The Department of Agriculture (DA) is implementing stricter rules on fish imports to protect the local industry while ensuring stable supply.
The DA has tightened the rules to avoid the surge of fish imports which happened in recent years due to loose policy in the past, Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. said on Tuesday, September 16.
Tiu Laurel said he has prohibited the practice of transporting imported fish to private ports, instead of the government-authorized fish ports, which was among the questionable policies in the previous administration.
“Just to give you an example, we now only allow fish shipments to be unloaded in PFDA (Philippine Fisheries Development Authority) ports,” Tiu Laurel said during a House Committee on Appropriations hearing on the DA’s 2026 budget.
“In the previous administration, before I came in, they were allowing unloading in private ports where anyone could just get on the list,” he told lawmakers.
To solve the problem, Tiu Laurel said the DA has decided to determine the import allocation based on previous-year performance and require importers to unload fish shipments at the PFDA ports to ensure tax compliance, supply monitoring, and market stability for both consumers and local producers.
At one point, the agriculture chief said he had the DA registry cleansed to get a better picture of the country’s fish requirements.
The DA removed a lot of entities on its list due to “kalokohan (irregularities),” Tiu Laurel added.
“Because of tighter import regulations, thousands of tons of smuggled fish, particularly mackerel, have been confiscated in several ports across the country since last year (2024),” Tiu Laurel said.
He added that the volumes of smuggled fish seized, despite tougher import rules, indicated “how lucrative the fish market is.”
Total imports of fresh, chilled, and frozen fish alone reached 2.37 million metric tons (MT) from 2017 to 2022, worth P163.76 billion, based on the Philippine Fisheries Profile published by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR).
The volume is almost a million MT higher than the 1.41 million metric tons imported between 2011 and 2016, amounting to P64.15 billion.
Data from the BFAR also showed that fish imports slightly eased to 404,027 MT in 2023 from 414,539 MT a year ago.
The BFAR has yet to release the fish import data for 2024.
