Made-in-China food shortage imperils Philippines

Sen. Ralph Recto has warned the country of a possible “made-in-China food shortage,” as colleague Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. chided the government for limiting its options on the territorial dispute with China by closing the door to bilateral negotiations.

Legislators are one in saying the country stands to lose heavily if the current arbitration case at the International Tribunal on the Law of the Seas (Itlos) does not favor the Philippines.

The hearings are to determine if Itlos has jurisdiction over the case filed by the Philippines against China.

Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario has said the Philippines would accept any ruling, “win or lose.”

Recto estimated in a forum that the country may lose up to P200 million a day worth of potential fish catches alone if China retained its hold on the areas it is now claiming.

The value of what commercial and municipal fishermen produced in 2013 was about P150 billion, Recto said. “Based on this, it is a P410-million-a-day industry. If half of this is caught from the West Philippine Sea, at least P200 million would be lost in potential catches daily if China posts a ‘do not enter’ sign on the Spratlys or Baja de Masinloc. They are even claiming the seas off the province of Ilocos,” Recto said.

If China puts up a “no fishing” sign around the Great Wall of Sand as a result of the maritime dispute, it would starve Filipinos of a staple in their diet which is fish, Rectro said, adding: “It will hit us where it hurts most—our stomach. There lies the greatest danger of Chinese incursion in our territory. It’s a formula for starvation. More than a national security question, it involves food security. This is not just a battle about cartography, but about calories. What we’re stopping is a made-in-China food shortage.”

Of the 4.705 million metric tons (MT) of fish caught in 2013, commercial fishers contributed 1.067 million MT, while municipal fishermen added 1.264 million MT. The rest, or 2.374 million MT, were raised through aquaculture.

By one estimate, more than three-fourths of total commercial and municipal fishing production come from the rich fishing grounds in the West Philippine Sea.

“All the sardines that we put in cans are mostly from the disputed areas,” Recto said.

He said the West Philippine Sea is “a nursery, breeding ground” of our fish. “Iyan ang maternity ward, parang Fabella Hospital ng ating mga isda. Kahit ’yung ibang nahuhuli sa ibang lugar, kung may birth certificate sila, ang ilalagay doon ay West Philippine Sea,” Recto said.

He said China’s push into Philippine waters was motivated, in part, to secure rich fishing grounds that would satiate Chinese appetite for marine products.

“It’s a market of 1.360 billion people, each eating 31 kilos of fish each year,” he said.

“The West Philippine Sea is included in the Coral Triangle, one of richest fishing grounds in the world, kaya sino ba naman ang hindi maeenganyo,” Recto said.

Senator Marcos said rejecting China’s offer to hold bilateral talks with the Philippines has limited the government’s strategic options to stop China from antagonizing not only the Philippines, but all the other claimant-countries in the South China Sea.

“We should not be snobbish. I can’t see any reason at all why we are not talking to China. On the contrary, there are more than enough obvious reasons why we should talk to superpower China,” he said in another media forum.

Marcos also said the government’s rejection of bilateral talks with China could force the superpower to take a more hardline position on the sea dispute.

Offer rejected

The Palace had rejected a new Chinese offer for bilateral talks to resolve the row even with the ongoing arbitration case.

“China opened the door and we shut it. The Chinese said let’s talk and we snubbed them. It’s like the Philippine government itself is encouraging China to take and maintain an unbending stance on the issue,” Marcos said during a forum last week.

Marcos said the Philippines is not going to lose anything by accepting the Chinese invitation to a dialogue.

“So talk, and tell them: we are not happy with what you are doing and we do not agree with what you are doing. But the next thing you say is: how do we fix this?” said Marcos, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said.

Marcos had called on the government to agree to or initiate bilateral talks with China when it aggressively started erecting structures in areas the Philippines is claiming as either part of its sovereign territory or within its 200 nautical (370-km) mile exclusive economic zone.

Marcos said there are only three options open to the country in resolving the dispute: by war, adjudication, or multilateral/bilateral agreements.

“We do not want war. Arbitration is not one that is going to be recognized by the Chinese. So it has to be negotiations,” Marcos said.

Marcos cited the so-called cod wars, or the dispute over rich fishing grounds between the United Kingdom and Spain in the early 1980s. At the height of the tensions, warships even rammed fishing boats.

“In the end, what did they do? They came to a bilateral agreement to share and now they are working on that basis,” Marcos said.

Marcos added the government should adopt the strategy of back-channel diplomacy and persuade Filipino nationals to talk with their friends and connections in China on ways to resolve the disputes.

“We should talk to China bilaterally because it is still the best option. Our Filipino businessmen can also help by reaching out to their Chinese counterparts and friends in China and try to come up with a solution that would persuade both governments to, at least, sit down and negotiate, or at most, resolve the problem outright,” he said.

“We’re strategically important to any great power in Asia-Pacific, but we have to play that role even-handedly,” Marcos said.

A House of Representatives think-tank estimated that 20 percent to 25 percent of all the country’s annual fish catch come from the waters west of Palawan and Luzon’s western seaboard, two areas now embraced by the Chinese nine-dash line map.

Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, one of the eminent persons in the country’s powerhouse delegation to The Hague hearings, has issued a warning in countless lectures against the disastrous effect of losing our fishing grounds in the West Philippine Sea.

“If we lose 80 percent of our exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea, that means we lose 80 percent of the fish we catch annually in the South China Sea,” Carpio said.

Philippine fisheries produced P244 billion worth of fish in 2013—P93.7 billion from aquaculture, P80.9 billion from municipal fisher- men, P69.9 billion from commercial fishers—or about 2 percent of the GDP.