It took a crab ban to protect our dolphins

There are maybe 13 Irrawaddy dolphins left in the Iloilo-Guimaras Strait. Thirteen. Scientists have been saying so since at least 2017, and the count has only moved one direction since a mother and calf washed up on the Negros coast years back. None of it was enough to get a provincewide monitoring program. What finally did the trick was a letter from a fisheries office in Maryland.

That is the uncomfortable read on Executive Order No. 72, which Gov. Arthur Defensor Jr. signed on June 29. It creates a Marine Wildlife Conservation, Bycatch Monitoring, and Stranding Response Program, complete with a task force, a reporting system, and a scientific panel. It is a good order. It is also, plainly, a trade-compliance document in conservation clothing, and we should say so before we start clapping.

Here is the part the province would rather skip. On May 11, the National Marine Fisheries Service denied the Philippine blue swimming crab fishery a comparability finding for the second time, while clearing Vietnam, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. We were the only ASEAN exporter to fail. The ban took effect June 11 and is in force. Phil-Union Frozen Foods in Lapu-Lapu had already cut 245 workers. Industry groups peg the trade at roughly USD 50 million.

So EO 72 is not shutting the barn door after the horse bolted. The horse is still out. And that, oddly, is the best reason to take the order seriously. The pressure that produced it has not lifted, so the will behind it might outlast the ribbon-cutting.

But a provincial order cannot fix a national failure by itself. The gaps Washington flagged belong to BFAR and DENR: no bycatch monitoring, no mandatory reporting of marine mammal deaths, no proof the mitigation works. And they were documented across the whole country. Iloilo can build the cleanest reporting system in the Visayas and still watch the ban hold, because comparability is granted nation to nation, not province to province.

What Iloilo can do is prove the thing works. Fund the task force with a real budget line, not a signing ceremony. Make the incident data public, so fisherfolk and reporters can see it, not only federal auditors. Hook it to whatever corrective plan BFAR carries into its July 3 consultation. And give the 19 coastal mayors a reason to care beyond the trade sheet. Older fishers here once read these dolphins like a map, following them to the catch. The animal drowning in their nets is the same one that used to lead them to fish.

The dolphin does not read trade determinations. Neither does the family that lost a paycheck in Lapu-Lapu. Get this right and both come out ahead: 13 animals, and a fishery worth keeping. It is the rare case where the decent thing and the profitable thing point the same way. We should not have needed Washington to point it out.