Assessing approaches in community-based coastal resource management in the Philippines

Introduction: What this paper is all about

Under more civilized circumstances, violence which has resulted in the killing of one of the engineers involved in a mining operations in a small island off the coast of Eastern Samar last October, should not have happened. But violence seems to be one of the fastest ways to resolve brewing social conflicts over critical areas, especially when the continued survival of communities is at stake.

Hinatuan Mining Company had long wanted to reopen its nickel mining operations in Manicani island which has a size of 1,165 hectares. The mine will use approximately 95 percent of the island's resources and, according to a Catholic priest assigned to the village of Buenavista, the mining operations will put its land and marine resources - and human lives - in jeopardy. The priest said the open pit dug by the HMC mining operation had in the past brought great destruction to the environment of Manicani.

This had resulted in the siltation of the mangroves and shores of the island. HMC was reported to have paid Php 50,000 for that but the villagers claimed that no amount of money could compensate for the destruction HMC had wreak on their once lovely island. The white sands of the island have turned to brown due to the latrite or silt which flows from the mining pit.

Pollution is also destroying the marine sources of the villagers. Fishermen now have to venture farther out to the sea to catch fish, while "kinis" or crabs which used to abound in the island's mangroves, are no longer to be found.

Buenavista residents have already filed a complaint before the local officials and the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources against the pollution HMC is causing in the island, but the action on their case has yet to be seen or heard.

Last month, an irate group of residents finally ganged up on a mining engineer of Hinatuan Mining Corporation and took turns in stabbing him to death. According to news reports, the perpetrators of the crime were said to be the group that strongly opposes the mining firm's reopening of the mine. The group had been picketing in the area for some months because apparently their demands were not being listened to. The mining firm is said to be owned by Salvador Zamora, a younger brother of the Executive Secretary Ronaldo Zamora.

From all appearances, the firm has the support of the important government agencies. The Regional Trial Court of Guian has issued a temporary restraing order allowing the heavy equipment and service vehicle of HMC to pass to the mine and dismantle the four months' old barricade of the islanders at the mine entrance.

Aside from the local government of Guian, HMC has the support of the Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources. According to a supervising science research specialist of the Mines and Geo-Sciences Regional Office, the HMC was able to comply with the requirements, like the environmental impact assessment and social acceptance, never mind if the residents themselves are picketing against it. The HMC is only waiting for the go-signal from the contingency and rehabilitation fund steering committee and the result of the deliberations from the central office in Manila for it to start operations. (Bankaw Newsmagazine)

Open physical violence may not be a usual feature in areas threatened by environmental destruction or already suffering from it. In fact, it is a rare feature. But there is an unseen kind of violence that happens when mangroves and fishing grounds are destroyed, and fishing communities are finding it more and more impossible to survive from fishing in such a plundered environment. Stories of this kind are not rare. They are found in almost all fishing villages where 80 percent of the sector live below poverty thresholds (by Philippine standards). In these villages, a fishing family earns an average of P714 (US$14) a month, which is not even enough to buy a 50-kilo sack of rice. The amount is earned from the average two kilos of catch per day using traditional methods (hook and line, gill net or pante, etc.) of fishing. Indeed, fishermen could easily be the poorest sector among the working classes in Philippine society today. (Ibon Facts and Figures)

There is no arguing that the issue of conservation of marine resources is closely tied up with that of poverty among resource users in a vicious cycle of sorts. Resource depletion partly explains poverty in these fishing villages, and it is ironically their poverty which drives them to drastic actions like blast fishing, which in turn causes their fishing environment to be further depleted.

Conservation is also tied up to local politics inasmuch as local ordinances and their implementation or lack of it can promote the recovery of the degraded resources or further worsen their situation. Local officials can make or unmake a conservation project, depending on their attitudes towards it. Several cases can be cited where projects supported by a mayor were spurned by a new mayor years later, causing projects to fail.

Conservation is tied up to national policies which in a general sense determine the direction of conservation efforts at the level of policy as well as implementation. In the country, we have ample examples of pro- and anti-conservation policies and programs implemented side by side, sometimes by the same agencies as in the case of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources which is promoting both conservation and productivity in the tradition of capitalist entrepreneurship.

Several papers and articles have already been written about the fisheries situation in the Philippines, prescribing what should be done to address the problem. Some of these papers argue for stricter law implementation to address the problem of illegal fishing which is apparently causing the decline in catch. A few have posed questions about property rights, claiming these are actually inherent rights of communities and that these should be respected over and above claims to open access. Others point out the role of the local fishing communities as the country's last hope for preserving its fishing grounds. In fact, projects have been conceived and implemented both by government and the private sectors to address the problem, and a lot of these efforts have actually succeeded to a limited extent in halting what appears to be an inexorable trend in the fishing industry.

