SOCIAL preparation for the 252 community fish landing centers in the country is 80 percent done, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR)-Davao Region said.
Bfar-Davao regional director Fatma Idris said in an interview with VoxPop Davao that they target to finish all remaining social preparation activities for 252 sites nationwide by yearend to improve the socio-economic conditions of fisherfolk communities with high poverty incidence.
“We also intend to start with the 90 sites with Notice to Proceed for 2016 until March 2017,” she said.
Idris added that during the Mindanao Training on BFAR’s umbrella program, the Targeted Actions to Reduce Poverty and Generate Economic Transformation (Target) and reorientation on Community Fish Landing Centers (CFLCs) social preparation which opened last November 30 and until December 4 at The Ritz at Garden Oases Hotel convention center, 250 Mindanao-based fisherfolks participated, 17 of whom are from Davao region. The CFLCs are under Target which was launched in November 2014.
The CFLCs, each costing P2.85 million, will house post-harvest equipment and tools that will enable fisherfolk to preserve the good quality of their fish and fishery products enabling them to sell at a higher price.
Local consumers will also benefit from the fish landing centers as they will have better access to safe and quality fishery commodities. The facilities will also be opened as venues for skills trainings on disaster-resilient fisheries-based livelihoods and resource management such as monitoring fish catch and stock assessment.
Under the 2016-2020 Comprehensive Fisheries Industry Development Plan, BFAR targets to achieve 10 percent reduction in postharvest losses in five years from the present target at 18 percent.
In identifying sites, BFAR in its press briefer explained that they made use of its own fisherfolk database and the Registry System for Basic Sector in Agriculture (RSBSA) of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) with the assistance of the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) in determining the sites where the CFLCS will be established based on “poverty incidence, municipal density, fish production, number of registered fisherfolk and number of existing fish ports and fish landing areas.”
Once established, the CFLCs will be operated by the local government units (LGUs) and later on by fisherfolk cooperatives.
As of July 2016, 173 out of 252 sites have formed people organizations; 92 Project Management Committee were created and 56 sites have completed its trainings.
“For 2016 targets, more than 90 out of 271 sites are ongoing. While a total of 96 sites can be finished by the end of the year,” Idris said adding that of the 96, 24 sites are located in Mindanao.
Some 250 new tablet units were distributed Friday, December 2, to 250 fisherfolks attending the five-day training as the old tablets distributed last year were observed to have inefficiency by its service provider.
With the new, more efficient tablets, Idris said, BFAR will be a step closer to its goal of fast-tracking and completing the nationwide registration of municipal fishing vessels with capacity of three gross tons and below and municipal fishing gears, as required under Executive Order No. 305 s. 2004 and section 19 of the Fisheries Code of 1998.
This is strengthened under the Under the Boat Registration program, the agency will use the Boat Ad measurement mobile application which will facilitate the registration data and compute the registration breadth, depth and length.
Each tablet will have a Boat Ad measurement mobile application which will also serve as a monitoring tool to the agency's projects and programs.
