Tropical Fish and Cyanide: Deadly Mix in Philippines

Barnet Shutman, a Long Island salesman, was sitting in his hotel room here the other day when suddenly he thought of Nancy Reagan. Within seconds, it inspired a new ad campaign.

“It came to me like a flash,” the 28-year-old Shutman recalled. “ ‘Just say no to cyanide.’ ”

Shutman buys and sells tropical fish, and the new slogan is part of a pioneering crusade that his company, based on Long Island, N.Y., is about to launch in one of America’s fastest-growing hobby industries.

Unknown to many of the millions of Americans who enjoy home aquariums, most of the tropical fish they buy are heavily laced with cyanide.

The problem begins here in impoverished regions such as Palawan--the island province of which Puerto Princesa is the capital--an area that is the world’s largest single source of tropical fish for home aquariums.

Nearly a decade ago, the Manila-based corporations that supply most of those fish to American and European markets discovered that industrial sodium cyanide, pumped liberally into offshore ocean reefs, forced thousands of fish to the surface and boosted their profits.

The cyanide does not kill the fish--at least not right away. It only weakens them, forces them to the surface and makes it easy for fishermen to scoop them up with nets. It does, however, kill the coral reefs where the fish breed and live.

Still, the mostly poor rural fishermen, who are paid by the number of fish they catch, say they cannot afford to think of the future. Most of them have used the cyanide to maximize their profits.

The long-term result has been devastating. The cyanide that has slowed and stunned millions of Philippine tropical fish for export each year also has killed as much as 95% of the coral reefs that made this nation of 7,100 islands one of the world’s most beautiful archipelagoes.

“Palawan is really the last frontier, and our main goal was to find drug-free fish, so we decided to start looking here,” said Shutman, who came to Palawan a month ago with the president of his Oceanic Resources Inc., of Bohemia, N.Y., in search of a tropical-fish exporter who was not using cyanide.

Prayers Answered

“But it was really only a prayer. We knew only too well, and everywhere in the world it’s widely known among wholesalers, that no fish out of the Philippines is cyanide-free anymore.”

Three weeks ago, though, Oceanic’s prayers were answered.

Through the Philippine chapter of the International Marinelife Alliance, a worldwide environmentalist lobby group, Shutman and his company’s president, Leon Carmel, found Regrix Enterprises and its owner, Erna Rafols.

The Manila-based firm was just beginning to experiment with cyanide-free methods of catching tropical fish. Rafols said her fishermen learned the technique, in which divers use a metal poker to chase the fish into nets without disturbing the reef, from Steve Robinson, a tropical fish importer based in Inglewood, Calif., who is also a member of the marine environmentalist lobby.

Admits Cyanide Use

“I’ll openly admit that I was using cyanide for years,” Rafols said. “I’ve been in this business for three years now, and I can tell you everyone is doing it. I was supplying my fishermen with drums and drums of cyanide, smuggling it in, paying people off, and it was no problem at all.

“But too many of our fish were dying, and, at some point, you start thinking about the reefs you’re killing and the fact that you’re leaving nothing behind for your children.”

Technically, cyanide fishing, which does radically shorten the fish’s life span and stunt its growth, is illegal in the Philippines. So is the other commonly used technique of dynamite fishing, which stuns the fish and brings them to the surface while destroying or damaging the reefs.

But Rafols and other exporters have openly said that environmental laws are easy to flout in a nation where even celebrated murders routinely go unsolved, and they have often alleged that the police and military officers who are supposed to prevent dynamite and cyanide use are directly involved in it.

Outgunned by Fishermen

The honest Philippine navy and coast guard officers who have tried to stop the illegal fishermen also complain of lenient punishment by judges, and one coast guard officer who tried to stop a cyanide- and dynamite-fishing syndicate on the central Philippine island of Bohol last year told The Times that his men actually were outgunned by the illegal fishermen, who are known to carry mortars and machine guns on their boats.

“All I’m trying to do now is to prove to everybody else that it can be done without cyanide,” Rafols said. “And maybe, just maybe, that will save our coral reefs.

“We’re an island nation and all our protein comes from the fish that breed in these reefs. Once they are gone, what is left for us to survive?”

Rafols is not alone in her concern.

In a strongly worded pastoral letter read in tens of thousands of Roman Catholic churches throughout the Philippines last year, religious leaders warned against the long-term effects of such practices as cyanide fishing.

Sermon on Cyanide

Titled, “What Is Happening to Our Beautiful Land,” the nation’s bishops declared, “Through our thoughtlessness and greed we have sinned against God and his creation.”

Widespread rape of the nation’s forests has reduced the Philippines’ 70 million acres of trees to just 2 million in this century alone, and the relatively new techniques of cyanide and dynamite fishing are threatening to reduce the country’s half-million square miles of territorial waters to “deserts in the sea,” the message warned.

“Who has turned the wonder-world of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of color and life?” the bishops asked rhetorically. “Imagine: Only 5% of our corals are still in their pristine state.

“As Filipinos, we can and must act now. Nobody else will do it for us. This is our home. We must care for it.”

According to Rafols and other environmentalists, though, the sermon had little effect.

“Everyone is still doing it,” she said of cyanide fishing. “Everyone, that is, but me.

“I just feel we have to start somewhere.”

Drug-Free Fish

For Shutman’s Oceanic Resources, which he said is the largest tropical fish importer in the northeastern United States, there is a practical as well as an environmental side to the quest for drug-free fish.

“When you blast a fish with cyanide, it doesn’t live as long,” he said. “Everyone in the business knows it, but the retailer . . . (is) only interested in keeping that fish alive until it leaves his shop. It’s the consumer and the hobbyist who suffers.

“They get these drugged fish home, put them in their tanks and they only live three to six months. Then, suddenly, the fish are dead, so he has to go out and buy more fish.

“We’re looking for a way to keep these fish alive longer and to sell specialty fish like clown triggers and regal angelfish that retailers won’t touch right now because they know the cyanide kills them quicker.”

Limited Progress

Shutman said he knows that his company cannot change an entire industry overnight.

“Our plan is to put these big signs on all the boxes of fish we import from Palawan that say in big letters, ‘Just say no to cyanide,’ ” he said. “When those boxes start landing on the docks in New York and getting around the industry, we hope it has a bandwagon effect and all the other wholesalers jump on.”

And, if it succeeds, Shutman conceded that it would eliminate a fundamental irony in the current tropical-fish boom in America.

Although Shutman said he hates to use the word yuppie to describe America’s principal buyers of tropical fish, he acknowledged that most are the environmentally aware children of the 1960s and 1970s who were enticed into tropical fish as a hobby by such come-ons as studies showing that a home aquarium lowers one’s blood pressure and “basically helps you kick back.”

“But these consumers and part-time hobbyists don’t know about the cyanide,” he said. “And if they did know, they’d hit the ceiling.

“What we’re trying to do is tell them the truth about what has really gone into the fish that are swimming around in their living room aquariums, and, at the same time, give them an alternative--drug-free fish and a chance to help save the world for future generations.”