January 16, 2007
 

Small fishers say ASEAN irrelevant to them

 

 

Fisherfolk groups from the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand have belittled the insecurity in the supply of staple food in the region as they lamented the "irrelevance" of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to small-scale fishers.

 

Arsenio Tanchuling, executive director of the Quezon City-based Tambuyog Development Centre said the existence of ASEAN for forty years has long been irrelevant to small fisheries as it failed to draw up a simple regional fisheries management plan to realistically address the problems of ecosystem, overfishing, depletion of fishing grounds and inequitable access to coastal resources. 

 

Southeast Asia relies on fishery resources for up to 70 percent of its protein needs as well as up to a 10th of the gross domestic product of each country in the region.

 

He added that some of ASEAN's fisheries program is even a threat to a sector with 20 million fishermen in the Philippines alone that are living on a dollar per day.

 

Tanchuling said the bloc's current design for the fisheries sector was riddled with policies geared toward developing big businesses' market competitiveness at the expense of small producers.

 

Eusebio Jacinto Jr of the Southeast Asia Fish for Justice Network said such policies were unrealistic and disastrous.

 

SEAFish is an alliance of 14 fisherfolk nongovernment and peoples' organizations with members representing groups from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.

 

Jacinto said programs to address concerns of small fishermen who comprise more than 90 percent of the sector were never mentioned in the ASEAN policies.

 

Jacinto said the sector was plagued by the depletion of fishing grounds, the destruction of coastal habitats and the continuous decline of capture fisheries' productivity.

 

These socio-environmental costs include the destruction of mangrove habitats, dislocation of artisanal fishers from their fishing grounds, and exhaustion and salinization of groundwater.

 

The groups say the US$4.2 billion yearly profits from shrimp farming in the region are not even worth the total cost of mangrove loss, which economists estimating its value at a range of US$5.5 billion to US$7.6 billion a year for about 692,450 hectares of mangroves lost in the region -- or $10,000 per hectare.

 

Jacinto added that if ASEAN intends to achieve competitive yet sustainable fisheries productivity, it must first abandon its current pragmatic approach and directly address the problems.