Scraps of Justice, An Ocean of Doubt

Before dawn last Saturday, as most of Iloilo slept, Carlito Moncal began to walk. His destination was 40 kilometers away, a journey not measured in steps, but in the struggle for survival.

Moncal and dozens of other small-scale fisherfolk were marching to defend their livelihood from what they see as a catastrophic threat. “Mabudlayan na kami magdakop,” Moncal said, his words heavy with the weariness of a man who sees his future shrinking.

“Sinsilyo na lang ang mabilin sa amon.” Only scraps will be left for us.

This gut-wrenching plea is the human translation of a legal decision made in the quiet halls of the Supreme Court last December. In a ruling that sent shockwaves through coastal communities, the high court declared unconstitutional the preferential access of municipal fisherfolk to their own 15-kilometer municipal waters, invalidating key protective provisions of the Philippine Fisheries Code (Republic Act 8550, as amended by R.A. 10654). The decision effectively opens the door for large-scale commercial fishing vessels to enter these critical zones once reserved for those with the least in life.

The 12-hour walk from Miagao to Iloilo City, aptly named “Aton ang Kinse” (The Fifteen is Ours), was a pilgrimage for survival against a verdict that, while legally reasoned, feels profoundly unjust. This brings us to the piercing question raised by University of the Philippines Visayas Chancellor Clement Camposano, who marched alongside the fisherfolk: “I hope we don’t reach a point where somebody will say they took justice and hid it behind the law, rather than the law serves the ends of justice.”

The Chancellor’s words expose the heart of this conflict. The 15-kilometer boundary is a scientifically and socially grounded demarcation of justice. These coastal waters are the primary spawning grounds for a majority of the archipelago’s marine life. Allowing heavy commercial equipment like purse seines and trawlers into these delicate ecosystems is an invitation to ecological collapse, destroying the very nurseries that replenish our seas.

The sector the Court’s decision impacts is immense. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, there are over 2 million municipal fishers in the country. Their catch, though small-scale, accounted for nearly 26% of the nation’s total fisheries production in 2023. They are not hobbyists; they are a pillar of our national food security. Yet, they remain one of the country’s poorest sectors, with a poverty incidence rate consistently hovering above 30%. The 15-kilometer zone was their shield, their legally mandated safety net.

The Supreme Court’s decision, reportedly based on technical questions of equal protection, fails to weigh the vast inequality of the players. A local fisher in a small, non-motorized banca cannot “equally compete” with a commercial vessel equipped with sonar and hauling nets the size of a football field. To suggest they should is to mistake formal equality for substantive justice. It ignores the spirit of the 1987 Constitution, which explicitly calls on the State to “protect the rights of subsistence fishermen, especially of local communities, to the preferential use of the communal marine and fishing resources.”

This is why the Iloilo provincial government’s petition to intervene in the case is so crucial. It signals that this is not just a sectoral complaint, but a crisis of governance. Local governments are mandated to protect their communities, and the court’s ruling has stripped them of a vital tool to do so.

The solidarity seen during the march—the students, the academics, the ordinary villagers who set up roadside tables with water and food for the weary marchers—reveals a deep, public understanding of what is at stake. They see what the court perhaps did not: the faces behind the case files. They see Carlito Moncal and countless others who now fear being left with nothing but scraps.

The Supreme Court has a motion for reconsideration before it. It has an opportunity to look past the cold letter of the law and see the living reality it governs. It can reaffirm that the law must serve the ends of justice, especially for the marginalized. The justices must ask themselves if their decision will be remembered as a technically sound judgment or as the moment the law itself pushed our most vulnerable citizens out to sea, only to take the water from beneath them.