The President’s last State-of-the-Nation Address, as we expected, was an attempt to capture the gains of his administration. While I wish his report were more coherent, I trust that the accomplishments he recounted are real. While doing my rounds of media commentaries, I said that overall, the President has done a good job in moving the country forward, even if the pace of improvement is not as equitable across the socio-economic spectrum. Today, I would like to focus on the fisheries sector - an area where the Aquino administration has made a tremendous amount of progress that many Filipinos may not be aware of. In his SONA, PNoy’s only mention of fisheries was in connection with the lifting of the “yellow card” that the EU issued. To recall, the EU gave us a “yellow card” in June last year to warn us that we must improve our efforts to curb illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, or else we could face sanctions that could cut our P9-billion annual export to the EU.

La Viña, D. T. (2015 August 1). State of Fish and Fishers. Manila Standard, p. A9.