Catching fish using cyanide is easy. All you do is crush a few tablets of sodium cyanide, mix them up with some water in a plastic bottle, go find your fish and squirt. With a little care, the mixture will stun the fish without killing it. Thousands of Philippine fishermen are doing it every day - and selling the live fish to the restaurants of Hong Kong and southern China. It is one of the most lucrative fish businesses on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Hong Kong gourmands alone eat 20,000 tons of live fish caught on the coral reefs of Southeast Asia each year. They say Philippine fish are the best and will pay up to £120 to pick a live coral trout or grouper from a tank and have it killed and cooked to order. The Philippine fisherman might get £12 of this, five to 10 times the price he'd get for a dead fish. But the environmental toll is horrendous. The lucrative business of killing coral reefsThe lingering cyanide in the water kills the coral and the algae on which the fish feed. Biologist Sam Mamauag of the International Marinelife Alliance in Manila estimates that every fish caught this way destroys a square meter of reef. Not every live reef fish is caught using cyanide. But fishing is much easier that way. And, though the practice is illegal in the Philippines, practical policing to stop it is almost nonexistent. In the rush to cash in, Philippine fishermen have turned more than half their country's reefs into ecological deserts. Yet, here is a conundrum. WWF, the world's top environmental organisation that was originally called the World Wildlife Fund, is opposing calls to ban this destructive trade in live reef fish. It says there is nothing wrong with the trade itself, nor with catching fish the conventional way, using a hook and line. It is the use of cyanide that is destructive, and the only way to stop its use is to keep the trade legal, but crack down on cyanide. It says a ban would either force the trade underground, where it would be harder to control, or would encourage fishermen to take more dead fish to make up their lost profits. Raphael Ribosin is a fisherman holed up in a shack on the remote typhoon-ravaged island of Delian in the Philippines. Despite the apparent fishing gold rush, he is holding on to his livelihood by a thread. "When we came here, we could fish right here by the beach," he says. "But now we have to go four hours by boat to find the fish." And, as times get harder, the temptation to use cyanide to catch more fish grows. Slowly, amid embarrassed giggles and glances at his wife, he acknowledges that. "Yes, when times are really bad, when we can't even afford to buy rice, we use cyanide." It was a small touch of honesty in a trade in which deceit is endemic. In Coron, a port amid the islands of the western Philippines where small-time fish traders sell to international conglomerates, the talk is all about cyanide. The chairman of the town environment committee, Patrick Matta, believes the big traders secretly supply fishermen with cyanide, bringing the chemicals in on the planes that they use to whisk away boxes of live fish each morning. Miniani Baylosis, the vice president of the local fishermen's association and wife of the pioneer of the local live reef-fish trade, says her association has a "self-policing policy" to catch cyanide fishermen, though she acknowledges it does no laboratory analysis of fish. But the local coastguard commander, Romeo Magallado, says cyanide fishing is undoubtedly rampant. Presented with such evidence, the case for a ban on the entire live reef fish trade seems overwhelming. Dante Dalabajan, who runs a local environmental law centre investigating the trade for US-based Conservation International, says: "We want a complete ban [on live reef fishing] as long as there is no good law enforcement." But social scientist Nilo Brucal, who is conducting another study for WWF in the Philippines, disagrees. For one thing, he says, if fishermen stuck to hook-and-line live fishing, there would be enough fish on the reefs for them to carry on catching live fish forever. It is the illegal cyanide fishing that upsets the balance by taking too many fish and destroying the coral ecosystem that feeds and shelters fish populations. | | He wants to encourage the live reef-fish trade, with proper enforcement of the cyanide ban, and protection for fish through no-take zones to aid population recovery and bans on fishing in spawning season. "Banning could drive the whole business underground," says Brucal. "The fish would be collected from the fishermen at sea by smugglers, and taken to Hong Kong in fast boats. We'd have even less chance of controlling the trade than we do now." Dalabajan sees this as a counsel of despair. He claims many fishermen would go and do something else entirely. Maybe, but when I ask Ribosin on Delian Island, he says: "We know nothing else but fishing, and have nowhere else to go. I am 57. I am too old to learn a new trade." If policing in the Philippines won't protect the reef fish from cyanide, what about market controls? Don't the restaurant owners and their customers have an interest in maintaining the reef fish business for the longer term? The trouble is the restaurant-goers' tastes could hardly be better geared to ensuring extinction. In Hong Kong they like their fish plate-sized. Sadly, groupers and other prized reef fish generally reach that size just as they become sexually mature. The smart Philippine fishermen know when and where the fish congregate to spawn and catch them as they do so. Most reef fish never get to reproduce before being squirted in the face by cyanide and getting air-freighted to Hong Kong. Traders interviewed in Hong Kong didn't seem too concerned. They say that if the Philippine fishery collapsed, they would get their live reef fish from Indonesia or the Solomon Islands. And if all the reef fisheries collapsed, there is always the emerging business of fish farming. Over lunch at Hong Kong's Aberdeen fish market canteen, a Mr Lee, who imports five tons of live grouper from the Philippines every day, says that he has told his trading partners not to take cyanide-caught fish, but he has no real idea if they comply. By the time the fish arrive on his docksides, they have excreted all the cyanide. It is impossible to check and, in any case, is "no risk to my customers". Would customers object if they knew their hugely expensive fish had been caught using cyanide? Nobody, it seems, has ever asked them. And anyway, they would have no way of knowing the truth. But that may soon change, and with it the potential for green-minded customers to take a stand. Reinhard Renneberg of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is developing a test for the telltale breakdown products left in the fish by cyanide. Unlike tests for cyanide itself, this could work many days after the fish had been caught - on the Hong Kong dockside or even in restaurants. He says he hopes that one day soon his test will be available to anyone who wants it. It wouldn't tell customers their fish was unsafe. That's not at issue. But it would tell them whether it had been caught illegally and at serious ecological cost. It may be the last hope for the coral reefs of the Philippines and beyond. |
