spawning and fishing grounds shrink ever smaller as more fish pens and cages were put up, thereby decreasing their already meager incomes.

"We just couldn't afford it (getting a cage)," says Bolinao, Pangasinan fisher William Caampued. "We are poor, we don't have the capital. Yes, that's open to fishers — but if they can find someone who would loan them the money."

In this coastal town, operating a single fish cage would mean more than P800,000. As it turned out, some of Bolinao's local officials, including the mayor and the vice-mayor, were later found to be owners or operators of fish pens and cages, at times even going beyond the five-unit limit per owner stipulated in the municipality's own fisheries ordinance.

But the big-time fish pen owners' greed seems to be leading to their own undoing. These days, more and more coastal towns are being alerted to the environmental dangers of having a high concentration of fish pens and cages in one area and agitating for a decrease in the number of these structures. Caampued, for instance, helped dismantle a fish cage squatting offshore just two months ago. Whether marginal fishers like him will finally have a chance at having more than a hand-to-mouth existence as a result, however, is unclear.

For all the flak fish pens and cages have been getting lately, the government is still determined to pursue efforts to intensify aquaculture in the coming years as part of a drive to increase fish production.

Its thrust is anchored on a comprehensive aquaculture for rural development program. This includes a P200 million investment in a sprawling mariculture park in Samal Island in Davao del Norte that was set up in August last year. (Aquaculture is the more general term used for fish culture in fresh, brackish and marine areas, whether in ponds, pens and cages. Mariculture is aquaculture practiced in coastal and marine waters.)

The 200-hectare mariculture park is patterned after the concept of an industrial park in which the government provides the infrastructure such as roads, power, water, communications, waste disposal and sewage facilities to attract investors. As the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) describes it, the mariculture park is "an industrial estate put in the sea for the fishing industry."

Peck Orbita, operations chief of the Samal project, insists that the park intends to help marginalized fisherfolk, in particular those who were displaced by it. But since these fishers lack the capital to invest on fish cages (a 10 m x 10 m cage would cost them P141,000; a 20 m x 20 m cage, P235,000), Orbita encourages them to form cooperatives, after which they will be assisted in formulating their feasibility studies and financing plans to be endorsed to the Quedan and Rural Credit Guarantee Corporation (Quedancor), which provides credit financing in the agriculture, fishery and informal sectors.

Fishers, he adds, may also opt to rent an area in the park to the tune of P19,000 a year for one hectare or P360 a year per fish cage.

But one wonders if the mariculture park in Samal would really benefit marginalized fishers. The way things are there right now, it does not seem any less different from the private investor-dominated affair in the unregulated environment of fish pens and cages.

At present, four investors, led by the commercial fishing giant Frabelle Fishing Corporation, are engaged in bangus farming. Eight more want to venture into fish cage culture, excluding two potential foreign investors and the Alsons firm of the powerful Alcantara clan. Another investor with plans of putting up bangus canning factory has already reserved 10 hectares in the park.

In comparison, only two fishers' cooperatives have so far been able to raise money enough for two to three smaller cages.

BFAR also trumpeted the creation of 20,000 jobs once the park is fully developed. Right now, though, it employs only 519 workers, mainly engaged in pre-production work, preparing the cages and then eventually for harvesting the fish.

"This is what we get in exchange for the big investment," remarks Arsenio Tanchuling, executive director of the nongovernment Tambuyog Development Center in Quezon City. "Sure, this excludes the fish growing part, but only a few people are needed to guard the fish cages anyway. In most cases, two people — often relatives of the owner — and many dogs are all you need to ensure that no one will steal from the cages."

Observers predict that some small fishers may just wind up reprising the role many of them have been playing in the last few years. That is, as hired laborers whose income is derived mainly from a small percentage—about six percent—of the net value of the fish harvest. The amount suffices for the basic needs of the fishers' families during the harvest season. But during the lean months, when there is no harvest, or during catastrophes like fish kills, the fishers-turned-pen workers have had to make do with a P1,000 monthly pay.

Tanchuling, for his part, concedes that there are bound to be benefits if the planned aquaculture/mariculture operations are to be practiced according to scale. But he says that he simply cannot understand the government's preferential treatment of the aquaculture sector.

"The problem with this promotion, this bias for aquaculture, is that it's as if there are no other fisheries subsectors," he says.

Indeed, such support is sorely lacking in the municipal fisheries sector, which accounts for one-third of the country's fisheries production yet offers an average monthly income of just P3,000.

Small fishers grouse that the government even seems to be dragging its feet in implementing an environment department order for coastal municipalities to delineate and delimit boundaries of their municipal waters (an expanse of 15 kilometers from the coasts). The order was actually issued in accordance with the Fisheries Code, and obviously aimed at widening the fishing grounds of small fishers. But the BFAR itself has not categorically declared its support of the delineation process, in the wake of opposition from the commercial fisheries sector, whose backers include members of Congress.

Peeved fishers say that at the very least then, they should be provided adequate post-harvest facilities such as municipal fish ports and landings, ice plant and cold storage, and processing plants to help reduce their losses.

Tanchuling's Tambuyog maintains that municipal fisheries can respond to the growing fish requirements of Filipinos if only the government would provide support for its development.

Though declining compared to aquaculture, the volume of demersal (bottom-dwelling, non-migratory fish species) fish catch, which is dominated by municipal fishers, has been relatively stable, fisheries production data from 1989-1998 show. Such is also the case with municipal fishery production in pelagic fisheries, the domain of commercial fishers.

Municipal marine and inland fisheries production in the last three years has even posted an average 947 thousand metric tons. The commercial fisheries sector, in comparison, harvested 957 thousand metric tons during the same period.

Yet BFAR's projections for the next 10 years place the burden of producing half of the country's total fish requirement on the aquaculture sector.

Thus, aside from the mariculture park in Samal Island, the BFAR wants to set up similar projects particularly in Luzon—among them Silangin Bay, Masinloc and Palauig Bay in Zambales; Mabayo Cove in Bataan; and Sto. Tomas in La Union. This is in line with its targets of a 24,000-hectare expansion and the intensified production in milkfish (2.5 metric tons per hectare a year), tilapia (five metric tons per hectare a year), and prawn (four metric tons per hectare a year) culture.

"The good thing about this," says BFAR Region I director Nestor Domendan, "is there are already established methods, identified things to follow to ensure the sustainability of the area because of the systematic way of putting the structures, feeding, stocking. And all other regular activities there will be regulated."

Anticipating criticisms about the possible negative effects all these mariculture parks can have on the environment, Domenden hastens to add that there is "an even bigger chance that this will not have as much adverse impacts" than what is now practiced in scattered fish pens and cages.

But the recent major fish kills in some Luzon coastal towns, particularly that which took place in February in Bolinao, Pangasinan, have many experts advising more caution with regards to aquaculture.

Dr. Gil Jacinto, director of the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines, for one, is anxious about the rate and pace at which aquaculture/mariculture is being pursued. He says, "It's going at a much greater pace than ideal. The scenario I think is that we'll have an unbridled expansion of coastal aquaculture and it would be a repeat of what we have seen in the prawn industry."

Shrimp culture collapsed in the latter half of the 1990s following the widespread outbreak of the luminous bacteria in shrimp farms in Western Visayas.

Jacinto says, "At the end of the day, it's to everybody's benefit to make sure that mariculture activities are sustainable not just for the environment but for the people, even for the entrepreneurs who want to make a living out of it. And it has to be a thinking not for the short-term, but sustainability in the long haul." (with a report from Ayan Mellejor/Davao)