Political patrons goad environment criminals

Last September the foreign office wrote the justice department to free 117 Chinese fishermen caught poaching in Tubbataha Reef off Palawan. It was a classic example of fawning diplomacy. Chairman Li Peng of China’s national congress was coming to visit, and Manila felt an urge to make a servile gesture if goodwill. Palawan folk were incensed. Lawyers had stalled the case against the poachers from the day they were arrested by the Coast Guard in five shiploads of fish, turtles and corals. Suddenly it was moving – but in the wrong direction. When it should have protested the incursion into a marine preserve in the Sulu Sea, the foreign office was asking that charges be dropped. Environment NGOs and the media joined the outcry. Senators and congressmen urged Manila authorities to enforce the law. Justice officials backed down, but only to lull everyone. Soon after Li departed, the 117 poachers, a third of whom had been nabbed before, pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, paid a fraction of the multimillion-peso fine, then went home.

Follow the leader, of course. With high officials using kid gloves on illegal fishing, lesser ones can only mimic. The environment department recently revoked an order to its affiliate National Mapping and Resource Information Authority to delineate the 15-km municipal water boundaries under the 1998 Fisheries Code. The law forbids commercial fishing within the 15-km zone, but a congressman who runs a ship-repair yard opposes it. In exchange for swift confirmation by the Appointments Commission, of which the congressman is head of the House panel, Environment Sec. Elisea Gozun scrapped the order of her predecessor Heherson Alvarez. Against the cries of small fishermen, Gozun claimed to base her action on a justice department opinion that it’s the agriculture secretary who should sign the order. That opinion, issued by an undersecretary, overturned an earlier one by the justice secretary, who has since resigned, that the order was legal. Too, it was contrary to a court ruling that likewise affirmed the order. And it defied administrative logic. For how could an agriculture secretary fire off orders to an agency under the environment office? At any rate, the damage is done. Despite the ban since 1998, commercial fishing goes on unabated in municipal waters. Small fishermen must face unfair competition from the big boys for the meager catch left in their preserve.

Down the line goes the official apathy towards illegal fishing. Mayors of coastal towns do not only look the other way while constituents use dynamite or cyanide, they even intercede when the Coast Guard accosts the culprits. Along Luzon’s western and eastern coasts, blasts can be heard a few dozen meters from shore, but lawmen no longer scramble into action, for fear of political retribution. Ironically, it’s the mayors who, under the Fisheries Code, must lead in guarding their waters against destructive fishing methods. Invariably, the mayors who play blind to illegal fishing also allow illegal logging, quarrying and other depredations of natural resources.

Environment preservation is lost to those local officials. For them, patronage politics comes first. They permit blast fishing, quarrying or logging ostensibly for livelihood for their voters. They also take bribes from the illegal financiers. The food supply of future generations means nothing to them. Less than five percent of Philippine reefs remain healthy enough today to sustain more than 30 tons of marine life per square kilometer. With commercial, dynamite and cyanide fishing, those last few coral patches will soon go the way of the rest which can hardly hold 15 tons.

Enlightened fishing communities have started to fight back, for sure. Last year, three months after the five Chinese ships were apprehended in Tubbataha, a hundred Palawan fishermen and seaweed growers rounded up 17 more Chinese poachers in Cagayancillo. The town of a dozen or so islets is nine hours by fast craft from the capital of Puerto Princesa. Help from authorities couldn’t get there on time. With only their small bancas, they herded the intruders to shore for custody of the Coast Guard.

On February 11 in El Nido’s Tapiutan isle, also in Palawan, villagers alerted local rangers about the presence of three commercial craft in their municipal waters. Two of the vessels, F/B Tricia and F/B Tiger Shark, had come all the way from Navotas, Metro Manila; the third, F/B Laura, was from Taytay town. Onboard the arresting party found banned Danish seines, known locally as hulbot-hulbot. Hundreds of meters long, fitted with floats on the upper edge and sinkers on the lower, the fine nets are dragged from ships to snare everything in path. Crewmen then pick out only the big catch and throw the smaller but mutilated ones back to sea.

In Nasugbu, Batangas, reformed dynamite and cyanide fishers have organized themselves into Bantay Dagat (Bay Watch) teams. Equipped with speedboats from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, they chase off blast-and-poison fishers from Cavite.

Where there are enlightened fisherfolk, the source of inspiration and ecological education are enlightened local officials as well. The Nasugbu fishermen are led by their mayor Raymond Apacible in forming volunteer patrols in all the coastal barangays. Most mayors in Palawan have set up cyanide detection units in public markets under a policy of foiling supply and demand.

It’s a tough act, though. Luis Nacario, head of Nasugbu’s Bantay Dagat, says arrested captains of commercial fishing ships easily get off the hook "because they have many influential lawyers." In adjacent Calatagan town, his counterpart Sixto Atienza, responsible for more than 200 arrests in two years, was shot dead at noon during a barrio fiesta last May. Weeks later in Payao, Zamboanga Sibugay, Mayor Moises Araham was shot with a rifle while accosting two boats of dynamite fishermen.

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