ILLEGAL-fishing activities continue to pose a big challenge to Philippine authorities.
Environmental group Greenpeace Southeast Asia-Philippines said illegal-fishing activities threaten the country’s food security, citing a new report from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources-Fisheries Protection and Law Enforcement Group (BFAR-FPLEG).
The law-enforcement arm of BFAR reported that over the last two years, it has recorded a total of 649 apprehensions related to the unabated illegal and unregulated fishing in various parts of the country.
During the two-year period between 2016 and 2017, the highest recorded violations were unauthorized fishing, the intrusion of commercial fishing vessels in municipal fishing grounds, dynamite fishing and the use of illegal and active fishing gears, such as hulbot-hulbot and bottom trawling.
Worse, Greenpeace Southeast Asia-Philippines said employment of unlicensed fishers remains rampant.
“Even years after the amended fisheries law was enacted, destructive and illegal commercial fishers continue to rob poor Filipinos of livelihood and cheap sources of protein. Data coming from the BFAR is very disturbing and shows that illegal fishing is a continuing threat to the country’s overall food security, and may defeat the efforts of various stakeholders to pursue sustainable seafood and fisheries,” Vince Cinches, oceans campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia-Philippines, said in a statement.
“What is worse is commercial fishers are not just profiteering from unsustainable fishing practices, but also making hefty profits through unfair labor practices by employing unlicensed fishermen,” Cinches added.
Cinches urged the Duterte administration to prioritize the full enforcement of the Philippine fisheries law and take out identified threats to the people and the Philippine seas.
Cinches said the Duterte administration must be able to “tilt the balance in favor of small, decentralized and sustainable production of our food, and prevent fish from disappearing from our table or, at the very least, from the plates of the majority of people who depend on the sea for sustenance.”
The BFAR-FPLEG report was presented at the recently concluded Sustainable Seafood Week organized by Greenpeace, together with Meliomar, RARE and other civil-society organizations, as part of the effort toward developing a National Food Policy and part of a global movement “to allow our oceans to recover for a climate-resilient, green and peaceful future.”
“It is our fervent hope to make sustainable seafood a norm, instead of a niche; not just an event, but a movement. That’s what we are working on, to make it accessible to everybody,” Cinches said.