In Malampaya Sound on the Philippine island of Palawan, freshwater and saltwater converge to sustain a rich biodiversity, including the critically endangered Irrawaddy dolphin, as well as some 68,000 people who live along its peripheries. The sound is a remote seascape in an inlet folded between surrounding lush, mountainous terrain.
Angelo (not his real name) has been fishing in the sound, located in Palawan’s north-west, for most of his life. Born just a few miles up the coast, near the town of El Nido, he moved to Malampaya a few decades ago as a teenager. Today, he supports his wife and three children through subsistence fishing and selling his surplus catch at the market.
Angelo has noticed a big change in recent years: storms have become more frequent and intense, setting new hurdles for fishers like himself. “[Most] boat and net fishing are destroyed from typhoons,” he tells Dialogue Earth. “It has a big impact, especially on fishermen. It’s like starting all over again.”
His family is one of hundreds who rely on Malampaya Sound – nicknamed the “Fishbowl of the Philippines” – as their main source of food and income. But their once-dependable survival safety net is now increasingly vulnerable to multiple threats.
One is typhoons, which compromise a coastal food system already made fragile by overexploitation and habitat degradation. Small-scale and subsistence fishers especially are having to make do on less and less.
The impacts of the typhoons are compounded by another factor: commercial fishing vessels sweeping up catches from locals.
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Recognising nutrition outcomes as an important contribution of fisheries [is important]. Integrated food system policies that consider sectors like health and fisheries will be more effective when [they] are evidence based and informed by country-relevant data.
Gianna Bonis-Profumo, scientist, WorldFish
Fish as food and livelihood
Early on most mornings, before the sun rises, fishers head out onto the sound on their bangkas – small wooden outrigger canoes powered by a single, small engine. They motor into the Inner Sound, where marine harvesters each concentrate on a different local species: crab, fish, eel, squid, jellyfish, seaweed. Nets are cast, and traps are set and reset. The work is communal: men, women and children bring daily catches back to their coastal communities to be cleaned and sorted. Some of it is cooked immediately for consumption, while the rest is sold in the market.
Fishers in the area told Dialogue Earth that a good day during fishing season might mean earning anywhere from P200 to 800 (about US$3.50-13.50), while a bad day out of season might mean failing to meet basic needs. In 2026, the minimum daily wage in the Mimaropa region where the Malampaya Sound is located has been set at P455 (about US$7.60) for private-sector workers.
Despite the country’s heavy reliance on fish as a key protein source, fisherfolk face some of the highest poverty rates of any occupation in the Philippines, with 27.4 per cent living below the poverty line. In Mimaropa, the region where Palawan is located, that figure is 32.2 per cent.
Worldwide, small-scale fishing provides millions of individuals with a food security fail-safe in areas with little alternative social support. In the Philippines, 85 per cent of the country’s fishers are small-scale, yet they supply half of the nation’s overall marine catch, according to a report from conservation NGO Rare.
With their low incomes, small-scale fishers of Malampaya Sound have little financial buffer when typhoons destroy gear or when commercial vessels push into the waters they depend on. Each storm or lost fishing ground translates directly into missed meals and mounting debt.
Pressures from typhoons
Extreme weather events over the past decade have increasingly threatened food security in the Philippines. The nation topped the 2025 WorldRiskIndex as the most disaster-prone in the world due to high exposure and vulnerability to extreme weather. When Typhoon Rai struck in December 2021, boats were smashed, and around 2.1 million homes were damaged, with total damage to infrastructure estimated at around P30 billion (US$512 million), according to analysis by the Red Cross.
The effects last far longer than the storm.
In the Malampaya Sound, residents reported their post-typhoon catches plummeting and that the environmental and infrastructural damage led to disruptions in subsistence fishing. “After Rai, we were unable to catch anything because the water was so muddy, and all seafood was gone,” Malampaya Sound local Christine (not her real name) told Dialogue Earth. “It was like this for a long time.”
Since then, typhoons have continued to batter the country: Super Typhoon Fung-wong and Typhoon Kalmaegi passed through in late 2025, killing hundreds in their wake. Fishers tell Dialogue Earth that such storms are pushing them farther into the West Philippine Sea, increasing fuel costs and equipment wear. Spending more time on the water also increases the risk of threats like unpredictable weather and strong currents.
Disruptions like these also solidify larger, industrial vessels’ upper hand, reducing food availability even further by exporting remaining fish to foreign markets.
The scale of loss
Of Philippine provinces, Palawan has the most apparent commercial fishing vessels inside municipal waters, notes conservation NGO Oceana. Last year, Oceana reported 5,218 likely intrusions of commercial vessels in 2024, up from 2,989 in 2022, with concentrations in northern Palawan, a region which includes the Malampaya Sound.
The presence of commercial fishing vessels in the sound has not gone unnoticed by fishers like Angelo. “There’s a bigger chance that they’ll catch more,” he says, voicing the concern many other fishers have. All this is despite the sound being designated a Marine Protected Area, meaning that trawling equipment or gillnets of more than 100 metres in total length are prohibited.
Researchers project that if subsistence and small-scale fisheries like Malampaya Sound’s disappear, food insecurity and malnutrition will rise for the communities. A 2024 study in npj Ocean Sustainability notes that in 2017, the Philippines sourced all or almost all of its highly nutritious catch from within “preferential access areas” – zones where small-scale fisheries are given priority access.
But while these zones were a key source of small-scale fishers’ catches, they “do not confer strong user rights to small-scale fishers and fishworkers (eg the right to co-manage), or, in and of themselves, ensure sustainable management”, the study noted.
Recent policy has also overlooked the protection of subsistence fishers and their fisheries. A 2015 amendment to the Philippine Fisheries Code of 1998 sought to improve food security by giving small-scale fishers preferential use of near-shore waters. However, a decision by the Supreme Court in 2024 upheld the ruling of a lower court allowing commercial fishing vessels in these municipal waters. Fishers told Dialogue Earth that they have been left feeling unprotected and defeated, fearing competition from commercial vessels, often from other countries.
Prioritising small-scale fishers
Experts Dialogue Earth spoke to agree that long-term support for fishers remains insufficient, primarily due to small-scale fisheries being generally undercounted.
They are often not accounted for in national statistics or may be measured in “very inaccurate” ways, notes Gianna Bonis-Profumo, a scientist at research organisation WorldFish. She says “numerous small vessels that might land catches on a riverbank or a beach in remote areas” are more challenging to monitor than commercial fishing boats that land their fish together in ports.
Bonis-Profumo notes this is particularly the case in countries where small-scale fisheries are critical for the livelihoods and food security of much of the population, “where limited funding means fisheries are typically managed with little consideration of data”.
Underfunding and a lack of accounting means limited social and political protection for small-scale fisheries, despite their crucial contributions to food security. Proper long-term support would require “recognising nutrition outcomes as an important contribution of fisheries”, she says. “Integrated food system policies that consider sectors like health and fisheries will be more effective when [they] are evidence-based and informed by country-relevant data.”
But such solutions may be far on the horizon. In the meantime, fishers of the Malampaya Sound are finding their own ways to cope. Some of them are diversifying their income streams and moving away from subsistence-led lifestyles towards entrepreneurship. Angelo, for one, has been taking his bangka up the coast to cater to tourists, while his sister has opened a halo-halo (cold shaved ice dessert) shop near the village harbour.
Yet ultimately, fish remains a key part of local life – one that is essential to the identity and survival of the community. “Our culture here is seafood and we are proud of it,” says Christine.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
