Fishing for Fairness Poverty, Morality and Marine Resource Regulation in the Philippines Asia-Pacific Environment Monograph 7 Fishing for Fairness Poverty, Morality and Marine Resource Regulation in the Philippines Michael Fabinyi Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/ National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Fabinyi, Michael. Title: Fishing for fairness [electronic resource] : poverty, morality and marine resource regulation in the Philippines / Michael Fabinyi. ISBN: 9781921862656 (pbk.) 9781921862663 (ebook) Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Fishers--Philippines--Attitudes. Working poor--Philippines--Attitudes. Marine resources--Philippines--Management. Dewey Number: 333.91609599 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU E Press Cover image: Fishers plying the waters of the Calamianes Islands, Palawan Province, Philippines, 2009. Printed by Griffin Press This edition © 2012 ANU E Press Contents Foreword . ix Acknowledgements . xiii Selected Tagalog Glossary . xvii Abbreviations . xviii Currency Conversion Rates . xviii 1 . Introduction: Fishing for Fairness . 1 2 . Resource Frontiers: Palawan, the Calamianes Islands and Esperanza . 21 3 . Economic, Class and Status Relations in Esperanza . 53 4 . The ‘Poor Moral Fisher’: Local Conceptions of Environmental Degradation, Fishing and Poverty in Esperanza . 91 5 . Fishing, Dive Tourism and Marine Protected Areas . 121 6 . Fishing in Marine Protected Areas: Resistance, Youth and Masculinity . 149 7 . The Politics of Patronage and Live Fish Trade Regulation . 171 8 . Conclusion . 191 References . 201 Index . 223 v List of Tables Table 2-1: Birthplaces of Esperanza residents . 39 Table 2-2: Occupations of people in Esperanza . 42 Table 2-3: Historical patterns of fishing in Esperanza. 45 Table 2-4: Common fish caught in the Calamianes waters. 45 Table 3-1: Socio-economic features of fisher groups in Esperanza. 60 Table 3-2: Economic characteristics of primary fisheries in Esperanza. 67 List of Maps Map 1-1: Map of the Calamianes Islands . 13 Map 1-2: Map of Palawan Province . 14 Map 2-1: Historical development of fisheries based in Esperanza. 44 Map 3-1: Map indicating fish export destinations. 66 List of Figures Figure 3-1: The Marquez family and their business relationships . 62 Figure 4-1: The discourse of the poor moral fisher. 92 List of Plates Plate 2-1: Live fish caught in the Calamianes loaded for export at Coron Airport . 30 Plate 2-2: Leopard coral grouper atop a float representing Coron at a provincial festival held annually in Puerto Princesa . 32 Plate 2-3: Leopard coral grouper held in an aquarium . 33 Plate 2-4: NGO worker holding a fish caught for the marine ornamental trade . 33 Plate 2-5: A carpenter working on his boat . 43 vii Plate 2-6: Rabbitfish caught by net fishers. 47 Plate 2-7: Red-bellied fusilier caught by fusilier fishers. 48 Plate 2-8: Gleaning for shellfish at low tide. 49 Plate 2-9: Building a fish cage. 50 Plate 3-1: A fisher using the plunger to drive the fish into the gillnet. 68 Plate 3-2: Gillnet with the trip’s catch .. 69 Plate 3-3: Preparing net-caught fish to be dried. 69 Plate 3-4: Packing the fusiliers in boxes with ice . 74 Plate 3-5: Fusilier fishing boat. 75 Plate 3-6: Vessel used to catch fresh grouper . 79 Plate 3-7: Boat used to catch live grouper . 82 Plate 3-8: Final destination of live grouper caught in the Calamianes waters: a Beijing restaurant . 83 Plate 4-1: Fernando Poe Jr (Presidental candidate in 2004) and Joseph Estrada (President 1998–2001) forged film careers playing characters identifying with the poor . Tatak ng Tundo was about life in the slums of Manila . 95 Plate 4-2: Fishing in the hot sun . 114 Plate 4-3: Fishing village shoreline . 114 Plate 5-1: Promoting marine protected areas in Coron town . 128 Plate 5-2: Typical boat used to take tourists on day trips . 146 Plate 6-1: At the karaoke den . 155 Plate 6-2: Freshly caught fish to go with drinks. 158 Plate 6-3: The ice-hold packer aboard the fishing boat. 159 Plate 6-4: Fisher with tuna (Family Scombridae) . 161 Plate 6-5: Rabbitfish (Family Siganidae). 162 Plate 6-6: Fresh grouper (Family Serranidae) . 162 Plate 7-1: Infrastructure promotion like this is a common feature throughout the Philippines . 