FROM Rebecca Pestaño-Smith, one learns about limits: how to live with them and, when necessary, how to push past them.
She runs her Hale Manna Coastal Gardens resort in Saavedra, Moalboal town with a consistent respect for carrying capacity in mind. Word-of-mouth and positive online reviews since it opened in 2011 have helped the resort grow and allowed Pestaño-Smith to employ 53 fishers, who work as lifeguards or maintenance crew. Some keep a protective eye on the resort’s guests who are encouraged to use the kayaks or go snorkeling for free, so they will learn to appreciate the sea more. Swimmers near a bamboo raft a few meters offshore can watch some sea snakes and a resident turtle.
Tourism has helped some fishers give up illegal methods in this southwestern flank of Cebu Province, which faces Tañon Strait. For that, Pestaño-Smith is grateful. Since she retired in 2014 from full-time conservation education work, she has seen in her resort’s and its community’s growth just how well coastal resource management (CRM) can support tourism. The challenge, she says, is to translate such concepts as carrying capacity until these inform how local officials and fishers’ communities act.
The “tragedy of the commons” is a concept the conservationist and business owner uses to explain one of the biggest challenges to CRM in the Philippines. There is a limited understanding, much less application, of the concept to fisheries, but that is one limit she wants to help people move past.
“It’s just dawning on people that if we insist on open access all the time, we will run out of fish,” Pestaño-Smith explains. “The tragedy of the commons stems from the view that if I don’t get as much as I can (of a shared resource, such as fish), someone else will.”
In nearly two decades of working on CRM awareness and education, including the Coastal Resource Management Project (CRMP), Pestaño-Smith has helped set up marine sanctuaries, train local government officials and fishers on CRM, and contributed valuable research. Her team worked with fishers in towns from Alcantara to Santander and from Alcoy to Sibonga on “participatory coastal resource assessment, where they can see for themselves how their coral reefs are doing and help produce a CRM plan for each town.”
Natural limits
The CRMP operated from 1996 to 2002, supported by the US Agency for International Development.
In the midst of the interview, one of Pestaño-Smith’s providers of freshly caught fish arrives and Pestaño-Smith gently tells him she will not buy any parrotfish (molmol in Cebuano) he might catch. (Parrotfish help clean reefs by nibbling away at dead coral and then excrete fine white sand.) What types of fish to catch, how much to catch: here, limits are necessary.
“This idea that they should be able to fish anywhere, when they want” is tough to correct. But with informed business owners like Pestaño-Smith, who choose to operate sustainably and provide fishers’ communities with sources of supplemental income, there is reason to hope they will come around and learn to fish within limits.
Understanding limits is crucial in CRM.
In 2004, when several institutions including the environment and agriculture agencies and the Regional Development Council published “The Fisheries of Central Visayas,” this was one of the points emphasized: Fisheries are renewable for as long as they are “harvested sustainably up to a certain limit.” At that time, the authors asserted, “The fisheries of Central Visayas have surpassed their natural limits, and their ability to renew and provide fish catch is now hampered.”
While marine protected areas declared by towns were a good starting point, the challenge then was to shift to “larger-area management, which considers regionwide issues.”
How to approach change
Four years before that book came out, the CRMP included Tañon Strait as part of its expansion area. “We set up marine sanctuaries from Alcantara to Santander, then from Alcoy to Sibonga, and helped fishers see for themselves the status of their coral reefs,” Pestaño-Smith recalls.
When Oceana entered the picture, they helped reactivate the Protected Area Management Board for Tañon Strait. Moalboal was one of several local governments that already had marine protected areas—it had declared the Saavedra marine sanctuary in 1987 and the Basdiot fish sanctuary in 1998—but the challenge was to get all of the local governments and communities along the strait involved.
“Marine sanctuaries were doable,” the resort owner explains. “They were not overwhelming and the enforcement was localized. But banning commercial fishers from municipal waters required stronger local government units and support from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.”
And then there was the matter of local officials changing every so often. If a batch of officials that had learned and prepared to implement coastal resource management lost an election, the training went back to square one.
“The handholding took a long time,” Pestaño-Smith recalls. “In communications workshops, I learned that knowledge isn’t sufficient to change behavior. One has to go from ‘I know’ and ‘I should’ all the way to ‘I want to’ and ‘I can.’ That’s how you change behavior.”
Pestaño-Smith worked closely with her husband, Dr. Ian Smith, who studied and believed in the importance of traditional fishers in local economies, about whose lives very little was known.
More patient, like farmers
“Unlike farmers, fishers have a different mindset. Farmers are used to waiting and are more patient. If a fisherman fails to catch anything, that means his family goes hungry for the day. They generally have no back-up,” she points out. And while farmers can look to the agriculture and agrarian reform departments for support, “who among the agencies really has a mandate to help fishers?”
A Department of Fisheries may be feasible, but only if it’s not just production-centered. Again, we run into the matter of limits. Whatever the answer is, “it must combine conservation and production. It’s a very complicated issue.”
Tourism helps, in a way. Support for the declaration of the Basdiot fish sanctuary in Moalboal 21 years ago surfaced, in part, because the town wanted to attract more divers. A fishermen’s association was tasked with making sure that no fishers nor fishing boats entered its 4.17-hectare no-take zone. In a three-hectare buffer zone around the sanctuary, only hook and line fishing was allowed.
“Coastal resource management has been good for tourism and has taught people to value natural environments more,” Pestaño-Smith says. “But again we have to introduce the concept of carrying capacity. There are so many concepts that have to be broken down.”
Hale Manna, for one, is in no hurry to expand. “I had this dream for a long time,” she says. It’s her choice to avoid quick fixes and to grow the resort at a pace that its natural environment will support. Some limits you just have to embrace.