The Bureau of Fisheries and the Philippine Fishports Development Authority have introduced a nationwide program to facilitate the distribution of fish straight from the ports to the remote towns of the country.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said the program called “Isda sa Kabukiran,” or Fish in the Rural Areas, would involve the BFAR and the PFDA in a distribution system where the fishing communities and fishermen would be organized and provided with ice-making and cold storage facilities.
From the cold storage facilities, fish would then be brought by fish cars owned by the fishermen’s associations to strategic locations in the interior areas, called the Provincial Fish Distribution Centers.
Piñol said the centers would be equipped with cold storage and ice-making facilities where fish vendors could buy wholesale for resale in the wet markets.
A municipal distribution center may also be set up in other more remote areas, where local vendors could also buy wholesale at a lower price.
Piñol said up to 40 percent of the fish catch in many fishing grounds is lost to spoilage simply because there are no cold storage or ice-making facilities.
While ordinary fish like “tamban” or sardines is sold for as low as P20 to P25 per kilo in many fishing communities, many poor families living in the mountains and interior towns and villages could not buy fish.
Piñol said under the present system, private fish traders who own fish cars buy from the fish consolidators in the ports.
They will then bring the fish supply to the interior towns but by then, the price will already be too high because of the profit earned by the fish consolidator.
Piñol said by the time the P25-per-kilo “tamban” reaches the interior areas, the price would have already breached P200 per kilo.
Piñol directed Agriculture Undersecretary Eduardo Gongona, who is also BFAR director, to coordinate with the PFDA for the immediate implementation of the program this year.