KABASINGAN Fishing with a future in mind
DESTRUCTIVE PRACTICE IN A TREASURE AREA
The fishing village of Kabasingan is in the Philippines, north of the Mindoro Island, on the famous Verde Island Passage, which two powerful monsoon currents invert flows each season, making it an exceptional reproduction ground for the marine biodiversity that brews and disseminates toward the Pacific ocean and the Chinese Sea. The passage rich biodiversity is widely acknowledged, most recently by the 2015 California Academy of Sciences expedition that discovered over 100 new species, from “living fossil” urchins to unrecorded nudibranchs synthesizing promising biomedical compounds. Yet it is, like the rest of the archipelago, still among the fastest degrading marine environments worldwide. In a growing country of 100 millions, on both side of this passage just south of Metro Manila, communities resort to highly unsustainable practices to barely make a living. On this “Biodiversity Corridor” small fishermen and farmers are among the country’s poorest and least educated people. From their point of view, conservation conflicts with continuously diminishing incomes and food safety.
In this strait separating Luzon and Mindoro, the most disruptive practice as well as one of the most lucrative for local fishermen is called the “dulong” fishing. “Dulong” is the commonly used designation that cover the fry of different species from post-larvea to juvenile, essentially sardines and anchovies but also any living things large enough to not escape the very fine-meshed nets used. Despite a regulation imposing a minimum of 3 cm mesh size, the nets used by these fishermen, resemble mosquito nets. This over-kill of immature sardines and anchovies has a heavy impact on the two populations as well as on the larger species feeding on them. Practiced at night, with “super” lights to attract the fry, this practice is a massive disturber of the entire underwater ecology. A study, led by USAID and Conservation International, in 2011 estimated the catches of only 20 small local wooden fishing boats, to a staggering 60 metric tones per year, generating about $100.000 USD of annual revenues. Hundreds of such boats are operating in this passage. Though the money is going essentially to middle men brokers who are collecting up to 80% of the revenues, for the simple fisherman, this type of practice can be 5 times more profitable than other usual techniques.
KABASINGAN EXEMPLARY CASE
Kabasingan harbors 30 of the 35 “dulong” boats of the municipality of Abra de Ilog. Each boat’s earns between $ 1.000 to 3.000 USD each year, removing in the process hundreds of tons of juvenile specimens of all species. Dozens of similar villages populate the Verde Island Passage. Converting one pilot community to voluntarily reorient its practices toward solutions regenerating ecosystem’s resources and stabilizing revenues, could have a tremendous impact on all the Verde Island Passage, with an efficient communication campaign.
In 2014 Abra de Ilog municipality, decided the implementation of a Marine Reserve. Its Local Government Unit (LGU) designed a coral reef protecting zone. Then the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) extended it to a proper Marine Protected Area. For this extension, in 2016, we provided to the LGU the support and scientific assistance for the Biological Baseline Assessment and Coral Reef Survey as requested by the Philippines MPA regulation. Now remains the ultimate stage for its definitive validation is the “Local Communities Approval”. The issue is locally extremely divisive and had been somehow underestimated. The catches keep dwindling dramatically and a silent guiltiness, that keep to be demonstrated, is attached to the families practicing this type of fishing. Though also declining, the “dulong” still provides a significant share of the village income. The closest road is 6 km away and the village is out of reach of any permanent authority. Strong resistance to the MPA enforcement is highly expected.
Philippines has over 1000 MPAs and one of the best environmental legislation in the region. Why are MPAs so difficult to implement and maintain, when their environmental and economical impacts are so clearly demonstrated? Are local communities be the ultimate stumble block? Under local governments scarce resources, MPAs early setbacks become deterrent to larger propagation. The costs of non-enforceable regulations upon non-complying populations are considered main reasons of failure. Results of costly coercion or cash compensations last only the time the stick or the carrots last. They are not self-sustainable solutions. Eventually locals are inadequately labeled ignorant and environmental agents wrongly perceived as oppressors… Communication and cooperation are obvious keys. Intelligence and trust, when tapped, grow proportionally to their use. They are self-sustainable resources.
