OVER SEAS -- The Online Magazine for Sustainable Seas

Palawan

CRMP’s work in Palawan focuses on San Vicente, 180 km from Puerto Princesa. Known to the outside world primarily for its 14-km White Beach, San Vicente is, to CRMP, a rich ground for instituting programs in coastal resource management. This municipality northwest of Puerto Princesa City has four out of the 165 fishing grounds found in Palawan: Imuruan Bay, Caruray, Pagdanan and Jibbon Bay. With forest reserve areas covering 86.8% or 68,834 hectares of the total land area of nearly 80,000 hectares and a coastline extending to 120 kms, majority of San Vicente’s 20,000 residents depend on fishing for livelihood.

Technical Working Group Starts Work On Port Barton Plan
A Technical Working Group that will work on the Port Barton Development Plan has been formed with representation from the barangay (village) council, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the tourism department, women’s group, private sector, fishers’ organizations, boatmen’s organization, and sitio chairmen. The TWG has so far consulted three of the 14 sitios in the Port Barton area. In addition, CRMP conducted last May 21 a workshop on tourism; two more workshops – the first on fisheries management and the other on habitat management – will be conducted on June 17 and 18. "We will begin writing the draft of the plan after these workshops," said Mel Corkum, CRMP Learning Coordinator for Palawan. "We hope to finish the draft by the end of 1998."

Corkum said she is heartened by the participants’ response to the tourism workshop. "In all the four years that I’ve been involved in CRM work in Port Barton, this is the first time I’d seen the kind of response shown by those who joined the May 21 workshop. Everybody came on time, and everyone stayed until the workshops were finished. I think it was a reflection of their commitment to the project."

CRMP is using tourism as "a channel to propagate CRM concepts" among the key players of development in Port Barton. "There is a thriving reef-based tourism industry in the area, and we want to get the commitment of the resort operators, who have access to resources and the financing required to implement certain aspects of resource management, and all others involved in, benefit from or are in some way affected by tourism at Port Barton."§