SHRINKING CATCH, RISING HUNGER | Report: ‘national food security emergency’ looms as 45 million kilos of fish is lost yearly

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

A decade after the Philippines toughened its Fisheries Code to clamp down on illegal fishing and rebuild stocks, a new assessment says the country’s marine catch is still sliding – and coastal families are paying for it in a way the rest of the country can’t keep ignoring.

Oceana, an international ocean advocacy group, said the Philippines is losing roughly 45 million kilograms of fish catch each year, a decline it calls a threat to national food security in a country where fish remains a staple source of protein.

The group is urging the Marcos administration to prioritize enforcement of existing rules – particularly the protection of municipal waters reserved for small-scale fishers – and to hold officials accountable for what it describes as years of weak implementation.

The claims come with a thick set of numbers behind them. In The Philippine Fisheries Assessment, A Glimpse of RA 10654’s 10-Year Implementation, scientist-authors from the University of the Philippines Visayas track official fisheries statistics and enforcement indicators and conclude the country’s capture fisheries production dropped from 2.6 million metric tons in 2010 to 1.9 million metric tons in 2023, a cumulative loss of 591,136 metric tons over 13 years.

Using a regression trendline, the report estimates the average annual decline at about 45,472 metric tons – the figure Oceana translates into “45 million kilos” lost each year.

If this sounds like an abstract problem, the report keeps dragging it back to the table—and to the people who supply it.

In 2023, more than 353,000 fisherfolk families were below the poverty line, including 93,030 classified as food-poor, meaning they could not afford basic food needs, the assessment said. Oceana puts the number of affected fishers and families at roughly 2.5 million.

There’s also a demographic warning embedded in the data. The average Filipino fisher is now 49–52 years old, the report said, and younger workers are leaving a job that can bring in only PHP 2,500 to PHP 7,000 a month in some cases.

Overfishing, then governance gaps

The assessment doesn’t argue that depletion began in 2015 or even in 2010. It points to overfishing documented decades earlier, then says the more recent story is about governance: rules exist, but enforcement is uneven, and the systems meant to track fishing pressure and compliance aren’t doing their job at scale.

One headline figure has been repeated in the advocacy push: 88% of fish stocks are overfished and depleted, based on the government’s National Stock Assessment Program results cited by Oceana from 2017.

The assessment itself emphasizes that the decline in production is consistent with long-running pressure on major fishing grounds, and that the country is now trying to impose stronger controls at a time when stocks are already extensively depleted.

That matters because RA 10654 was supposed to be the corrective: stronger penalties, more science-based management tools, and monitoring requirements meant to deter illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

The report’s verdict is blunt: implementation has been partial and, in key areas, slow.

Municipal waters fight, seen from space

For coastal communities, the most emotionally charged battleground is still the 15-kilometer municipal waters zone, which the law reserves primarily for small-scale fishers. It is also, increasingly, where commercial boats are alleged to be showing up.

Using data from Oceana’s Karagatan Patrol platform, the assessment summarizes Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) detections – nighttime satellite observations of lights on the water that can indicate the presence of fishing vessels.

The report notes an important caveat: detection does not automatically prove illegal fishing, but it has been used as an indicator and as an enforcement planning tool in the Philippines.

Still, the scale is hard to shrug off. From January 2017 to June 2024, the assessment reports 270,165 total VIIRS boat detections in municipal waters across the country.

Annual counts in the table rise from 35,357 (2017) to 44,924 (2019), dip during the pandemic years, then climb again to 28,822 (2023); by June 2024, detections were already 19,584, suggesting another increase if the trend held through year-end.

The report also names hotspots. Among the top LGUs with the highest mean number of detections per month from 2017 through June 2024 were Zamboanga City, Tongkil in Sulu, and Languyan in Tawi-Tawi – all in the area covered by Fisheries Management Area 4, the East Sulu Sea–Moro Gulf cluster.

The assessment notes that FMAs 4, 5 (Northern Palawan), and 11 (Visayan Sea) each had four LGUs in the top 20 list, making them persistent encroachment hotspots.

This is where the policy fight turns sharp: the report says some of the detected vessels may include those allowed to fish within 10.1–15 kilometers by certain LGUs under specific conditions – meaning the story isn’t always a simple illegal-versus-legal binary, and enforcement becomes a patchwork depending on local rules and capacity.

A system that works

The assessment repeatedly returns to a problem that sounds technical until you translate it: without reliable monitoring and reporting, regulation becomes theater.

It points out that daily catch logsheet reporting has been required for commercial vessels for years, and those records could have provided a clearer timeline of stock decline and grounds for early intervention.

But the report says such information has not been used or made available by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) for management purposes, in part because noncompliance has been tolerated for so long.

Data quality shows up in other ways, too. The report includes examples of inconsistent vessel lists and incomplete regional data, warning that decisions are being made from conflicting or unreliable registries – bad conditions for resolving the municipal-commercial fisheries conflict.

And there is a legal tremor under the surface. The assessment notes that in December 2024, a Supreme Court ruling in the Mercidar Fishing Corporation case became public, upholding a lower court decision that allowed Mercidar’s commercial fishing vessels to operate in municipal waters.

BFAR, the report says, filed a motion for reconsideration seeking to overturn the decision. For small-scale fishers and local officials who treat municipal waters as a last refuge, the case is more than a courtroom fight; it’s a signal of how fragile protections can be.

‘Paper MPAs’ and small sanctuaries

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are often presented as a hopeful counterweight: close off a portion of the sea, let fish recover, and allow spillover that boosts catches nearby.

The assessment acknowledges that well-managed MPAs can increase fish biomass and species richness, but it argues the country still struggles with basic execution – zoning, surveillance, sustained financing, and pressure from surrounding fishing activity.

In 2023, the report says, the Philippines had 2,112 MPAs, many set up at the barangay-LGU level, commonly sized 10–100 hectares.

But it also cites a long-standing critique: in 2007, fewer than 10% of MPAs were estimated to be effectively managed with no-take zones, while most were “paper” MPAs—created on paper, weak on enforcement.

The assessment says it found no updated national estimate of fully managed MPAs, and warns the “paper MPA” problem remains a major challenge.

Livelihood help that doesn’t always land

Government livelihood programs are often the political answer to fisheries restrictions: if you ask people to fish less or fish differently, you help them earn in other ways.

But the Oceana assessment pulls in Commission on Audit findings to show recurring operational problems – unutilized funds, delays, and equipment distributed but not actually used.

One example: for 2023, the report cites COA observations that PHP417.161 million allocated for a fuel assistance program remained unutilized in 16 regions because of delayed guidelines, leaving intended beneficiaries without support.

It also lists cases such as nonoperational freezers and delayed construction or turnover of community fish landing centers—small details, maybe, until you’re the one trying to sell fish without ice or storage.

What happens next

Oceana is calling for urgent government action and accountability, framing the issue as a national food security emergency. The assessment behind the advocacy makes a quieter but sharper point: the country already has the building blocks – laws, management frameworks, even new tools like satellite alerts – but it keeps stumbling on basics: consistent enforcement, usable data, and coordination between national agencies and the hundreds of coastal LGUs tasked with managing municipal waters.

The sea, in other words, is not waiting for the next round of consultations.