Foodkill

The BFAR should stop dishing out this nonsense about the fish dying in our lakes as a seasonal phenomenon. If that were true, we would have a word for such an event in any of our colorful dialects.

The “fishkill” now wreaking havoc on our food supply and the livelihood of our fishing communities is an entirely manmade calamity. It is the outcome of our corrupted politics, absent policies and weak administration of the commons.

One newspaper, obviously tongue-in-cheek, reported that the thousands of tons of fish found floating in our lakes and along our coasts drowned. That is technically correct. The fish did die of asphyxiation.

If the fish died because there was not enough oxygen in the water, then that is a serious danger signal. The water we rely on for our supply of fish is seriously degraded. Our lakes, on which we rely for increasingly scarce potable water could be dying faster than we care to admit.

The culprit here is not some natural cycle but the abuse committed by lake-grabbers — those who fenced off large areas, overstock the pens, impede water flow and overuse fish feed that eventually settle, and rot, at the bottom.

Look at the satellite photos of all our lakes and much of our coastal areas — and weep. Laguna de Bay, Taal lake, Lanao lake and even the famous Sampaloc lake in San Pablo are all nearly entirely fenced off, expropriated by private fishpen operators. Large parts of the coastal areas off Cavite, Bataan and Pangasinan have likewise been expropriated by powerful interests.

We are the only country that allows lakes to be, in effect, privately owned. The fishpen operators disenfranchise small fishermen, reducing them to security guards for the magnates. These fishpens collect silt, prevent the proper transfusion of water and trap trash. For maximum profit, the pens are overstocked and large quantities of fish feed dumped into them.

Under that arrangement, the calamity we are now experiencing was forthcoming.

The authorities now say they will be going after the “illegal” fishpen operators. Which are legal and which are illegal? There is no law that allows our waters to be privately owned. The fishpens proliferated only because local executives and bureaucrats make illicit money from looking the other way.

When he was DENR secretary, Lito Atienza went after the fishpens with a passion even as powerful interests moved to block him from doing so. He enjoyed full support from then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and a few local executives, most notably then Gov. Ayong Malicsi of Cavite. The fishpens along the Cavite shoreline were cleared — although they have since returned.

Atienza likewise imposed a running fine of P100,000 per day on the two water concession companies for failing to install water treatment facilities to keep sewage from being dumped raw into the rivers and the bay. The concession contracts require the water companies to treat sewage and return pure water to the waterways. They have not done that even as they charge consumers a sewage fee.

DENR Secretary Ramon Paje, now that he is more or less secure in his post, should take up the cudgels. The lakes, in particular, ought to be liberated from pens and returned to the commons. Or else our food supply will be under more severe threat.

Manual polls

The badly-conceived move to have elections for the ARMM postponed has taken its toll on the Comelec’s preparations for the polls. The timeline is now too short for us to be fully confident of the poll’s integrity.

As things now stand, the proposal to postpone the regional elections and have the officials of the autonomous government appointed by the Palace is dead in the water. The Senate committee considering the proposal rejected it. Committee chair Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in an act of magnanimity, added his vote to the five senators required to have the matter taken up in plenary. The final outcome is more or less conceded.

Notwithstanding, it is too late now for the Comelec to sign a new deal with Smartmatic to use the PCOS machines for elections next August. The polls, likely to push through, will be completely manual. What any irony, considering the ARMM was the region where automation was first employed.

The return to what one election commissioner described as a “medieval” process is the first casualty of the Palace-instigated effort to postpone the polls. The prospect, however, might please newly appointed commissioner Gus Lagman. He opposed full automation of the polls and advocated for an “open” system where the ballots are tallied by hand and only the canvass results transmitted electronically.

Most electoral reform advocates criticize this “open” and largely manual system to be as vulnerable as the old system. Manual counting will not check fake ballots nor any of the other tactics of retail cheating. The electronic transmission of the results of the manual count will only help conceal dagdag-bawas.

The ARMM, we know, has been most vulnerable to retail fraud: fake ballots, flying voters, ballot box grabbing, voter intimidation and doctoring of the canvass sheets. The return of the manual system will not check these. The “reform” of electoral politics at the ARMM has been delayed rather than enhanced by the ill-advised attempt to postpone regional elections.

By and large, the automated system deployed in the 2010 elections has been credible. The contrived controversy about the source codes raised by Lagman’s group was slapped down by no less than the Supreme Court.

Yet, without trying too hard, the opponents of modernization in our electoral system scored a victory in the forthcoming manual elections in the ARMM.