by MARLON ALEXANDER S. LUISTRO

This three-part investigative report by PCIJ fellow Marlon Luistro looks at how the government and fish cage operators can save the lake from dying, without sacrificing the livelihood of those who earn from fish cages.

TALISAY and SAN NICOLAS, BATANGAS — More than a decade ago, Talisay resident Vicente Llona’s take-home pay after a day’s hard work at a construction site came to P110.

	GREED and the lack of political will have caused led to the overcrowding of fish cages, polluting the country's third largest lake. [photo courtesy of Balikas]

Today, the 43-year-old high school graduate earns five times as much. Since 2002, he has been growing tilapia in fish cages in Taal Lake, an occupation that now nets him as much as P100,000 every six months — and he doesn’t even have to break much sweat.

“Our job is simple,” says Napoleon Carandang, a fish cage caretaker like Llona. “We just feed the fish thrice a day and wait for at least five months before we can harvest them.”

Livelihood generation and food production were the primary reasons why the national government decided almost 30 years ago to promote aquaculture and encourage fish farming in the country’s lakes. Today fish cage operations in Taal Lake alone directly employ more than 1,500 people while the lake’s tilapia production has helped feed not only residents of the Calabarzon (Cavite-Laguna-Batangas-Rizal-Quezon) Region, but also those in Metro Manila.

	NEXT PART 3 looks at how the government and the communities are staving off disaster in Taal Lake without sacrificing the livelihood of those who earn from fish cages. PREVIOUSLY PART 1 looks at how Taal Lake, a declared protected area, is fast deteriorating as a result of runaway fish cage operations.

But scientists say unregulated fish cage operations have put many of the country’s bodies of water at risk. Indeed, not even Taal Lake’s “protected” status has spared it of the environmental woes attributed to practices particular to untrained fish farmers.

OVERSTOCKING AND OVERFEEDING
These practices include overstocking the fish cages and overfeeding the fish that lead to excess amount of nutrients in the water. The excess nutrients in turn favor the bloom of harmful algae, which eventually depletes the oxygen in the water and causes fish kills.

Taal Lake was declared a protected area in 1996 under the National Integrated Protected Area System (NIPAS) Act. By then there were already fish cages in the lake. Yet instead of declining in number after Taal Lake came under the NIPAS, the fish cages proliferated all the more. In 1993, there were only 1,601 fish cages in the lake; today the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) says there are 9,188.

Loopholes in the law and a focus on profits on the part of operators and local officials apparently made this possible.

Legal experts point out that as a protected area, Taal Lake has no municipal waters. This means every development in the lake requires not just a mayor’s permit, but also an environmental compliance certificate from the Environmental Management Bureau and a clearance from the Protected Areas Management Board (PAMB), which is headed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

But the lake’s PAMB remained “interim” until 2006, and failed to craft a lake-wide ordinance that would have at the very least set a limit on the number of fish cages, as well as standards regarding stocking capacity.

Fisheries experts also say forcing fish cage operators like Llona and Carandang to undergo seminars and workshops on fish farming — and constantly monitoring them to ensure they follow correct procedures — would have spared the lake much of its present problems.

According to aquaculturist Josephine de la Vega, the operators usually go over the 30,000 to 50,000 stocking density per cage that is recommended by BFAR.

There are fish cages in five of the 13 towns (plus three cities) surrounding Taal Lake — Agoncillo, Talisay, San Nicolas, Laurel, and Mataas na Kahoy. Operators there confirm that they stock around 100,000 to 250,000 fish per cage.

“Anticipating a fish kill, the operators would double the number of stocks in a cage,” explains freshwater biologist Dr. Lourdes Castillo. But she says that many of the fish die precisely because they were overstocked.

The operators also believe that figuring out how much to feed the fish is a matter of common sense. “You just have to estimate the feeds and wait until the fish eat them,” says Llona.