BUZZ WORD FOR SUICIDE By Juan Mercado

PUERTO PRINCESA, Palawan: Huddled along 17,460 kilometers of coastline, fisher folk remain among the poorest in a country whose seas were once the marine counterpart of the Amazon forests in stunning richness of biodiversity.

“The Philippines paradoxically is simultaneously a hotspot and a mega-diversity country”, UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Joaquin Cortez told an International Cooperatives Fisheries Organization seminar here. Seventeen mega-diversity nations have 67 percent of the world’s biological resources. The Philippines, and six of these 17, are in Asia. Our seas held more than 950 commercial species of fish, plus 561 kinds of corals.

This wealth, however, is being dissipated relentlessly. Among the world’s ecological hotspots, the Philippines ranks second to Madagascar, Oxford University’s Norman Myers notes. Number three is a trio: Sumatra, Java and Borneo.

The world center of marine biodiversity is a “triangle”, fishery planning officer, Cortez told 49 seminar participants Luzon’s northernmost tip is the apex. And it runs down to the Cocos Island of Australia, and then bounces to Papua New Guinea. And within this “Indon-Malay- Philippine Archipelago” the country is “home to the top 10 percent of concentrated diversity”.

This richness stems from Pleistocene sea level changes 55 million years, argue Drs Victor Springer of Smithsonian Institution and Kent Carpenter of International Union for Nature Conservation. Shifting of tectonic plates jiggled land masses, with their plant, animal and marine life, and Dr Robert Hall’s study of Southeast Asian plates indicate.

“Only Palawan, Mindoro and Panay existed then,” Cortez said. Cebu and Negros emerged from the crumbling land masses, says the “West Visayas Small Islands Survey”. “Neither Tablas nor Siquijor were connected to the greater Pleistocene islands.”

Geological history’s roll of the dice resulted in a mind-boggling variety of often unique plants and animals. And marine life abounded since the Philippines ended up with the most basins and many bays: Calauag, San Miguel, Tayabas, Sorsogon, Ormoc and Panguil, among others.

The biological diversity stunned scientists, from Silliman University’s Dr Arturo Rabor to Drs L.R. Heaney and E.A. Rickhart. “Large number of species occurs nowhere else in the world,” they observed. In Panglao, Bohol, University of San Carlos scientists, working with French counterparts, are continuing to turn up new species. “When I consider the work of Thy hands,” the Psalmist wrote, “what is man that Thou art mindful of him?”

Filipinos haven’t drawn adequate sustenance from the seas and land, despite lavish Providence. Less blessed nations, in contrast, built thriving fisheries while conserving this resource. Those who net fish for our dinners, have little to eat. Eight out of every 10 coastal fisher folk scrounge below poverty lines. Penury in seven fishing bays “is the highest in the country,” an Agriculture Department survey found.

Population, meanwhile, builds up on the “seam between land and water” – the coastlines. Six out of every ten Filipinos today are crammed into 10,000 coastal villages. They rely on increasingly polluted seas for about 10 percent of their protein. And when the catch falters, their need for protein is dumped on farms often eroded from deforestation.

Is this mess due to our welshing as stewards for our grandchildren? Did we become predators instead?

Only four percent of our reefs – aptly called “rainforests of the sea” -- remain in pristine condition today. Dynamited reefs in Panay Gulf and the Bohol Sea yield only four to five metric tons per square kilometer yearly compared to its original potential of 15 metric tons. “Malthusian over fishing”, in the words of a Swedish Royal Academy study, depleted fish stocks in the Sulu Seas and Moro Gulf. In just four decades, almost 60 percent of mangroves were cut or asphalted over, notes Jurgenne Primavera, the leading Filipina scientist on wetlands.

Filipinos are innovative. But did we bargain for what the UN Environment Programme reported “Squirting cyanide to stun fish originated in the Philippines and Taiwan in the 1960s...In the mid-1980s, more than 80 percent of all fish harvested in the Philippines and for aquarium trade were collected using cyanide.” Poisoning decimates marine populations. Misuse of cyanide spread to Asian countries, then leapfrogged to the Maldives, then to the Seychelles…”

They dub this trend as “unsustainable”. It’s the polite word for suicide. There has, therefore, been a growing recognition of the need for more than knee-jerk demands: whether for more patrol boats (the 96 Bantay Dagat vessels have helped) or yet more laws.

Top-down centralized measures failed to evolve into modern systems of fisheries management, Masahiro Yamao of Hiroshima University notes. And Asian nations are groping for systems where fisher folk have a say on decisions.

Here, the need is for effective enforcement of the 1991 Local Government Code, 1998 Fisheries Code and 1997 Agriculture and Fishery Modernization Act where it matters: at sea and in fishing villages. As the Puerto Princesa seminar stressed: more attention must be given to decentralized management of coastal resources with fisher folk co-managing with government.

It’s their next meal and their children’s future at stake, after all. Ecological suicide is not inevitable. “The fault my dear Brutus does not lie in our stars/but in ourselves – that we are underlings.”