Veteran longline fisherman Miguel Mayola eased his boat gingerly into the port of General Santos City after a month at sea with his crew in deep waters off Bongao, a finger-shaped island at the southwestern tip of the Philippines.
The 39-year-old captain, his leathery face weather-beaten by years of toiling in an industry that has made many buyers rich from the tuna he fishes, was now waiting to see whether his prized catch could net him enough money. He needed the cash for his family and 13-man crew, and to fund another fishing expedition.
“We have to endure rough seas in the southern waters. Sometimes we have a good catch, but other times we are unlucky,” he told BenarNews in the local Visayan dialect.
“When we dock here, that’s when they’ll judge our catch. We work so hard but when we arrive here, we sometimes find out that we don’t have enough money for our family’s needs.”
He and other fishermen in General Santos City – the capital of the Philippine tuna industry and one of Southeast Asia’s leading producers of premium yellowfin tuna – say they’re struggling to make ends meet as they contend with a spike in prices for crude oil and inflation, while being burdened by an ongoing global pandemic.
“It’s hard work but we can’t do anything. It’s really hard with prices of crude and gasoline rising, and our families have nobody to rely on but us fishermen,” Mayola said.
Diesel prices are now at 75 pesos, or U.S. $1.50 a liter, in General Santos, which produces 75 percent of the nation’s tuna supply. This eats up a huge chunk of fishing operators’ expenses in a normal fishing cycle, which can last about a month.
“The high fuel costs have a huge impact on the industry. Their expenditures for their regular fishing run have now tremendously increased,” Jun Superticioso, officer-in-charge of the General Santos City Fish Port Complex, told BenarNews earlier this week.