(First of two parts)

While he still can, Bert Cabornay continues to fish in the sea off Bacoor City, Cavite. He rows farther than usual, towards clearer waters and away from his mussel farm that is barely operating.

Cabornay, 56, noticed in 2020 that the waters around his farm had become turbid. It was during this time that authorities started dumping sand in nearby areas, eventually forming an artificial island.

Across Bacoor’s waters, more land will emerge, commercial buildings will rise and new residences will be built. These are the promises of the city’s twin reclamation projects: the 230-hectare outer island and 90-hectare inner island Bacoor Reclamation and Development Project (BRDP) and the 100-hectare Diamond Reclamation and Development Project (DRDP).

The city government, the proponent, is rezoning its waters to accommodate the two big-ticket projects. But in the process, a large portion of the city’s fishing grounds and aquaculture zone will be wiped out. 

Numerous mussel farms beside his own have been demolished, Cabornay said. 

“They first targeted mussel farms at the 100-hectare island,” he said in Filipino. “Everything that island covers, they’ve already fenced off. They’ve compensated the affected owners.” 

Bacoor, a coastal city skirting Manila Bay, is known as one of the biggest mussel-producing areas in the Philippines, along with Maqueda Bay in Samar and Sapian Bay in Capiz.

Data from the Cavite Ecological Profile spanning 2010-2021 show that Bacoor topped the province’s mussel production for 12 years. Kawit City and Cavite City also contribute to overall production.

Before the sand-dumping started, Cabornay earned between P100,000 and P200,000 every harvest season. But hopes of earning this much will soon be washed away as his farm is next on the list.

“They’re constructing the 230-hectare project next. They’ll compensate the affected mussel farmers… I will be one of them,” he said.

The 90-hectare inner island is materializing, too. In 2020, authorities began dumping sand on the coastal Barangay Maliksi I.

Fishing families once resided here. Boats used to dock at its edges. Bamboo stalks trapping all sorts of edible sea creatures stood in its waters. 

As the land stretches farther, more coastal barangays where fishing families reside will be affected by the largest reclamation project in Bacoor’s history.

Through the decades, artificial islands and reclaimed roads have been restructuring Cavite’s waters.

The Island Cove in Kawit is a product of reclamation that started as early as the 1970s. It is now the site of Philippine offshore gaming hubs. Meanwhile, a portion of the Manila-Cavite expressway (Cavitex) that began operations in the 2000s rips through the waters of Bacoor.

Both projects have stirred controversy for disrupting the livelihood of Cavite’s fishers and displacing mussel farms.

Bacoor’s waters make up a small portion of Manila Bay, which has been subjected to decades-long dump-and-fill operations. More change will come as 13 reclamation projects in Manila Bay, including the BRDP and DRDP, have been approved by the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA) as of November 2023.

Demand for land

Bacoor’s growing population prompted the implementation of the BRDP and DRDP. “With such rapid growth, land developments are much needed to facilitate this expansion,” the project report states.

By adding residential and open commercial lands to Bacoor, the “waterfront central business district” is envisioned to enhance and create new sectors, provide adequate housing, and eventually attract economic development, the report adds.

Data from Bacoor’s Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) for the years 2015-2024 indicate that the population “is expected to double by 2024 based on the 2010 census.”

Bacoor’s CLUP, last updated in 2016 according to the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development, hinted at reclamation efforts to accommodate the projected growth: “The ‘interior’ municipal waters, that is, the municipal waters from the [Cavitex] towards the shore, may be considered for reclamation. This municipal water is estimated to occupy an area of 90 hectares, and there is a provisional approval to reclaim this.” 

The reclamation of the outer islands, however, is missing. And if zoning orders from Bacoor’s CLUP are to be strictly followed, its municipal waters should only be allotted to fishing, aquaculture and mangroves.

The CLUP serves as the long-term management plan of a locality and “identifies areas where development can and cannot be located and directs public and private investments accordingly,” a memorandum circular from the Department of the Interior and Local Government says.

Every local government unit is mandated by law to prepare its own CLUP, which is sometimes referred to as “the people’s plan.”

The City Planning and Development Office is fashioning an updated sea use plan that will put the reclamation projects on the map.

“Only the mangrove, aquaculture and fishing ground zones were included in the existing plan. In our new plan, we have a water use plan that includes the reclamation projects,” said the city planning officer, Rhowena Alcantara.

‘Something’s wrong’ 

Carmelita Liwag, a professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP SURP) raised an eyebrow at Bacoor’s plans to change its CLUP.

“If the reclamation is not included in the CLUP approved by the city or the Cavite CLUP, something’s wrong,” Liwag said in a mix of Filipino and English.

