In a slum Philippine coastal village, William Indab, a fisherman for more than 30 years, lives at a dilapidated house some 10 meters from the shore. “My earning is not enough to send my three children through college. It’s not even barely enough for our family to make both ends meet,†said the 49-year-old fisherman. “If I’m lucky, I can catch a hundred kilos of fish. But there were I times I go home empty handed after 12 hours of overnight fishing,†he says while working on his 300-kilo capacity motorized banca docked just outside his house.
Indab, fondly called “Bebot†by the neighborhood, says traders buy his catch of various kinds of fish at only P4 a kilo. But he usually earns only P150 for a 100-kilo catch using net mesh because he spends P250 for fuel. “With my small income, instead of buying three kilos of rice, oftentimes I buy only a kilo. My wife will cook it as lugaw (porridge) so that it will last for the whole day,†he laments. Indab, who fishes just several kilometers from the shoreline, wants the voiding of the local one-percent levy on fish products of ordinary catchers since it would just be an additional burden to the poor fishermen.
Tuna fish catchers echo the sentiments of Indab. They do not want to pay the levy since their operators or financiers are already deducting from them certain amounts.
Enrique Asmolo, in his 50s, explains that for P10,000 worth of tuna he would catch for a financier, he would be going home with just some P1,500. The difference goes to the financier for expenses on food, gasoline and others incurred during the fishing expedition. Sometimes, he added, a tuna catcher would go home without money for his family if he catches no fish at all during the expedition. In which case, he even accumulates debt to the financier for his consumption needs while at sea. Tuna catching is usually done in the high seas. A fishing expedition can last a month. There are usually a dozen men on board a 9,500-kilo capacity fishing boat. They use hooks to catch the tuna. “It would be too much if our meager take home pay would be deducted with the one-percent tax. The levy should be imposed only on the operators or the financiers because the operators get the bigger share of the catch,†he told.
Just like Indab, Asmolo wants ordinary fisher folk to be exempted from the one-percent levy.
Dario Lauron, chairman of the local Alliance of Tuna Handliners, has also questioned the tax imposed on their gross sales by the local office of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. “The ordinary fisher folks are against this scheme. They don’t want to pay because their names are not reflected in the certificate of withholding tax,†Lauron told this reporter earlier. Lauron stressed that majority of these fisher folks are not even holders of tax identification numbers because of their poor economic condition. According to Lauron, the levy is being shouldered by fishing boat operators because the ordinary fishermen refused to pay the tax supposedly imposed on them.
Marbel Bishop Dinualdo Gutierrez, chair of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’s National Secretariat for Social Action-Justice and Peace, has earlier thrown his support behind the fishermen. According to the bishop, those who have less in life should have more in law. But in the case of the levy imposed on fishermen here, “those who have less in life are beaten by the law,†he said. He called for a review on the “oppressive†tax scheme, saying that most people involved in fisheries and farm agriculture are economically deprived and that they should be exempted from tax burdens. “The real fishermen are poor,†he said, adding that the financiers are the ones reaping money from the hard work of poor fisher folks.
Close to 50,000 people of this city, dubbed as the “Tuna Capital of the Philippines, are directly involved in the fishing industry, according to the Growth with Equity in Mindanao, a non-government organization doing development work in the island.