While bringing considerable revenues on the short terms “dulong” is known by all to severely impact the entire biodiversity. It is a matter of short term profits versus long term damages, a local yet emblematic issue. It raises the question of community’s responsibility toward common good. How do we bring multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and visions into coherent actions beneficial to all? In Kabasingan as everywhere, in regard to the environmental emergency and what must be done, science is clear enough. Furthermore, governing entities are nowadays converging toward the right regulations and measures, and particularly in Philippines. But knowledge, policies and governance are superficial societal layers relatively easy to address. Deeper inertia remain: social beliefs and practices, cultural habits and values, community norms and power distribution are dynamics that need to be accessed, informed and harnessed. Modification of community’s long-standing practices are hardly achieved by outsiders. So, instead of trying implementing ready-made solutions, the project intend to help find the reasons, place and time for the Kabasingan’s people to come together to build their own solutions and re-endorse responsibilities for their choices and their consequences, at local as well as global scale. It aims at restoring a communal space that used to exist everywhere before the globalized civilization discredited it, under the pretense of expert competencies. Rebuilding this local platform of inclusive crowd intelligence using modern communication tools and social techniques, will facilitate the introduction of science and techniques that will inform, as well as be informed by the community wisdom. The process will strengthen alliance between science and field realities. In it first phase this deliberate bottom-up approach should help build cooperating capacities for all participating pilot communities and, if compelling, might pave an innovative way to bring together similar communities.
ACTING WITNESS STRATEGY in KABASINGAN
Acting Witness is a bottom-up strategy that relies on the emergence of crowd intelligence from social complexity. It is strongly relying on local people understanding, expertise and concern for their own environment. The project intend to showcase the ability of a multi-stakeholders community to assume the stewardship for their marine environment, when entrusted and empowered.
The “Observer Effect” is well known to documentary film makers. Bringing in a camera in a community is never neutral. The coordinator of this project experimented it along a twenty years carrier: Being observed triggers, in anyone having developed a prefrontal cortex, a twitching in behavior which tend to tilt it toward its best. Individually or in group, this human ability of meta-cognition, as defined by scientists, is the initial component of this project. But it requires also trust and therefore a “long term embedding” strategical approach. The project will use ethnographic methods in more rigorous manner than usual documentary productions, given the project is about inducing long term behavior adjustments, rather than just telling a story. The “observer open position” is a third essential requirement. From start, regular screenings of successive episodes will be organized for the community itself. The observer tends to have de facto a dominant position upon the observed. This project deliberately puts the observed subjects in position of being active observers, empowering the protagonists themselves, from early stage, to be in charge of the issues that need to be raised. Each of the growing number of protagonists has the opportunity to voice his opinion and script what is to be shown within the community or outside it. Each participates to the narrative, yet under the control of the film director and “facilitator” who moderates the positions of all parties. Framing this social impulse, the project uses the Forum Theater's long proven techniques. These ones deepens the initial process, through role playing and participatory script writing, toward a self-assessment of real needs and potential solutions. The Forum Theater, also known as Theater of the Oppressed, helps create a safe exploratory space, with room for emotions to be processed leading to group’s creative intelligence. Iterating evolving scripts around shifting protagonists and supposed oppressors, the game allows each player to switch role and experiment others point of view. This progressively tends to unveil the “inner oppressor” in each protagonists. Acting Witness substitutes on stage live performances by screenings bi-monthly episodes followed by public debates. The challenge along the 10 episodes is for the director-facilitator to maintain a narrative structure preserving the suspense through progression of real events towards conflicts and/or resolutions. The suspense, shooting process and the post-production that will happen on location, will keep the protagonists actively engaged during the entire project.
