A response to Mayor Garcia’s proposal to ‘kill whales and dolphins in Tañon Strait' (Part I)
Text and photo by Angelico Tiongson
Note from the author: This is a response to Dumanjug, Cebu Mayor Nelson Gamaliel Garcia’s statement on the Tañon Strait Protected Seascape (TSPS). Let me be clear that I was not at the Tañon Strait Summit, and that I am only responding based on what was published in the news on February 11, 2015.
I commend Mayor Garcia for being a responsible government official to his constituents by voicing out their concerns. According to the reports, he was the lone opposition to this General Management Plan and the TSPS overall during the summit.
According to Garcia, the TSPS should be relegated, and that dolphin populations and other marine megafauna should be controlled. In this article, I will present four points against his arguments.
Firstly, Garcia believes that the fisheries resource within the Tañon Strait is very low, and that this has had a great impact among the 500 fisherfolk within his Local Government Unit (LGU). He cited that the fishermen no longer catch enough fish and fully blames the low catch on the dolphins. He called them “parasites,” and proposed that the nationally protected seascape status of the Tañon Strait be relegated and returned to the jurisdiction of the municipality. As a protected seascape, municipalities that are part of Tañon Strait are still responsible for enforcing the protected seascape policies in their municipal waters, but they do not have authority on what the policies should be. Dissolving the TSPS, he believes, would be beneficial to his constituents.
Here lies the problem. At this very moment when the Tañon Strait holds a protected seascape status, Garcia said that he is allowing commercial fishing within his municipal waters. Several witnesses have reported that commercial fishing happens within what would have been Dumanjug’s municipal waters, with Garcia’s full knowledge. A few of Garcia’s constituents allegedly profit from the exploitation of these commercial fishers who are not from Tañon Strait. And yet, Garcia argues that the dolphins are to blame for the 500 municipal fisherfolk in his town to not have enough fish to catch.
Garcia also appears to be unaware that there are no physical boundaries that separate municipal waters from the rest of the Tañon Strait. Municipal waters are only delineated by imaginary lines (15 kilometers from the coastline), which means that the fisheries resource within Dumanjug’s waters are also shared by all other LGUs. Simply put, allowing commercial fishing in one part of the strait will affect the entire strait.
This brings me to my second point that Garcia appears to be unaware of the concept of sustainability. In the most elementary definition, sustainability is the recognition that every resource is finite, and that intergenerational equity and responsibility should be considered in all relevant decisions. Garcia believes that by relegating the TSPS, allowing commercial fishing, and culling dolphins, it will solve the current issue of the low catch of the fisherfolk in Dumanjug. However, research shows that there is a real danger of fishing Tañon Strait to the point of collapse, even in just one human generation.
This short-term and one-dimensional answer from a politician is not surprising. After all, politicians have a limited term in office, and receive an avalanche of complaints from their constituents. Essentially what Garcia wants is to have fish for all people now. As long as the 500 fishermen now are happy, then he feels he is doing the right thing. But Garcia will then have to answer to his children and his children’s children on why they no longer have fish to eat, and no more dolphins to see.
Angelico Tiongson studied at Silliman University in Dumaguete, Philippines andInternational Christian University in Tokyo, Japan before graduating at Silliman in 2012. In his senior year, he volunteered as a research assistant for a behavioural study on humpback whales in Australia. After graduation, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Environmental and Marine Sciences on various projects before moving to The Swire Institute of Marine Science at The University of Hong Kong to work on the Chinese pink dolphins and to handle his own conservation project in the Philippines. He has worked on ecology and conservation of marine mammals in Hong Kong, Philippines and Australia.
