It is midnight on a beach in southern Negros Oriental, a province in the central Philippines, and everything is dark and silent. Except, that is, for the scene playing out in front of a small guardhouse made of bamboo. There, seven people have congregated: one middle-aged man is splayed on a bench, a man and a woman in sports vests hug their knees to their chest while chatting, and others walk back and forth barefoot with torches and green laser pointers shining out beyond the sand. All eyes are set on a portion of the ocean loosely cordoned off by some white buoys.
These are the Bantay Dagat, the sea patrol, a team of village-appointed volunteers who take turns staying up all night to guard their waters. They fend off any local people trying to illegally fish in the community marine sanctuaries, and any commercial fishers trying to trespass into municipal waters within 15km (nine miles) of the coastline.
“The only chance for us to survive is to police among ourselves,” says the 48-year-old Antonio “Toni” Yocor, who helped found the local Bantay Dagat in 2005 and has spent thousands of nights on watch ever since, searching for the telltale glare of underwater lights. Just the night before, they had to chase eight intruders off into the darkness.
The ocean surrounding the 7,641 islands of the Philippines is one of the world’s most abundant in marine biodiversity. With a reef system that spans more than 22,000 sq km, it is the crown jewel of the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle.
But this underwater treasure has been steadily depleted due to warming and acidifying seas, chemical and plastic pollution and, crucially, intensive overfishing and destructive harvesting techniques. Throughout the decades, commercial fishers have trawled and scraped through entire coral beds with superfine-mesh nets destroying everything in their wake.
For the 1.1 million Filipinos fishing in these reefs and, for the main part, living in poverty, the sea has just been thought of as a means to an end for eating and sustaining their family. “People are thinking about how to get as much fish as they can, but they don’t think about sustainability,” says Ceasar Ruiz, who was brought up in a small fishing village.
While fish were once so abundant they seemed to jump on to the hooks, fishers began to find their catch getting smaller.
To counter the trend, in the 1970s, the government introduced marine protected areas (MPAs) – no-fishing zones. MPAs, also known as marine sanctuaries, would not only protect precious coral reefs from further destruction to preserve biodiversity but also act as nurseries for juvenile fish.
Filipino waters are now home to more than 1,500 MPAs but while some of them are overseen and funded by the national government, more than 90% of sanctuaries are small and community-managed, relying heavily on local government and village volunteers for enforcement.
And getting local communities on board with the sanctuaries hasn’t been easy, with MPA boundaries frequently being vandalised or ignored. Even authorities turned a blind eye to any wrongdoing because the fishers were often “their compadres”, says Yocor.
When Yocor started the patrol team, many family members and neighbours saw him as a traitor who’d turned his back on the town’s food security needs. He says he would routinely take a gun to his Bantay Dagat night shifts in case tensions rose and encounters got “nasty”.
Today, MPA intruders are less frequent and less violent, and mostly local poachers who are trying to sneak in for a large catch of fish just when their family has nothing to eat or a big debt to pay off. “It’s a very hard encounter, they are desperate. I understand, I’m a fisherman too,” says Yocor. The wardens flash their lights at the intruders, chase them away on foot or by boat, and sometimes manage to apprehend and fine them according to the powers they’ve been given.
Data on the progress of the wildlife in these MPAs is collected by citizen scientists from the nonprofit organisation Marine Conservation Philippines (MCP), who come out to the MPAs daily to survey the corals, invertebrates and fish. MCP also provides a large part of the funding needed to support the Bantay Dagat and other volunteer efforts, such as the team of 35 bantay women who safeguard the island’s mangrove forests, which are fundamental for flourishing ocean ecosystems as fish use them to spawn.
“People don’t care about the mangroves, they say their fishing nets get stuck in the mangroves, but preserving them will benefit the whole community living in this area, and all coastal areas,” says Evelyn Buca, who heads the volunteer project, as she looks out on to the mangroves she has been watching over since she was 11 years old.
Rose Anne Yocor, Toni’s niece, runs MCP’s coastal plastic-collecting programme. The Philippines is the one of the world’s largest ocean plastic polluters, and her team collects an average of 400kg of plastic every day from the water and beaches.
These collective efforts have helped change the narrative about how all ocean-safeguarding efforts are interconnected and fundamental for the sake of food security. “Everybody has started understanding that we need to conserve and protect our marine environments because it’s the last frontier, if we can’t fish here any more, we’re going to die,” says Mario Neil Montemar, the president of the local Fisherfolks Association and a former member of one of the Bantay Dagat chapters. “Fisherfolk are the poorest of the poor.”
But the issue of illegal fishing “will go on and on” if central government doesn’t provide proper resources, says Montemar. “The Bantay Dagat also needs to eat, they are fishers who also need to give their family food on the table.”
More than 20,000 commercial vessels entered Philippine municipal waters in 2023. When these ships encroach and rake in hundreds of thousands of kilos of fish – the second type of infraction Bantay Dagat need to look out for – a couple of volunteers sailing out on a small bangka (the boats used to fish and get around many Philippine islands) is not a very effective deterrent. Montemar once went face to face with a big commercial fishing operator and was told his life was worth less than the 5,000 pesos (£70) the mogul would pay to have him killed.
Even if all the municipal water restrictions were robustly enforced, Philippine law mandates that 15% of municipal waters be designated as no-fishing zones – but fewer than 1% of them are.
The Philippines would benefit from a network of connected and well-maintained MPAs with support from central and local governments, says Rene Abesamis, a marine biologist at the University of the Philippines and a leading expert on MPAs.
Bantay Dagat should also become professionalised, trained, and paid like the rangers on the Great Barrier Reef, says Abesamis, something that’s being discussed in the national parliament. “We may have a chance if we get things right,” he says.
At midday on another beach in southern Negros Oriental, wind chimes made of shells and coral branches tinkle in the wind, and a man and woman sit on the makeshift porch of a bamboo guardhouse looking out to sea. Spotting illegal fishers during daylight is a little easier: 64-year-old Carmen Pajula, who spearheaded the Fisherfolks Association before Montemar and has spent her fair share of days and nights patrolling MPAs, says she sees only one way forward for her people – molampos, which means “to prosper”.
