© Iain Neish
Starting in the early seventies, Iain Neish was one of the first to help spread smallholder seaweed farming across the Philippines as an employee of Marine Colloids / FMC.
He simultaneously built out the company’s carrageenan processing in the Philippines, before moving to Malaysia and Indonesia to catalyse those nations’ burgeoning seaweed industries.
When he departed his home base in Cebu, he left behind a thriving seaweed farming region at nearby Danajon reef that yielded thousands of tonnes of seaweed a year. Since then, production has gradually declined and recently collapsed to zero. Now, Neish is trying to revive its fortunes.
You have been away from the Philippines for a long time. There are other places that could use your seaweed farming expertise. What was it about Danajon reef in particular that brought you back?
It was my niece Leah who got me into this. She had left her corporate life in Manila during Covid and found refuge on Olango island off the coast of Cebu. She was looking for ways to help the locals, and she asked me if seaweeds could be part of a solution.
There's about 700,000 people out here. The marine resources have been devastated, blast fishing, poison fishing, overfishing, ghost nets… The seagrass beds are over-gleaned like crazy. When I first came here in the 1970s, you'd see sea cucumbers and sea urchins and all kinds of molluscs, all over the place. You never see a sea cucumber anymore. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.
The decline brought along poverty. According to a study from 2016, these folks are now earning the daily equivalent of two kilograms of fish in the market. That’s just surviving, right? Compare that to 30 years ago, when seaweed farming was going strong here; the area around Danawon, that little island alone used to rake in about half a million dollars in a good month.
We talked to people and they said, of course we'd like to get back into farming, but we have no way to do it. There was some action from NGOs and local government, but just giving them planting materials is not enough to get this thing started again from scratch. It needs more help.
As my work in Indonesia was wrapping up, it felt like the right moment to return to the Philippines. Reviving Danajon reef, both from an ecological and an economic point of view, felt like the thing to do. That’s how my new venture SeaKITS got started.
© Iain Neish
If seaweed cultivation was thriving on Danajon reef before, why did it collapse?
There was an earthquake here and a typhoon. And people say that after that, in some places, the seaweed wasn't growing so well anymore. Now that was the third or fourth typhoon that they had. They managed to recover from the other ones. But they were unable to recover from Odette in December 2021.
Why is that? I still don't know. I have, I think, 10 hypotheses, and they range from value chain failure to political rent-seeking crushing recovery efforts. There’s the mysterious “water being no good anymore” theory, supposedly due to toxic substances leaching out the ocean floor after the 2013 earthquake. And so on. Perhaps someday we'll know what combination of those things add up to the catastrophe.
Some critics say, with more typhoons predicted for the future, it’s futile to keep farming seaweeds here, only for things to get blown away time and time again with increasing frequency.
If you're going to live here, you live with typhoons. And all the other force majeure that goes with the place. And people are still here and they won't leave. When Leah and I were asking the former seaweed farmers in Bilangbilangan if they saw typhoons as the major problem, they said “no, we recovered from typhoons. If we quit living because of typhoons, we'd be dead long ago.”
SeaKITS wants to bring back seaweed cultivation on Danajon. How?
There's a need for fundamental baseline information. There is very little data pertaining to anything that's happened out here. People talk about climate change, but who's measuring the environmental parameters in coastal waters? So that's where it starts, first get the data.
Once we figure out where there are possibilities we’ll put in the test plots. I believe that there are cultivars that will grow in some places at some time. The fact that ten kilometres away seaweed production is thriving indicates to me that it could probably be done here.
© Iain Neish
The more you test, the sooner you can expand into commercial production at the best locations. Of course, the test plots are not just about seaweed, they're also about the people you are working with. You are sort of screening the whole thing, the habitat, the seaweed cultivars, the farmers.
Then, as soon as you get a cultivar growing well with a good group of people, you just expand, expand, expand. That's how we got seaweed farming going all over Southeast Asia in the first place. Literal organic growth.
This sounds like it could definitely get people earning money again. But what’s the difference with how things were done in the past? How is this going to help the health of the reef?
Besides looking at seaweed, of course, we look at the mangroves, the seagrass beds, the corals, any opportunities that can also be nurtured. And we don't farm seaweed in ways that are damaging like we did in the past. So, it's about making sure that people follow the protocols, do it properly. That comes with an extra level of oversight. Field presence is really important.
That comes with an extra price tag, though. How can you compete with cheaper, less sustainable farming operations?
I have been at every level of this value chain over my career, producing biostimulants and carrageenan. There are opportunities for value addition right here. Part of our effort is to maximise the return for locals and reconnect to the market. I am trying to convince people in high places here that, honestly, this situation here is a national disgrace, and it's up to Filipinos to bring it back. We (I speak as if I'm a Filipino, although I'm an immigrant, but my family are Filipino), we built something marvellous here, and now it has, for reasons still unclear, collapsed, and many, many people want to bring it back, but the wherewithal to bring it back is not here. Meanwhile we have people with marine biology degrees driving taxis in the city because there's no jobs for them. We need to use these resources to reimagine this industry.
© Iain Neish
What are the main challenges you face to make this happen?
Money is the big challenge. What I call KITS – knowledge, information, tools, and solutions – that’s all here. We have qualified people who can't get a job applying their skills and training. The people in need willing to work are here. We just need the money to put everything together.
It would obviously be great to have grant funding in the beginning because in effect, we are recovering from disaster. But in the long run, this would be running as a value chain. It makes sense from a business point of view. Something like half a million dollars per hectare per cycle should be feasible in this area, and we have over 250 hectares. So the business case is there.
Before SeaKITS you worked with companies that want to grow seaweeds at an industrial scale. Here you are trying to build a network of small family businesses. Is one approach superior in farming seaweeds, or do they both have their place?
This is an area where I have a philosophical difference with advocates of industrial seaweed farming. Farmers on a salary are not good farmers in general. They need to have skin in the game or they don't care whether the crop lives or dies. Maybe if a company has terrific management, they will be able to make it work. But I have never known of an estate farm that worked, and I have witnessed several failed attempts over the past five decades.
Mind you, it would be great if somebody does make it work. With suitable technology, there is no reason at all why you couldn't put, for example, one-square-kilometre farms along seashores and fit them into coastal ecosystems. But it is wise to develop at several sites to spread your risk… you know, eggs in one basket?
They may dodge the bullet for a while, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it goes on for long. It's just very risky. At Danajon Bank we have seen how a thriving seaweed production region thousands of hectares in size can fail for reasons not yet understood. We are still early in the development of adaptive phyconomy.
