Politics in this country is a family business!

With elections coming very soon, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) led by its president, Msgr. Angel Lagdameo has issued another pastoral letter calling for credible and violent-free elections. Lagdameo said, "As a nation, we cannot afford yet another controversial electoral exercise that further aggravates social distrust and hopelessness. Many of our current political problems, which have hindered further economic development and social justice… can be traced to unresolved questions concerning the conduct of past elections."

While I fully agree with this statement, it must be said that until now, the CBCP refuses to accept the reality that many of our political problems stem from the 1987 Constitution, which is why many of us wanted to change the Charter and attune it to the present times. A case in point… if you read the two-page open letter published in The STAR last Monday by former Sen. Francisco "Kit" Tatad, entitled "Tatad Asks Erap — Why Do You Want To Do This To Our People," this gives you an idea of how only a few families control the nation’s elective seats of government. This gives credence to the reality today that politics in this country is a family business!

In his letter, Mr. Tatad cites Article II, Section 26 of the 1987 Constitution about the guarantee of equal access to opportunities for public service and the prohibition of political dynasties. Because the 1987 Constitution was created by friends of Tita Cory 20 years ago, no legislator ever filed such a law prohibiting political dynasties.

Hence the only way to enforce this is to make political dynasties illegal in a new constitution. But since the CBCP refuses to see it our way… we therefore have to live with today’s reality, which was the reality of yesterday’s politics that only the rich and the powerful could control the government and therefore, its coffers. We shall write more of this in future columns; hopefully the CBCP would wake up and see the truth and the light!

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The front page news that came out in The STAR last Sunday that a report coming from the Visayan Sea Squadron (a group of lawyers turned environmentalists) that the ecosystem of the Visayan Sea triangle was on the verge of collapse was quite alarming to many people, who until now refuse to believe that the Visayan Sea is truly endangered because of commercial overfishing. We’ve written about this quite extensively almost exactly a year ago.

Last year, because my good friend, Cebu City Bantay Dagat program director Elpidio "Jojo" de la Victoria, also concurred with the advocacy of the Visayan Sea Squadron for the closure of the Visayan Sea from commercial fishing operations, he was gunned down on Holy Wednesday, April 12, 2006, and died the following day, Holy Thursday. You can say that Jojo was the first victim of our efforts to bring this problem to the public so that our people would know and be prepared for whatever measures we have to take to prevent any further degradation of the Visayan Sea.

This report on the Visayan Sea triangle was collated by volunteers, mostly divers from the University of San Carlos (USC) Marine Biology class. But the Visayan Sea is a large body of water surrounded by the Visayan islands, stretching from northern Leyte to Cebu, Romblon and Panay, which is a huge area. While we appreciate the volunteer work of the Visayan Sea Squadron, it should be said that this report should now trigger a full-blown investigation by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) or the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) to verify and validate the findings of the Visayan Sea Squadron.

Meanwhile, the best thing we can do for the Visayan Sea triangle is to immediately ban commercial fishing, which we believe is the principal cause of this near-collapse. However this is quite a daunting task given the fact that we are just entering the election season and you can bet that many local government officials will surely get funding from these big-time commercial fishers, who by now hold many public officials in their debt. This is why so many court cases or subpoenas issued by the courts end up in a dead-end file simply because there are no local policemen to serve those warrants.

The Visayan Sea Squadron is led by a good friend, environmental lawyer and advocate Tony Oposa who has been so vocal in emphasizing the need to stop commercial fishing in the Visayan Sea before the inevitable happens… that there would really be nothing left to fish. Few people realize that the nets that trawl fishermen use scrape the bottom of the ocean, destroying what little coral is left. Corals are the homes for many fish species; without them these fish cannot propagate and find other breeding grounds.

The problem we face is to convince people that fish stocks are dwindling in the Visayan Sea; this is also a worldwide phenomenon. A few months ago, CNN came up with a special report that if there were no massive intervention, fish stocks all over the world would be depleted within 30 to 50 years. That report was also quite alarming and there is no question that we need to verify such reports so we can come up with options as to how best to solve this problem and prevent further degradation of our ecosystem.

Meanwhile, there’s the bigger problem of how we can convince our people that the Visayan Sea is on the verge of collapse when most of our supermarkets or grocery stores always seem to have an abundance of fish to sell. This is why we must verify these reports from the Visayan Sea Squadron and from the government so we can work together to solve this problem.

In Cebu, we have a fish sanctuary across the Mactan Channel called the Hilutungan Islet, which has become a favorite tourist spot because hundreds of huge fish would eat off food given by scuba or skin divers. This was because the municipality of Cordova made sure that there was no fishing allowed in that spot. Now a lot of municipalities around the province of Cebu are following suit in the hope that it would help ease the problem in the Visayan Sea.

Perhaps this is just one of the solutions to this problem, but the biggest one facing us is the question of whether the government has the political will or not to ban commercial fishing in the Visayan Sea or face the prospect of mass starvation because with overfishing unabated, in a few years from now, there will be little or no more fish to find in the Visayan Sea.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.