Creation of fisheries dept urged anew
LEADERS and stakeholders of the country’s fishing industry are pushing anew for the creation of Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources ( DFAR) to directly address the challenges faced by the sector, particularly the continued decline in production and management of Philippine marine resources.
The call came after the recent order of the Department of Agriculture (DA) allowing the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) to import at least 45,000 metric tons (MT) of galunggong (round scad) to ensure enough supply amid the closed fishing season in Zamboanga Peninsula from December to March 2020.
Under the law, BFAR, an attached agency to the DA, is mandated to monitor, control, manage, develop and preserve the country’s marine resources as part of the government’s effort to ensure food security.
The BFAR, however, cannot execute all its responsibilities because it is just a bureau, Joseph Borromeo, board member of National Fisheries Research Development Institute (NFRDI) said in a press conference on Tuesday in Quezon City.
“This is what we would like to stress to the legislators: creating a department is not a cost and it will not add to the bureaucracy of the government. [It] will simply fix the institutional failure happening to BFAR because it’s bureau. We will just turn it from a bureau to a department,” Borromeo explained.
He added the Philippines is the only country among top fishproducing countries that has no separate department for the fisheries sector.
The Philippines losses about P65 billion a year from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUUF), government data showed.
“We have these richness. The question is how are we taking care of all of these resources and whether or not the agency that is supposed to take care of these resources has the right capability to monitor these resources,” Borromeo added.
The Philippines’ coastline, he said, is the fifth longest coastine in the world.
Despite this, however, the country produced only 4.35 million MT of fish valued at P265 billion in 2018, as against that of China, the largest fish producer in the world, at 70 million MT or 60 percent of the global production. “But China does not have the coast line [and natural resources] that the Philippines has,” Borromeo said.
In a study, the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), the country’s highest policy- making scientific body, valuated Philippines’ marine resources — coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass — at $1.5 billion or P75.02 trillion.
Furthermore, the study showed the net annual benefit from the country’s marine ecosystem — fisheries, tourism and research —is estimated at $6.3 billion or P317.33 billion.
For this year, the maritime sector has so far contributed P210.30 billion or 2.6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to Borromeo.
“We’d like to remind them it’s a campaign promise of the President ( Rodrigo Duterte). We are just trying to correct a mistake [and] institutional reforms, and to look at this not as an additional cost to the government but an investment,” Borromeo said.
He stressed that if the government invests P27 billion, the industry can return the investments by as much as P78 billion, as stated on the Comprehensive Fisheries National Industry Development Plan.
BFAR had said that approximately P60 billion is needed annually to properly execute all its responsibilities. However, only P5.7 billion was given to BFAR by the DA.
Balance
Meanwhile, Joann Binondo, Sustainable Tuna Manager of World Wildlife Fund-Philippines, said the creation of DFAR aims to “strike a balance between economy and ecology.”
Currently, about 59.9 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully fished while some 33.1 percent are overfished. Only 7 percent of the total fish resources globally are un-fished.
Global fisheries continue to grow at 1 percent annually, with declining contribution of capture fisheries at a rate of 2 percent while aquaculture grows at 5 percent. The Philippines seemingly follows this development by growing its total fish production at 1.04 percent every year, with 1-percent decrease in capture fisheries and 2.97 increase in aquaculture.
Globally, 800 million depend on fish. In the fisheries sector, about 84 percent of total employees and workers come from developing countries in Asia like the Philippines.
“If those challenges are not being addressed then you have a risk of 6 million direct fishing jobs and over $6 billion in income. Then you are impacting food security [ since] 271 million people live within 30 kilometers off reefs,” Binondo added.
Of the 105 million Filipinos, about 83 million eat fish at 38.2 kilos per year, as compared to the global per capita consumption of 20.3 kilos.