Indeed, it would be ideal to come up with a ready formula to save the industry. I would suspect there have been efforts to do just that. But the complexity of the situation in the industry easily deters one from doing any such attempt, no matter how tempting. For the problem includes not just the biophysical aspects (which is the least of our concerns here) but primarily socio-cultural as well political aspects that make ready-made solutions impossible to think of. In any Philippine coastal village, people's lives impact on their environment as much as with themselves, that it is impossible to even imagine life situations that are not in one way or another influenced by what they live on and how they survive and by their interactions with different members of their communities.

Equipped with a small boat, a net or long line, a fisherman must first reckon with the weather, the condition of the sea and the day of the month during which to fish before he can set out to the sea to earn his keep for himself and his family. Is the sea calm and the weather fine for fishing? Will the sea have fish at this time of the month? Which part of the sea has sufficient fish for his kind of fishing gear? Even the more equipped fisherman must reckon with basically the same factors if the attempt to catch is to be successful.

Everything else is secondary to him. For instance, it is farthest from his mind if his fishing activities are destructive to his environment. Survival - and whatever it takes to achieve that - comes first.

"Most small-scale fishermen exist at the subsistence level and have a short-run survival strategy of taking care of themselves and their family that day. The fisherman, due to limited mobility and lack of alternative employment to move out of fishery, will utilize whatever resources are available to him (technology, skill, capital) to harvest as much fish as possible. For if he does not harvest the fish, some other fishermen will. The fishermen living at the subsistence level, has what is called a high discount rate concerning use of the resource - he prefers profits and food now rather than a continual flow into perpetuity."(Pomeroy)

In the long history of the country's small-scale fishing industry in the coastal villages, the fisherman never had to recknon with anything else. Ask any old fisherman in a typical coastal village and he will tell you his fishing ground teemed with all sorts of fish some 30 years ago. A few hours of fishing activity usually produced sufficient catch to afford him and his family enough rice and viand on the table, besides his other needs to enable him to fish again the next day. His only worry was when the weather was bad and the waves were too large for his small boat to sail on.

But today, the small fisherman must also reckon with fishing laws and ordinances that govern his fishing grounds, and the people who make sure these laws are being observed. He must reckon with government policies that will have far-reaching impact on the industry as a whole, even if discussion of these policies are limited to the centers of power and authority and very rarely talked about at the village level. His fishing territory is growing smaller and smaller, more and more fishermen are in competition with him, the fish getting more scarce, while villages are no longer isolated enclaves where each fisherman may claim his own space to fish in. Population has grown from just more than 40 million 30 years ago to around 75 million today, and that growth surely had an impact on the already overfished marine areas in the country. (NSO)

Moreover, along with declining fish catch, several types of new fishing gear have evolved alongside the older ones in attempts to cope with the decline in the catch. (Szanton) While the old gear are still in use (because they are affordable to the small fisherman), those who persist in using them do so at their own risk and disadvantage. Driven to desperation, it is not uncommon for him to resort to desperate - and illegal - means to fend for his own survival, which is even more risky for him and his family. He could get his hands blasted off with his homemade TNT or get caught by the authorities. The Philippine judiciary is not known for being kind on the poor, and stiffer jail sentences are usually meted on those who cannot afford to pay the fine.

Studies have often blamed the poor municipal fisherman for destroying fish habitats, the corals and mangroves, with blast fishing. While this may be true, I have not come across any studies that document the presumably extensive damage done by commercial fishing in municipal fishing grounds. This bias against the small municipal fishermen extends even to programs conceived and implemented by government agencies and nongovernment organizations which target village fisherfolk in community-bassed coastal resource management projects. The implied message of these programs is that it is the poor fishermen who did all that damage, hence, it is their responsibility to restore and protect their fishing grounds and other coastal resources.

Yet there seem to be no programs addressed at commercial fishing enterprises requiring them to be involved in coastal resource management even if there is ample evidence that they may be a major source of damage long before the small village fisherfolk blasted the seas with their homemade TNTs. These other actors in the fishing industry appear to have been reckoned with only as productive forces that contribute to the industry's revenues, never as factors that contribute to the degradation of the coastal resources and even much less as the major culprits. Indeed, it would make an interesting study to show the relationship of the owners of the fishing enterprises to the seats of power if only to get a glimpse at the political undercurrents beneath all these apparent biases.

However, that is not our thrust here. In this paper, I shall limit myself to setting down some approaches which would be useful and appropriate at the community level to someone involved in coastal resource management, with the village fisherfolk as the main actors. The top-down approach has been tried and failed, and since the '80s, there has been a trend towards community-based resource management approaches, with the locals taking the lead. This paper will discuss the interventions of both government and private sectors over the last 10 years. Such approaches will be assessed in the context of the fisheries situation in the country.