Maritime divide: why the Philippines is failing its seas

The Philippines is a maritime nation surrounded by multiple bodies of water, yet its approach to governing them remains fragmented, reactive and increasingly strained. Public attention has understandably focused on the West Philippine Sea, where transparency efforts have helped many Filipinos better understand the stakes.

However, at a time when maritime challenges are multiplying, the real risk is not silence but distraction. While officials argue over narratives and sovereignty, the rest of its maritime domain quietly deteriorates.

The impact of current maritime governance failures is already evident away from the West Philippine Sea spotlight, particularly along the country’s coasts. One of its clearest manifestations is food insecurity, a problem rooted in marine resource management but often approached through sectoral silos.

According to Oceana, the Philippines loses approximately45 million kilograms of fish annually, withcumulative losses of more than 590,000 metric tons since 2010, largely due to weak enforcement and regulatory shortcomings.

These losses are not abstract. They translate directly into shrinking fish stocks, declining incomes and fisherfolk families pushed further below the poverty line.

Oceana’s research also shows that overfishing persists alongside the continued intrusion of commercial vessels into municipal waters and marine protected areas, underscoring that existing fisheries laws fail not in principle but in implementation. These are not marginal issues. Taken together, they strike at the heart of national stability.

Maritime safety presents another sobering reality and further exposes the cost of governing the seas through institutional silos. Ferry accidents and maritime disasters continue to occur, but investigations rarely lead to systemic reform.

The recent sinking of the MVTrisha Kerstin 3, a cargo and passenger ferry, resulted in at least52 deaths as of this writing, and more than two weeks after the incident, the cause remains under investigation. In such cases, the issue is not fate or weather but systems that failed to function as intended.

Peer-reviewed maritime safety research on the Philippines, including studies published in theJournal of Navigation and Port Research, has long documented patterns of weak enforcement, poor vessel management, aging infrastructure and diffuse accountability. When such incidents are treated as isolated tragedies, the result is not reform but repetition.

Climate change is compounding these failures across the country’s maritime domain. Marine ecosystems are already under severe stress from rising temperatures, shifting ocean conditions and intensifying weather events, pressures that are eroding the productivity and resilience of Philippine waters.

According to climate projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the maximum fish catch potential of the Philippine seas could decline by as much as 50% by the 2050s if current warming trajectories persist, placing coral reefs and other critical habitats at risk from heat stress, acidification and more frequent disturbances.

These impacts are further exacerbated by pollution and unsustainable human activities. In Palawan, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a recent joint assessment by Philippine government bodies and Australian scientific institutions found that58% of examined marine species are experiencing significant decline.

This evidence underscores how environmental pressures are advancing faster than governance responses, widening the gap between climate risk and the capacity of maritime institutions to manage ecosystems and livelihoods in an integrated manner.

The costs of fragmented maritime governance are also visible in the country’s logistics, port performance and maritime industries. Logistics expenses now account for approximately 27.5% of Philippine GDP, the highest in ASEAN, reflecting persistent inefficiencies in port operations, inter-island shipping and regulatory coordination.

Congested ports, particularly in Metro Manila, which handles the bulk of the country’s container traffic, routinely operate beyond capacity, driving up costs and delays across supply chains. The same governance gap is visible in shipbuilding.

While the Philippines once ranked among the world’s leading shipbuilding nations, output declined sharply after 2018 following the closure of major facilities, and the industry remains structurally divided between export-oriented foreign yards and smaller domestic repair operations.

This decline was not inevitable. It reflects a policy framework that is strong in regulating shipping operations and seafarer deployment, but weak in sustaining shipbuilding as an integrated industrial sector.

When ports, shipping, logistics, and industrial development are governed through separate mandates and unaligned priorities, maritime industries struggle not because of geography or market forces, but because no institution is responsible for steering them as a coherent maritime system.

In 2024, the Marcos administration reorganized the National Coast Watch Council into the National Maritime Council, reflecting renewed recognition that maritime issues cut across security, economic, environmental, and regulatory domains.

The council’s mandate reiterates the long-standing need for unified action across the maritime domain, a principle already embedded in earlier coordination mechanisms. Yet institutional reorganization alone has not resolved the deeper problem of fragmentation.

Even in maritime security, coordination remains contested, with agencies and officials at times advancing divergent public positions rather than converging on a shared strategic direction.

Beyond security, this disconnected governance is more pronounced, as fisheries management, port development, climate resilience and maritime industrial policy continue to operate largely in parallel. The structure acknowledges the problem, but governance practices have not changed.

The Philippines is surrounded not only by water, but also by responsibility. The challenge is no longer about awareness, mandates, or institutions, but about execution.

Maritime governance requires political discipline, institutional trust among agencies and a genuine whole-of-government commitment to act collectively across security, livelihoods, safety, climate resilience and economic development.

Until coordination moves from public contestation to shared execution, the country will continue to fall short of what its seas and people require.

Ivy Ganadillo is a PhD candidate in international relations at Ewha Womans University in South Korea, a Maritime GENIE at the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific Studies and a non-resident fellow at the Indo-Pacific Studies Center.