But she also pointed out that revising a CLUP during its years of coverage is technically legal: “Although usually, there’s a loophole for the local government unit. They can easily pass a resolution or ordinance to push through with their project be it privately or publicly initiated.” 

As early as 2016, the city council had shown intent to reclaim about 900 hectares of Bacoor’s municipal waters “for future development as a commercial, industrial, residential and tourism center.” It was signed by then Mayor Lani Mercado-Revilla.

No such proposal had reached the PRA’s list of approved projects as of November 2023.

But reclamation continued, only now through private corporations. In December 2016, Frabelle Fishing Corp. and Diamond Export Corp. submitted the BRDP and DRDP as unsolicited proposals, respectively, to the Bacoor City government.

In 2018, the city council approved another resolution allowing the mayor to sign joint-venture agreements with the developers of the reclamation projects.

The revised CLUP had yet to be finalized at this writing, but reclamation operations have been underway for four years now.

Government representatives commonly hold more power in the formulation of CLUPs, said Rafael Dimalanta, a research analyst at the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies.

Dimalanta said that while representatives of nongovernment organizations may participate in a local government’s planning through a local development council (LDC), getting accredited for this body “entails numerous bureaucratic processes and requirements.”

Getting elected to an LDC is “mired [in] politics…” he said. “As such, voices of dissent regarding the content of CLUPs, including zoning ordinances, or even revision of these, are not very common.”

In compliance with the requirements for the reclamation projects, the Bacoor City government has consulted various stakeholders on the impending changes in the municipal waters.

Through these dialogues, city officials admitted that the CLUP does not include the reclamation projects.

Loss of livelihood

Dissenting views on the project, but not necessarily on the CLUP, found space in these consultations, with environment officials raising concerns on the projects’ impact on marine resources.

Meanwhile, the affected fishers voiced their worries about losing their livelihood and homes. “What will happen to the livelihood of fishing families in Bacoor?” a representative asked authorities in the January 2019 public scoping for the reclamation projects.

Lawyer Bernadette Corrasco, a city government official, tried to calm their anxiety, saying in Filipino: “All of us here will thrive… We will put you in a fisherman’s village that is not far from the coastal area.”

But “how will the government ensure that the affected residents are properly relocated?” was the question posed by a barangay captain in a 2018 dialogue. 

Carrasco responded that there will be in-city resettlement of displaced residents. She said their “partner” had already bought land in Bacoor for the relocation site and the local government had secured a budget from the National Housing Authority.

Mercado-Revilla, who accepted the projects on the city’s behalf, addressed her constituents in a public consultation in January 2020. “We should all be excited because the coming changes are towards the progress and development of your family and community,” she said in Filipino.

A relocation site called Ciudad Kaunlaran, located some eight kilometers from Bacoor’s coastal area and to be composed of 3,000 units, will accommodate the displaced residents, Mercado-Revilla said.   

The tenement-type resettlement should be able to house the affected informal-settler families, which number 1,961, according to the Housing, Urban Development and Resettlement Department (HUDRD) of Bacoor City.

But groundbreaking for Ciudad Kaunlaran’s Phase II occurred only last January. Only nine buildings with a total of 540 units comprise its first phase, the HUDRD said.

Cabornay, whose house was among those that got in the way of the projects, opted for the off-city resettlement in Naic offered by the Bacoor City government. Naic is about two hours away from Bacoor. Still, he prefers the houses there over the smaller units in Ciudad Kaunlaran.

Besides, he said, there is a fisherman’s village promised for folks like him. 

But when the Cabornays’ house was demolished, the fisherman’s village had yet to be constructed. They availed themselves of the offered unit in Naic to secure a future house of their own, and, in the meantime, searched for a place to rent in Bacoor.

“As long as there is livelihood in the sea, I will stay,” Cabornay said. “I won’t live in Naic because there’s no job for me there… I know how it is to work in the sea.” 

The promised village, which is now referred to in city documents as a “fisherman’s dormitory,” has yet to be built at this writing.

“If the dorm has space that we can squeeze ourselves into, we’ll fight for it so we can have a place to sleep,” Cabornay said.

Space and capital

In the January 2020 dialogue, Mercado-Revilla denounced claims that the projects would kill Bacoor’s mussel and oyster industry, arguing that there would still be space for fishing and aquaculture.

As of 2023, the Philippine Statistics Authority listed 411 mussel-growing areas in Bacoor, covering about 256 hectares in total. The area allotted for aquaculture in the proposed sea use map is only 156 hectares.

Space is one issue, but capital is another.

Cabornay is worried that mussel farmers like himself will again have to find huge sums of money to set up their farms. He has been cultivating his 0.4066-hectare mussel farm for more than two decades now, investing some P100,000 in it.

