A blast fisher's journey to environmental advocacy

WHEN you come across a man in his fifties passionately engaged in the protection of aquatic resources, but in his forties had manipulated almost all imaginable destructive fishing methods, you tend to wonder what on that part of the country caused the 180-degree switch.

Blast fisher

"We must keep our marine protected area free from threats -- may it be pollution, over-fishing, or the encroachment of seaweeds farms. This is the greatest inheritance that we can leave with our children," Wilson Duran's words ring with finality.

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In Bacawayan, one of the 11 coastal villages in Dimataling, Zamboanga del Sur, these are the new-found convictions of a man who used to be a dinamitero, an elusive one at that.

"I wished for all my four children to get a college education. Clearly, I needed a lot of money. The dynamites sent them to school. I could get what -- twelve or fifteen thousand pesos. That's but a single day of blast fishing!" Duran recalls.

For six years he was a blast fisher. But when his children finished school and started their own families, the explosives lost their purpose. It would have been a phase in his life buried by history, but Duran went on to become the village chief. One day, he had to participate in his municipality's efforts to regulate the use of Dimataling's coastal resources.

Crippled corals

In 2004, educating coastal communities on fishery laws and the role that marine protected areas play in maintaining biodiversity became a priority concern of the municipal government of Dimataling. To do this, the local government unit (LGU) teamed up with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and USAID's EcoGov project.

EcoGov, through a technical assistance agreement with the local chief executive, capacitated the LGU’s coastal resources management office to conduct trainings and workshops on establishing a marine protected area (MPA) in Bacayawan.

It was one of those grassroots-level workshops where Duran, along with other stakeholders, saw images of dead corals that could no longer serve as fishes' breeding and feeding ground. He visualized a future without the sea's bounties, where hapless fishermen sailed home without catch. He could only imagine the vast expanse of corals his explosives crippled in the past.

Since then, Duran busied himself in encouraging the people of Bacayawan to pay attention to coastal resources management. Like an undaunted preacher, he’d urge them to closely watch the twenty-hectare marine sanctuary in their village for violators.

The diligence of the local leader paid off. In a recently held monitoring and evaluation activity, fish abundance progress was observed. Among other species, the population of the damsel fish (palata in the local dialect) made a record-breaking leap. It averaged 430 per 125 meter square inside the marine sanctuary as of October 2008. The previous year's monitoring result, only three damsel fish per 125 meter square were noted. This fish thrives very well in excellent corals environment; its growing presence could indicate a functional MPA management.

Recent monitoring activities reflect a tremendous increase in its population inside the marine protected area.

Promoting sustainable mariculture

Side by side with strong enforcement of local fishery laws in the MPA, Duran extends his service to the municipal coastal resources management office by helping promote sustainable seaweeds mariculture industry in the area. Bacayawan stands out among the more trusted producers of quality dried seaweeds, such that the buying price for Dimataling seaweeds would float at eighty pesos per kilo while other places' would drop to fifty pesos.

Sometime in September 2008, Bacayawan seaweeds farmers underwent a seaweeds clinic through the coordinated efforts of the LGU, EcoGov and some mariculture experts from the Mindanao State University in Naawan. As a follow through activity, they mapped out their resources and resource usage in October. For the first time, the fishermen and farmers drew with their own hands numerous marine creatures that could be found in their MPA, among these the rare seahorse.
"We should make the initiative to propose policies that will protect these treasures in our coastal area," Duran told the fishermen and seaweeds farmers present in the two-day mapping sessions.

Today, he no longer holds the torch of village leadership in Bacayawan, having passed this on to his daughter Rowe. Still, Duran remains on the frontline of MPA management, "This is the only way I can give back what I owe the sea."

(November 23, 2008 issue)
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