185 viii Foreword Until relatively recent times, the coastal regions of insular Southeast Asia have had the elastic ability to absorb a variety of transient fishing populations from other islands who then within a generation or so assimilate to a new, more fluid ethnic identity. As new technologies have enabled fishing populations to expand ever further in search of lucrative fishing grounds, movement to new settlement areas and the amount of inter-island traffic and fish exports have increased apace. These processes are especially common in the Philippines, and Palawan in the west-central part of the archipelago has attracted many migrant groups in recent decades. As Michael Fabinyi makes clear in his book, Fishing for Fairness, the political and economic construction of Palawan as the ‘final frontier’ and an ecological oasis in the country’s overall environmentally damaged set of natural resources, exists in an uneasy tension with the provincial government’s strategy of mineral extraction and economic development. In recent decades, maritime anthropology has really become applied environmental anthropology as national and international efforts to improve the management of marine resources have taken a more interdisciplinary direction. One of the most important ethnographic contributions of such research has been the documentation of existing forms of sea tenure and other territorial forms of dividing up human access to marine resources. A second area of ethnographic contribution concerns the documentation of community-based natural resource management and co-management projects wherein coastal fishers, traders, governments, and often non-governmental organisations design, implement and monitor the use of coastal resources. The relatively poor success record in the Philippines of many of these projects is a theme of this book, as Fabinyi makes the case that unless we understand the narratives and meanings different sets of actors attach to political or environmental initiatives, the effective design of conservation projects are likely to fail—especially if effective alternative livelihood projects are not implemented. This book is a major contribution to environmental anthropology generally and to political anthropology in the Philippines especially. Despite several decades of global efforts to stop environmental degradation and biodiversity loss in the country, most maritime conservation schemes have failed or, at best, only partially succeeded. Much anthropological literature has corrected Garrett Hardin’s critique of open access resources by noting that he confused open access resources with restricted access resources and omitted any consideration of cultural norms and social institutions that might constrain over-exploitation (see McCay and Acheson 1987; Anderson and Simmons 1993; Dyer and McGoodwin 1994). In contrast, Fabinyi’s post-structural ecology approach fits into a more recent set of approaches that seek to understand the rhetorics and ix Fishing for Fairness practices that surround debates about environmental projects from a variety of different perspectives. Here the emphasis is on how such rhetorics and discursive conflicts serve different interest groups and shape institutions, environmental actions, and ways of life (see Greenough and Tsing 2003). Drawing on cultural insights from a range of scholars specialising in the Philippines, the author highlights how the local conceptions of small-scale fishers of Coron in the Calamianes Islands are expressed through a rhetoric or discourse that equates their fishing practices with legality, morality and self- assessment of their neutral impact on the environment. This politicised rhetoric is formed in a discursive contestation with an opposed image of wealthy fishers associated with illegal fishing practices, immorality and relative impunity from government regulation—in part because they can avoid arrest by paying bribes. Small-scale fishers’ construction of wealthy fishers in this way serves as an active campaign of resistance and an effort to prevent government regulation of their extractive practices. Drawing on the ‘right to survive’ ethics that often color the discourse between the poor and the wealthy in the Philippines, Fabinyi calls this rhetoric ‘the discourse of the poor moral fisher’. In a stunning revocation of provincial government efforts to institute a closed season for the live fish trade in the Calamianes, Fabinyi carefully shows how such rhetorics and alliances between small-scale fishers, live fish traders and municipal politicians effectively repelled the provincial regulations. The pro-conservation, provincial politicians were seen by local-level fishers as enveloped within a wider framework that presents almost all actions of fisheries governance as anti-poor and corrupt. By illustrating his ethnography with a careful review of the work of such scholars