Monday, January 12, 2009 Tuna stakeholders push approval of baselines law
GENERAL SANTOS CITY -- Tuna industry players here have urged government to come up with a baselines law and work out a bilateral fishing access with Pacific Island countries to further spur the growth of the city's major economic driver.
Bayani B. Fredeluces, executive director of Socsksargen Federation of Fishing and Allied Industries Inc., called on President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to certify as priority bill the proposed baselines law pending before Congress.
Failure of government to delineate the country's territorial waters would result in the country losing its existing fishing grounds, he warned.
The country has only four months to beat the deadline set by the United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Seas (Unclos).
The Philippines ratified in 1984 the Unclos, which seeks to establish a comprehensive framework for the use of all ocean space and to determine maritime boundaries for every coastal state.
"If we cannot beat the deadline, our fishing grounds may become international waters and anybody can just fish on it, putting our commercial and small fishermen at a disadvantage," he warned anew in a recent interview.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur C. Yap has also urged Congress to formalize the country's 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and extended continental shelf (ECS, which can extend farther than the EEZ), as the deadline set by the United Nations is due to lapse this May.
Failure of Congress to define the Philippines' archipelagic baselines will make the country lose by default its claims to its ECS, which is teeming with fish and mineral resources.
Yap said an amendatory law is needed because the Philippines' existing baselines, as defined by Republic Act 3046 (An Act to Define the Baselines of the Territorial Sea of the Philippines) and amended by RA 5446, are not in accordance with Unclos.
Fredeluces said the tuna industry has been calling on government to delineate the country's water boundaries to avoid losing part of it to neighboring states.
As this developed, he also urged the government to immediately work out fishing access with Pacific island countries, such as Palau, Papua New Guinea, and the Federated States of Micronesia.
The industry has been calling for this in the past few annual tuna congresses in this city, Fredeluces said.
Malcolm I. Sarmiento, director of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), said the agency had submitted proposed fishing access agreements with Palau and Papua New Guinea.
But it has yet to be determined if they were adopted by the two countries.
The bilateral fishing agreement between the Philippines and Indonesia, which has a rich fishing ground for tuna, expired two years ago. Jakarta declined to renew the accord to encourage onshore investments from foreign tuna industry players.
This city is touted as the "Tuna Capital of the Philippines," hosting six of the country's seven tuna canneries.
