The cost of capitulation

“Worse than invasion.” This was how grassroots environmental group Homonhon Environmental Rescue Organization (Hero) described the damage China has wrought on the Philippines’ precious marine resources in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

Experts have estimated that the Philippines loses more than P30 billion annually in damaged marine life and lost income for the local fishing industry due to China’s reclamation activities and illegal fishing operations in the WPS.

“The Chinese fishermen have been overfishing, depleting our marine resources,” said Villardo Abuene, president of Hero. “Our fishermen are starving. They face hunger because of the Chinese.”

The group estimates that about 240,000 kilos or more than 260 tons are illegally taken daily by Chinese fishing vessels. Startlingly, the Chinese have been reported to even sell their catch to Filipino fishermen who have lost their traditional fishing grounds to the foreign poachers. Spell double kill.

In his latest column for this paper, “Why Chinese fishermen are in the WPS” (4/22/21), former senior associate justice Antonio Carpio wrote that there is a “more sinister reason” why Chinese fishing vessels roam en masse in the WPS.

After a Filipino vessel was rammed by a Chinese boat in Reed Bank in July 2019, “President Duterte disclosed to the nation for the first time that he had a ‘verbal agreement’ with Chinese President Xi Jinping allowing Chinese fishing vessels to fish in Philippine EEZ in the WPS. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m the owner, and I’m just giving the fishing rights. Galit sila kung bakit ko daw pinapaisda,’ Mr. Duterte told Pastor Apollo Quiboloy in his TV show.”

The President’s deal with Xi, according to presidential legal counsel Salvador Panelo, was “legally binding.” And this “verbal agreement,” Carpio noted, explains why the diplomatic protests filed by Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. and the warnings issued by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana over the massing of more than 200 Chinese militia vessels in Julian Felipe Reef in the WPS were not being taken seriously by Beijing.

The Duterte administration’s policy of accommodating China has now cost the country its sovereign rights to fish exclusively in the WPS, where about 15,000 Chinese fishing vessels have been operating. In quantifiable terms, China owes the Philippines over P800 billion for stealing and destroying marine life in the WPS since at least 2013, said Sen. Risa Hontiveros in February.

In April last year, she filed Senate Resolution No. 369 urging the Duterte administration to “exert legal and diplomatic pressure” on China to end its activities in the WPS, citing 2020 figures published by the international journal Ecosystems Services that 1,850 hectares of reef ecosystems in Panatag and the Spratlys worth P231.7 billion have been ruined by China over seven years, on top of an estimated P644 billion worth of fish catch looted since 2014.

Bountiful oil and natural gas are also said to be present in the WPS, hence China’s covetous eyes on the area. Robert Kaplan’s 2014 book “Asia’s Cauldron” mentions the conservative estimate of some 900 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 7 billion barrels of oil under the waters.

Maritime expert Jay Batongbacal and marine scientist Porfirio Aliño, on the other hand, in a commentary published in this paper in July 2011, stressed that “Petroleum is not the only valuable resource in the West Philippine Sea… The Kalayaan Islands and the area west of Palawan are vital to national food security. These waters comprise about 10 percent of our EEZ and annually contribute some 20 percent of our total marine fish catch. Its potential annual fish yield is estimated at 5 million tons… Studies by the UP Marine Science Institute indicate the area around the Kalayaan Islands have critical ecological links to the coastal areas of Palawan, NW Luzon and Sulu Sea, supplying and replenishing coastal fish stocks which our people directly depend on for subsistence.”

So critical are these waters, they added, that “The importance of living resources and their direct relationship to our national survival must be the basis for promoting respect for legal order in the West Philippine Sea.”

In other words, nothing less than national patrimony and national survival are at stake in the WPS issue. When President Duterte declares, as he did in a recent TV address, that “wala talagang mangyayari because we are not in possession of the sea,” the implication Beijing will read in that statement is that the the Philippines is effectively giving up its rights and capitulating to China’s supposed de facto control of the area.

That is an implication no conscientious Filipino will accept. The Arbitral Award is unequivocal that the WPS belongs to the Philippines; it is not for anyone, certainly not for the President, to surrender to any country the Filipino people’s patrimony and national heritage.