Cyanide fishing technique takes stunning toll on reefs

Catching fish using cyanide is easy.

All you do is crush a few tablets of sodium cyanide, mix them with some water in a plastic bottle, find your fish and squirt. With a little care, the mixture will stun the fish without killing it.

Thousands of fishermen from the Philippines are doing it every day, and selling the live fish to the restaurants of Hong Kong and southern China.

It is one of the most lucrative fish businesses on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Hong Kong gourmands alone eat an annual total of 20,000 tonnes of live fish caught on the coral reefs of Southeast Asia.

They say Philippines fish are the best and will pay up to $330 to pick a live grouper from a tank and have it killed and cooked to order.

The Filipino fisherman might receive $33 of this, five to 10 times the price he would get for a dead fish.

But the environmental toll is horrendous. Lingering cyanide in the water kills the coral and the algae on which the fish feed.

Biologist Sam Mamauag, of the International Marinelife Alliance in Manila, estimates that every fish caught this way destroys a square metre of reef.

Not every live reef fish is caught using cyanide, but fishing is much easier that way.

And although the practice is illegal in the Philippines, policing to stop it is almost nonexistent.

In the rush to cash in, fishermen have turned more than half their country's reefs into ecological deserts.

Here is a conundrum. WWF, the world's top environmental organisation (originally called the World Wildlife Fund), is opposing calls to ban this destructive trade in live reef fish.

It says there is nothing wrong with the trade itself, nor with catching fish the conventional way, using a hook and line.

It is the use of cyanide that is destructive, and the only way to stop its use is to keep the trade legal, but crack down on cyanide.

WWF says a ban would either force the trade underground, where it would be harder to control, or would encourage fishermen to take more dead fish to make up their lost profits.

Ribosin is a fisherman holed up in a shack on the remote typhoon-ravaged island of Delian in the Philippines.

Despite the apparent fishing gold rush, he is holding on to his livelihood by a thread.

"When we came here, we could fish right here by the beach," he says.

"Now we have to go four hours by boat to find the fish."

As times get harder, the temptation to use cyanide to catch more fish grows.

In Coron, a port amid the islands of the western Philippines where small-time fish traders sell to international conglomerates, the talk is all about cyanide.

The chairman of the town environment committee, Patrick Matta, believes the big traders secretly supply fishermen with cyanide, bringing the chemical in on the planes that they use to whisk away boxes of live fish each morning.

The local coastguard commander, Romeo Magallado, says cyanide fishing is undoubtedly rampant.

With such evidence, the case for a ban on the entire live reef fish trade seems overwhelming.

But social scientist Nilo Brucal, who is conducting another study for WWF in the Philippines, disagrees.

For one thing, he says, if fishermen stuck to hook-and-line live fishing, there would be enough fish on the reefs for them to carry on the trade forever.

It is the illegal cyanide fishing that upsets the balance by taking too many fish and destroying the coral ecosystem that feeds and shelters fish populations.

He wants to encourage the live reef-fish trade, with proper enforcement of the cyanide ban, protection for fish through no-take zones to aid population recovery, and bans on fishing in spawning season.

The trouble is that the restaurant-goers' tastes could hardly be better geared to ensuring extinction.

In Hong Kong they like their fish plate-sized. Sadly, groupers and other prized reef fish generally reach that size just as they become sexually mature.

Most reef fish never get to reproduce before being squirted in the face by cyanide and air-freighted to Hong Kong.

Those interviewed in Hong Kong did not seem too concerned. They say that if the Philippines fishery collapses, they would get their live reef fish from Indonesia or the Solomon Islands.

And if all the reef fisheries collapse, there is always fish-farming.

Would customers object if they knew their hugely expensive fish had been caught using cyanide? Nobody, it seems, has ever asked them. And anyway, they would have no way of knowing the truth.

But that may soon change.

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology are developing a test for the telltale breakdown products left in the fish by cyanide.

It would not tell diners if their fish was unsafe - that is not at issue. But it would tell them whether it had been caught illegally and at serious ecological cost.

That may be the last hope for the coral reefs of the Philippines and beyond.

- INDEPENDENT