But because compensation for farm owners is pegged at only P0.50 per square meter, according to Bacoor’s agriculture office, Cabornay will be entitled to the meager amount of P2,033.

“There will still be space for mussel farms… But what? It will be too cramped, you’re overcrowded, and you’ll need new capital,” he said.

Consulting with the affected residents is only one of the tasks of proponents before their major reclamation projects begin. They must also draft an environmental impact assessment (EIA) of their operations and secure an environmental compliance certificate (ECC) from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

The projects’ EIA identified reclamation as posing a “(t)hreat to existence and/or loss of important local species and habitat.” But it also said that once stock enhancement measures like re-seeding of species are conducted, residual effects will be “nil.”

The projects’ ECC, meanwhile, states that water turbidity is bound to increase, but with the “installation of a silt curtain surrounding the area to be filled with the reclamation materials,” there will be “100% no turbidity.”

Oceana Philippines, an organization dedicated to the conservation of ocean and marine resources, is skeptical about these mitigating measures.

Lawyer Gloria Ramos, Oceana’s vice president, asserted that re-seeding will not work because it is not a sustainable practice. “If it’s that simple, why has fish production been consistently declining?” she said in Filipino.

Bacoor’s mussel industry had been improving since experiencing a sharp decline in 2018. But starting 2020, progress has slowed.

The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) Region IV-A identified land reclamation and lack of expansion areas as threats to mussel production in Bacoor.

UP SURP’s Liwag said reclamation should always be the last recourse to accommodate growing populations. She said that vacant spaces, whether small or large, should first be explored, and that vertical development, or construction of high-rises, is also an option especially if the government can afford it.

“If there’s really no option … the last strategy is reclamation because once you reclaim—and naturally you reclaim the sea—firstly, that’s so costly. But it will also cause a myriad of negative environmental impacts,” the environment planner said.

Unsolicited projects

The P58.32-billion twin reclamation projects were not part of Bacoor’s plans. These are unsolicited projects proposed by Frabelle and Diamond to Mayor Mercado-Revilla’s office.

Because these are joint-venture agreements, the city government only has to allocate a minimal budget for the construction.

When the islands are completed, a sizable chunk will be owned by the developers and the remaining portion will become the property of the local government. Portioning has yet to be finalized, said city planning officer Alcantara. 

Frabelle and Diamond, both formerly chaired by Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., submitted the unsolicited project proposals for BRDP and DRDP, respectively, to the Bacoor City government in December 2016. 

A month later, the Local City Council passed City Ordinance No. CO 7-2017, formally establishing a Public-Private Partnership Code in the city that would facilitate agreements between the city government and private developers.

In May 2017, Mercado-Revilla issued a certificate of acceptance for the proposals and began negotiations with the developers. The reclamation projects were also opened to other private entities, but no one expressed interest in them.

The Bacoor City Council greenlit Mercado-Revilla to sign the joint-venture agreement through a resolution dated January 2018. Sand was first dumped on Barangay Maliksi I for the BRDP in 2020. 

Robinsons Land Corp/ (RLC) is also involved in the construction of the BRDP’s 90-hectare inner island as a joint-venture service provider of Frabelle, according to a 2021 resolution of the Bacoor City Council.

A report by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reveals that a joint venture was brokered between Frabelle and RLC as early as 2018.

This reporting team sought comments from Frabelle and Diamond by email and phone call on May 7, 2024, and sent a physical letter to their office in Navotas on May 8, 2024. Follow-up requests were made four times, but no response has been received at this writing. 

Tiu Laurel has divested from Frabelle and Diamond, as shown in SEC records obtained by this reporting team. But members of his family, many of whom are board members and stockholders of the businesses, are tied to the projects affecting Bacoor fishing families.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. appointed Tiu Laurel as agriculture secretary in November 2023. The business mogul donated P30 million to Marcos’ presidential campaign in 2022.

A few months into his tenure, Tiu Laurel, laid out a plan that would “[expand] and [improve] available agri-fishery areas to increase production.” 

Poorest sector

Fishers are the poorest among all sectors in the country, the latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority show.

The Bacoor City government believes that the displaced fishers can still benefit from the touted “world-class business hub.” They are welcome to mount their own business establishments there and sell any products they may have, Alcantara said.

She said livelihood programs and “training” are available for them and their spouses, including how to sew: “Tinuturuan din sila, like paano manahi, para ‘yung mga asawa ng fisherfolk meron silang trabahong pagkakakitaan.”

Cabornay, breadwinner of a family of three, was less optimistic. “They mentioned that the children will be the first ones to acquire jobs once businesses open in the reclaimed area… That’s if your child graduates from school. But how will our children finish their studies if we don’t have jobs?” he said.  

This story project was produced with support from the University of the Philippines Department of Journalism.