CALITUBAN ISLAND, Talibon, Bohol, May 22 (PIA)--According to folk tales, fishermen here using multiple hooks in the early 1960s pull from the sea fish-dangled lines, the image of fish like leaves in a branch hauled out from the sea becomes the vivid description of how rich the seas here are.
Danajon, accordingly got its name from there.
A part of the Visayan seas that feature a double barrier reef, one beside the other and taking thousands of years to emerge, Danajon is the only double barrier reef in the Philippines and among the six that are found in the world.
Danajon double barrier reef stretches across 17 towns in the provinces of Bohol, Cebu, Leyte and Southern Leyte, taking 271 square kilometers of area and extends to 381 kilometers in length.
This rare geological phenomenon, built by expansive coral growth is home to mangroves and sea grasses that abound in the shallow and protected waters with rich sea shells and crustaceans in its tidal flats thrive and proliferate.
Recent studies however in the Danajon showed over 200% decline of fish catch from the Danajon that was.
NET PROBLEM
In an area whose population is dependent on fishing, fishermen here frantically sought measures to cope up with their food and livelihood needs, that the option for bigger and longer fishing nets came naturally.
Nets however are not forever.
“More nets, means more gets discarded too: torn and abandoned everywhere in the bank’s numerous coral islets,” shared Bernie Caliñajan, former coastal resource management project implementer and now a public school teacher in one of Danajon’s islands: Calituban.
When torn nets are thrown, they drift and settle down covering and killing corals, they get trapped in the mangrove root systems or drift with the tides, catching fish, sea turtles and even dolphins, continuing the risk to marine life.
A study published by World Animal Protection said worldwide, over 100,000 large whales, sea lions, and seals are killed every year, and countless number of sea birds, turtles and fish get snagged and die in these unanchored drifting nets.
To get to the problem, Caliñajan said they joined an international agency which organized a systematic net retrieval system: the nets they retrieve is sold and the fishers earn additional income, while they help nature recover.
Sitting in the shade of a ficus, Caliñaja and other teachers took a short breather from the ongoing Brigada Eskwela to listen to the team of the Bohol Provincial coastal resource management task force (BCRMTF) making their information drive as a Month of the Ocean outreach activity in the island.
According to marine resource management specialist Dr. Alan White, rampant illegal fishing, blasting and overfishing by commercial fishers started the decline of Danajon between 1950-1960.
This was even heightened with the tropical aquarium fish industry and the introduction of cyanide fishing, according to non government organizations helping the residents of Danajon earn better lives.
As with the islands in the region, uncontrolled birth bloated the population which further intensified the problem.
Then working under the Project Sea Horse, Caliñajan used to sail across the islands to talk with communities, to sustainably manage their coastal resources through the effective establishment of marine protected areas and ecological solid waste management, to make these sustain.
It was also at those times when Project Seahorse when the London Zoological Society took over the project and devised ingenious solutions to the marine debris that is slowly choking the reefs that the idea of retrieving the nets bobbled in the surface.
On lean days, fishermen from as far as Tubigon on the southwest end of Danajon bank to Pitogo on the northeast, fishermen haul abandoned nets and bring them to established buying stations in the islands or the mainland, he said.
This is what NetWorks is all about.
Coming to Danajon in 2012 to set up a pioneering net recovery program, NetWorks plan was to organize fisher folks to gather these floating or snagged nets and buy them for recycling purposes, explained Caliñajan.
There is so much nets discarded in Danajon, the young teacher remarked.
On a weekly basis, all net buying stations average some 1.5 to 2.5 tons of nets, one which sells at a little over P14 per kilo, Caliñajan revealed.
This has become a handsome motivation for fishers to go out and scour the seas, dive the sea beds and pull these entangled nets for additional income.
“The net recovery program not only cleans up the waters, it has shown to create new jobs. Here, fishermen also dive for nets and pull them onto shore, bring these to a baling station on the island of Bohol, where they are tightly compressed into cubes, then shipped to a recycling company in Slovenia,” report environmentalists working in the countless island communities here.
The collected nets are accordingly made into nylon yarns and are shipped again to the United States to be spun into carpets that embellish some body’s stately home.
SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT
Solving the problem of nets in Danajon however, is snagging just a portion of the bigger garbage problem.
With over 50 islands and islets and sitting in the middle of four island provinces, the garbage problem in Danajon is an issue that has local government officials in a practically helpless state.
In the island the size of a quarter of a square kilometer, and with the population of about 5,000 mostly subsistence fishers who source out their water and food supplies from the mainland, Calituban as with other nearby islands is listed as among the world’s most densely populated.
NO PLACE FOR TRASH
The island is practically a squatters’ community, where the passageways are at most, a meter wide and where you have house walls instead of road shoulders.
Where there is clearly not enough space for houses, there certainly are no spaces for a sanitary landfill to contain their garbage, a member of the BCRMTF added.
Every supply boat that docks on the island’s docking points, a new set of potential garbage is brought in, adding to the already piling garbage that threaten to cover their coastlines.
An island barangay of Talibon which won last year’s best Ecological Solid Waste Management Program, Calituban, being about 15 kilometers and is 45-55 minutes away from the mainland by boat is not among Talibon’s garbage collection route.
In Calituban Island alone, members of the BCRMTF who visited the island for its Month of the Ocean activities saw the deplorable state of its solid waste management.
“Our group cleaned up about a few meters and we gathered four sacks of plastic,” a member of the BCRMTF confided. Calituban has about a kilometer long stretch of coasts.
“The problem is even more pronounced in the north-west side of the island,” locals reported.
Plastic water bottles, soda PET bottles, grocery bags, cellophane wrappers, styrofoam cups, straws, plates, ropes, broken appliances, slippers and even kiddie diapers were among the major garbage collected from the BCRMTF Coastal Clean-up May 22.
In its outreach activity, members of the BCRMTF went to Calituban to conduct a coastal clean up, an information drive on coastal and marine protection as well as to volunteer for the Brigada Eskwela.
“We used to go clean-ups and our school materials recovery facility (MRF) just could not take the sheer volume of garbage,” shares a pupil, who also helps his father collect torn nets for sale.
With the volume of garbage from the island plus the ones drifted from the mainland and other islands, Calituban becomes a filter of garbage that flows along the Visayan and Camotes seas.
“If we collect the garbage, where do we put it,” asks a woman who joined the BCRMTF in the clean-up.
A few hours after the coastal clean up, sacks of collected garbage lie in heaps by the narrow alleys of the island, the rising mid-day high tide starting to lap on the black garbage bags with the garbage.
NOWHERE TO GO
That question also happens to be one bothering Calituban Elementary School authorities. With the school MRF filling up fast, where would they be putting their collected garbage when the impound fills soon?
To that question, BCRMTF members suggested: ask the LGU in the mainland to send in garbage collector and ship the garbage to the mainland where these can be kept in secure landfills.
For if left dumped in piles, the rising tides brought about by climate change would soon carry the garbage again to the sea and the same cycle comes back. (trahc/PIA-7/Bohol)
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