By Alex Villanueva
Philippine News Agency
PUERTO PRINCESA CITY, June 5 (PNA) — To ensure that Palawan’s marine environment will be protected from fish stock depletion due to unbridled live and fresh fish trading activities, the Provincial Board (PB) has imposed stricter requirements on the business and is about to also impose a moratorium on it.
For live fish traders who are applying, the PB is now requiring them to deposit P100,000 in a trust fund and a certificate from a refutable bank for P50,000 to determine if they are capable of doing business and to avoid “fly-by-night” traders.
Board member Modesto Rodriguez II, chairperson of the PB Committee on Agriculture and Aquatic Resources, explained this to the local media after claiming he is being swamped with applications for live fish trading.
Rodriguez said that currently, the PB has already approved more or less 300 applications for live and fresh fish trading, and he is afraid that with this number, Palawan might suffer from over fishing.
As per report from the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development Staff (PCSDS), the board member said there is a big probability that there will be overfishing in the province because traders are shipping more than 147 tons of fish every year.
“For the meantime, we want to stop approving applications to give way to resolving the quota system,” he said.
Rodriguez disclosed further that there are traders who take advantage of getting applications because of the quota system. He found out that there are traders who have 10 applications for live fish trading, but only one actually owns the business.
If the quota system is not checked for loopholes, he said that an individual applicant can be awarded 10 endorsements, which is unfair to the others, considering that there are more than 300 of them applying.
It can be recalled that early this year, the PB was forced to identify a quota system on the tonnage of live fishes that can be shipped outside the province because of concern for fish stock depletion. (PNA)
