BFAR sets up surveillance center at tip of Batanes

LAOAG CITY, Ilocos Norte — Government officials have embarked on a six-day mission to the country’s northernmost territory to initiate the installation of a new monitoring facility in Amianan Island (Y’ami) of Itbayat, Batanes.

Lawyer Asis Perez, the executive director of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), led other officials in the mission on board the government’s multi-mission vessel, M/V DA-BFAR (DYCA), starting from Sta. Ana, Cagayan, last weekend.

In a simple rite, Perez and Mayor Reuel C. Ibañez of Itbayat town led the groundbreaking of a new Monitoring, Control, and Surveillance (MCS) station that will serve as a marker as well as BFAR’s watch center in the area.

“We are intensifying government’s capacity to monitor fishing activities by putting up government structures in the island,” Perez said last Saturday.

Afterward, BFAR personnel unloaded from DYCA to Amianan almost 400 bags of cement and other materials for the construction of the MCS Station with a traditional architecture of Ivatan houses.

Aside from the station, two units of fiberglass rain collection facilities were also transported to the island to serve as new station’s temporary source of freshwater.

Perez, who is also the undersecretary for fisheries of the Department of Agriculture, said that the idea in putting up the MCS in the area is to guard immediate archipelagic waters 24/7.

“The composite teams of BFAR’s fishery regulatory officers will be alternately assigned to the station to help deter illicit fishing activities in the country’s territory,” he said.

Perez said the mission coincides with the observance of the Farmers and Fisherfolk Month in May, when the role of the country’s fisherfolk in nation building is being highlighted.