Fish sales at Navotas port drop 50% due ferry sinking
By Nancy C. Carvajal
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 20:12:00 07/02/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- A group of commercial fishermen made a show of eating fish on Wednesday at the Navotas Fish Port Complex to assure the public that the fish remained free of contamination from pesticide.
"It's safe to eat fish because not a single fish sold in the fish port comes from the area of Romblon and Sibuyan Island,'' according to Alon Tan, president of the Inter-island Deep Sea Fishing Association.
The waters off Sibuyan Island, Romblon, have been off-limits to fishing as salvage operators try to retrieve 10 metric tons of the highly toxic chemical endosulfan from the sunken MV Princess of the Stars, before resuming the retrieval of bodies.
The ferry sank on June 21, at the height of Typhoon Frank (international codename: Fengshen), bringing down with it at least 800 passengers and crew of the Sulpicio Lines Inc. Government suspended the retrieval of bodies and pulled out divers from the shipwreck site after learning that 400 boxes of endosulfan were inside the ship.
Tan admitted that sales of marine products already dropped by 50 percent due to the fish scare.
"Sales dropped from an estimated average of 200 tons to 100 tons of various fish sold daily at the fish port,'' he said.
The fish complex is the biggest fish port in the country and supplies the marine products for Luzon and Metro Manila.
Tan, speaking in a press conference held inside the fish complex on Wednesday was joined by Navotas City Mayor Toby Tiangco, Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources assistant director Gil Adora, and other members of the fishing industry.
"Eighty percent of the fish sold in the fish port came from Mindanao and Palawan, and only 20 percent from Visayas and this does not include the Sibuyan Island,'' Tan explained.
"Zero,'' the officials answered when reporters asked how much of the fish sold at the port came from Sibuyan Island, in the province of Romblon, which is actually part of the MIMAROPA region or Region IV-B.
"All the fish delivered in the fish port were logged in, including where they were caught, and these are monitored as part of the fishing industry regulation, ''Tiangco said.
Tan said Romblon was not known "as a traditional fishing ground" for the big commercial fishing vessels.
"No traditional (commercial) fishing is conducted in the area. Maybe, fishing is done by municipal fishermen (local fishermen),'' Tan said.
Tan further said the high cost of fuel and "fish scare'' combined to make life quite difficult for the commercial fishing industry.
"The increasing cost of fuel which constitutes 70 percent of the operating expenses of a boat was bad enough, and is now aggravated by the incident,'' he said.
He also informed reporters that the industry asked the national government for a P5-fuel subsidy during a food summit conducted recently.
"We have yet to get a reaction but we are confident it would be considered,'' Tan explained.
He added the present condition was by far the longest fish scare they had experienced.
"This is the first time we have this kind of problem, and at the rate things are going, we expect the problem to last a little longer, so we opted to hold a press conference to inform the public that it's safe to eat fish,'' Tan said in mixture of English and Filipino.
Terry de Jesus, also a fishing boat owner, said fish vendors have been forced to slash the prices of their seafood products, but the turnout of consumers was still low.
"Vendors and suppliers had opted to hold on to their cash and adopt a wait-and-see attitude,'' De Jesus said.
She said that fish brokers in the complex were having a hard time selling the fish.
"The dwindling sales of seafood in various fish ports and wet markets in Metro Manila were due mainly to an unfounded fear,' 'she said.
MV Princess of the Stars capsized off the coast of Romblon's Sibuyan Island on June 21, after being battered by huge waves triggered by typhoon "Frank."
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