Newsbreak Chats: How gov’t officials, big operators conspired vs fisherfolk

Bookmark this page to catch the discussion live on Thursday, April 18, at 4 pm

MANILA, Philippines – Small fisherfolk are among the poorest in the Philippines, and yet they are also abused and undervalued both by the government and the private sector.

A two-part Rappler investigative series uncovered one of these instances, where the National Telecommunications Commission intervened in the implementation of a system that could have prevented illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. The NTC chairperson back then was Gamaliel Cordoba, whose wife’s family partly owns a commercial fishing company.

On Thursday, April 18, Rappler investigative editor Chay Hofileña sits down with investigative reporter Lian Buan and multimedia reporter Iya Gozum to discuss how they worked on this series, and the relevance of their findings both in terms of the bigger picture and in the context of the fisherfolk’s lives.

Read the two-part series here:

• Top officials with private interests spoil effort to track big fishers
• Big fishers encroach on small fisherfolk’s municipal waters

What was the impact of the NTC hampering the efforts? How can such interventions be prevented in the future?

Catch the discussion live on Thursday, at 4 pm. – Rappler.com

Watch other Newsbreak Chats episodes in 2024:

• Uncovering the lavish world of Apollo Quiboloy
• What it’s like to be a bike commuter in Metro Manila
• Faith and People Power
• Should Rodrigo Duterte be afraid of the Int’l Criminal Court?
• Charter change at the center of the Duterte-Marcos war
• Why Filipinos turn to sugar dating
• Martin Romualdez’s expanding power