J AY L.

B ATONGBACAL
Asst. Prof., UP Asian Center
Senior Lecturer, UP College of Law
 Section 9. The State shall promote a just and
dynamic social order that will ensure the prosperity
and independence of the nation and free the people
from poverty through policies that provide adequate
social services, promote full employment, a rising
standard of living, and an improved quality of life for
all.

 Section 10. The State shall promote social justice in

all phases of national development.
 Section 1. The Congress shall give highest priority to
the enactment of measures that protect and enhance
the right of all the people to human dignity,
reduce social, economic, and political
inequalities, and remove cultural inequities by
equitably diffusing wealth and political power for
the common good.
 To this end, the State shall regulate the acquisition,
ownership, use, and disposition of property and
its increments.
 Section 7. The State shall protect the rights of
subsistence fishermen, especially of local
communities, to the preferential use of the communal
marine and fishing resources, both inland and offshore.
It shall provide support to such fishermen through
appropriate technology and research, adequate financial,
production, and marketing assistance, and other services.
The State shall also protect, develop, and conserve such
resources. The protection shall extend to offshore fishing
grounds of subsistence fishermen against foreign intrusion.
Fishworkers shall receive a just share from their labor in the
utilization of marine and fishing resources.
 Coastal and marine areas
 At least 86% of total area
under RP jurisdiction
 Approx. 46% of total RP
population reside in coastal RP jurisd’n
areas present law
 822 out of 1,502 LGUs are
coastal

Potential
additional
jurisdiction
 RA8550, the Philippine Fisheries Code of 1998
 cf. RA8435, Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act
 RA7942, the Philippine Mining Act of 1995
 PD 87 as amended, the Petroleum Development Act of
1972
 RA7160, the Local Government Code
 CA141, Public Land Law as amended
 RA9593, Tourism Act of 2009
 RA9513, Renewable Energy Act of 2009
 EO380-A, Charter of the Philippine Reclamation Authority
 RA9275, Clean Water Act of 2004
 RA9147, Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection
Act
 RA9003, Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2001
 RA7586, National Integrated Protected Areas System
 RA7061, People’s Small-scale Mining Act of 1991
 RA6969, Toxic Substances and Hazardous and Nuclear
Wastes Control Act of 1990
 PD1586, Environment Impact Statement System
 PD1067, Water Code
 PD984, National Pollution Control Decree
 PD979, Marine Pollution Decree of 1976
 PD705, Revised Forestry Code of 1975
 PD474, Maritime Industry Development Decree
 EO513, Charter of the Philippine Ports Authority
 RA386, Revised Civil Code
 CA141, Public Land Act of 1936

 Plus special laws

 Systematic survey and understanding of marine tenurial
regimes
 Must accommodate existing local coastal uses
 Must be sensitive to local management contexts

 Regalian Doctrine currently hinders establishment of

“communal” property and rights, despite occasional
reference in law to such
 Need to carve out an exception

 The seas must remain property in common = “national

marine heritage”
 Observations, propositions based on field experiences
in last decade
 20-30 year time horizon, after which trends will
probably be irreversible/unremediable

 Worst-case scenarios; they can be prevented, if

reforms in place
 As the transport infrastructure improves across
the islands, formerly isolated communities
located in undeveloped or under-developed
islands and coastal areas will come under
increasing pressure from real estate development.
 These developments will
 tend to displace and further marginalize the coastal
poor and
 create enclaves of gated seaside or island communities
that will exacerbate the gap between the affluent and
the impoverished in the coastal areas.
 Multi-national
brand-name hotel

Local hotel
 More and more areas of municipal waters will
come under private control through various forms
of mariculture lease agreements, public
reclamation projects, as well as illegal private
reclamation.
 The appropriation of near-shore spaces will
 reduce the available accessible fishing grounds for
fishing communities,
 increase the likelihood of local conflicts between
fishers seeking other fishing grounds, and
 generally increase the incidence of poverty and
malnutrition along the coast.
Circular fish cage
 Unchecked population growth in the coastal areas will
result in increased congestion of limited coastal
space. Urban development upstream of rivers and
higher population density in coastal settlements will
generate more massive amounts of land-based marine
pollution such as garbage and sewage, which will
 further reduce the productivity of near-shore capture
fisheries,
 jeopardize bio-diversity conservation efforts,
 increase the health risks from marine toxins, and
 threaten the viability of any alternative livelihood
sources such as aquaculture, mariculture, and coastal
tourism (if there was any before).
 The incidence of de facto foreign ownership of
coastal properties will increase and possibly
accelerate, marginalizing and displacing Filipino
communities from direct access to the sea or
ownership of coastal lands.
 Higher-value coastal properties and frontages,
particularly in tourism zones, will be increasingly
appropriated by foreign citizens or interests and
 eventually relegate Filipino citizens to lower-value
areas with more difficult access and limited
utilities and services.
 Increase in offshore petroleum exploration and
development, growth in domestic and foreign
shipping incidental to economic activity and
growth, and coastal tourism development will
subject coastal communities to
 higher risks of environmental damage from
operational or accidental marine pollution,
 tend to displace traditional uses of the coasts and
seas, and
 further limit the mobility and ability of fishing
communities to survive.
 Negative trends
 Privatization and exclusive appropriation of currently
public coastal/marine spaces/commons
 Coming into alignment with environmental and eco-tourism
advocacies
 Marginalization of fishing communities from direct
access to/tenure over resources needed for
subsistence/livelihood
 Displacement from more convenient/higher value locations
 Higher exposure/vulnerability of fishing communities to
risk of sudden catastrophic environmental damage or
cumulative environmental degradation
 D. Miller,1976: “about how the good and bad things in life are
distributed in society”
 J. Laurel, Calalang v. Williams:
 …“neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism, nor anarchy,”
but the humanization of laws and the equalization of social
and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational
and objectively secular conception may at least be approximated.
Social justice means the promotion of the welfare of all the people,
the adoption by the Government of measures calculated to insure
economic stability of all the competent elements of society,
through the maintenance of a proper economic and social
equilibrium in the interrelations of the members of the
community, constitutionally, through the adoption of measures
legally justifiable, or extra-constitutionally, through the exercise of
powers underlying the existence of all governments on the time-
honored principle of salus populi est suprema lex.
 J. Diokno, 1981:
 …first, by not having a system of law at all, written or
unwritten, or one so flawed that people do not know
what their legal rights and duties are; second, by not
enforcing law fairly; and third, by enacting law that
does not pursue the social values that constitute the
Filipino vision of a just society, or that adopts means
which subverts those values
 Urgently needed for coastal and marine tenure
 Anticipatory reforms needed to prevent existing trends
from becoming irreversible