Talk:Aquaculture in the Philippines/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Chipmunkdavis (talk · contribs) 09:29, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 19:45, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

One preliminary question: have you heard of rice-fish polyculture in the Philippines, and if so, doesn't it deserve a mention? There are reliable sources such as FAO on the subject.
Great preliminary question! I have a brief mention of them in the Fish pond subsection and productivity. They exist, but are not productive. Let me know if you think there should be more expansion. CMD (talk) 00:21, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, polyculture productivity. I guess the point here is that total productivity goes up even if the components are not great on their own; and the system lowers inputs of fertilizer and pesticide, so is both profitable and good for the environment. Something of thus could be said, perhaps. Chiswick Chap (talk) 03:52, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

its wastewater can be used for irrigation - this is not far from the polyculture advantage, with a bit of geographic separation. It might be well to have a small subsection on 'Advantages', whether environmental or economic.
Added a bit more to distinguish brackish from freshwater, see below general comment on advantages.
The first paragraph of 'Resources' is a bit of a blizzard of numbers (including eight instances of ",000", for instance) and parentheses, basically just presenting data without any discussion or conclusions (which come much later in the article). This might work better as a table? Even better would be a simple cross-section diagram with a mountain on the left, grading down through land with lakes, river, reservoirs, to swamps fresh and brackish, and finally to the sea on the right. Then the figures can label each item. Can help with that if you like.
Table implemented, does that work? Open to moving towards a diagram, although diagram creation is not my personal forte.
The second paragraph of 'Productivity' is not as much of a blizzard, but it is not easy to read. A map with Regions I/Bangsamoro, III, IV-A clearly labelled (with placenames as well as numbers) would be helpful; we could go one step further and put the figures in a table. Again, I can help with that if you like. I note in passing that Bangsamoro is both overlinked and used slightly inconsistently as a label for Region I.
Table implemented for total and regions, keeping commodity in prose (trying to put those in the table too felt confusing, and the commodity seems a more important note).
a large aquaculture component: it might be helpful to indicate the ratio of aquaculture to wild-caught fishery here, whether by tonnage, price, or just percentage, for a recent year.
Added
highly productive due to large amounts of sunlight, and stable and warm temperatures. There must be good mixing or oxygen would quickly get low... freshwater fish such as carp cope with low oxygen by gulping air... I wonder if aeration isn't an issue.
Deoxygenation events are covered in environmental damage, but given the low capital many farmers have, they must be able to make do in normal conditions without special equipment.
Growth rates for tilapia cages can vary from 4 months to a year - needs rewording.
Done
fry are deliberately wild-caught - does this have an environmental impact?
The source mentions by-catch, so I added that to environmental. Presumably there is some conflict going back to before the 1949 FAO "Regulations for the conservation of Sabalo (full-grown bangus or milkfish) and for the prohibition of the exportation to foreign countries of "kawag-kawag" (bangus or milkfish fry) and "hatirin" (bangus fingerlings)"), but I haven't seen any specific coverage. It is probably difficult to disentangle from other issues, especially when a greater (non-aquaculture) issue is the shrinking size of fish catch.
'Environmental' covers A) fresh and salt water; B_ nutrient enrichment and chemical/antibiotic pollution; C) impact of introduced species; and D) (see next item) harms in opposite directions. Some subdivision would be helpful. At present it reads as a bit of a breathless jumble.

...also damage aquaculture - this sentence concerns Environment -> Aquaculture harms, while most of the rest of the material is the reverse. It appears that there are also (introduced?) fish harmful to aquaculture, so perhaps there should be a separate subsection describing the E -> A harms.

I guess I was surprised at how weakly the article distinguishes marine from freshwater aquaculture, which appear sharply distinct in European aquaculture. I suppose we could distinguish ponds (brackish or fresh, on land); freshwater pens (lakes or rivers); brackish and saltwater ponds and pens. I can see there is some sort of continuum here, but are there not rather distinct consequences, specially ecological, from these? Salination of land would be one example (it has been disastrous with prawn ponds in South Asia: is it not an issue here too? I see that [6] Yap says it is); spreading of diseases and parasites in open waters another. Maybe this says that 'Environmental' at least (even if 'Methods' can't readily be divided?) needs a bit more detail and perhaps subsections?
Added the specific note on Negros, Yap implies it was an unusual situation caused by the coinciding drop in sugar prices and boom in shrimp prices.
'Socioeconomic' impacts include positive and negative. Might be worth separating these into subsections: the section is quite long and oscillates between the two at the moment.

'Industrialization' is a very long section (almost 3,000 words); 'History' as a whole is approaching 5,000 words, 10 pages of A4 printout, longer than many whole articles. This comes close to unbalancing the article; I see you've created History of fisheries in the Philippines; I wonder if we shouldn't split this off as History of aquaculture in the Philippines (or similar), leaving a short summary and a 'main' link? There is evidently some overlap, but it could of course be factored out of the Fisheries article also. Clearly this could be handled in a variety of ways. If we are going to keep anything like such a large amount of History in this article, it needs to be subdivided a bit more (sections on fish, shellfish (or crustaceans, molluscs), seaweeds would be one possible arrangement); but really it seems to me that it needs to be cut down quite a bit.

I'll note in passing that 'Under the 1987 constitution' rather bizarrely includes yet another burst of production figures, their readability decreased by the lack even of wikilinking to the Regions this time around. Again, a table or two might help.

Minor tweaks

I've made a few very minor tweaks to the text for readability.

Various tilapia species and hybrids were also important in 'Industrialization: suggest we drop "Various" and "also".

Images

The images are all relevant, often excellently informative, and are all plausibly licensed on Commons.

Sources

Spotchecks are all fine, this is a well-sourced article.

Summary

This is a detailed, informative, well-illustrated and well-sourced article. I've raised some concerns about organization and readability in the comments. Once these are addressed this will make a worthy GA. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:34, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the thoughts. There are a couple of chunky ones I will have to think about. Regarding the freshwater/marine distinction, perhaps this is due to production being so dominated by just a couple of species? Freshwater farming seems effectively synonymous with tilapia farming. On saliniation, Yap notes a particular instance, but in general my impression from the sources is that prime agricultural land is rarely converted to fish ponds, instead the most discussed issue is mangrove destruction. I will have another look as I go through. CMD (talk) 11:39, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks. It does seem that these things work rather differently the Philippines, not least because of its geography. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:51, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Some replies above, including two table creations. Let me know if that is what you had in mind. Regarding advantages and disadvantages, I prefer not to split into explicitly positive and negative sections, it seems like adding a bit too much value judgment. Still thinking about dejumbling environmental and socioeconomic impact, and whatever is to be done with the history section (if it seems it needs to be cut down, I suppose deciding between keeping details combined in the main narrative or creating the separate sub-article). CMD (talk) 15:12, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looking good so far. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:06, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]