The word from Nosy Tarsee’s fishing hole is that a mega infrastructure project rising on reclaimed land up north has the folks who used to fish that mud unhappy. Word from the barangays is that thousands of families got moved off their old grounds years back. They took the relocation money. It wasn’t much. It’s gone now.

From the mangroves, Nosy Tarsee learned that the compensation was a number picked from far away, not from reality.

One old fisherman put it plainly: What he used to earn in an hour, he can’t earn in a day now. He used to net a bucket of crabs in three hours flat. Now he’s out there 10 hours, sometimes all night, and comes home with a fraction of what he used to catch. Six kids to feed. Rice first, then the school fees, then the bills. Nothing left over. That’s the math of displacement, and no one at the top seems to be checking it Here’s the part that stings. Nosy Tarsee’s talk with the residents revealed that the land they were pushed off of, thousands of hectares of fishponds, sits idle right now.

The big outfit that holds the property isn’t using it yet. Won’t be, not for years. So the fisherfolk are asking for something simple: Let us back in, just until you need it. Let the ponds earn something for the people who worked them for generations, instead of sitting empty behind a fence.

So far, no answer from the big shot who runs the company. The bigger fight hasn’t stopped either. A militant fisherfolk alliance has been hammering the project on environmental grounds, too, citing a foreign-funded feasibility study that reportedly warned against building anything heavy on that stretch of coast in the first place.

They took it to court and asked for a writ of kalikasan, the special environmental remedy. The High Court threw it out on a technicality, on form and substance, not the merits. The fisherfolk read that as a no comment, not a vindication for the other side.

Nosy Tarsee believes somebody with the real money in this mega-project ought to sit down with the men still fishing at midnight and do his arithmetic properly or face a real tricky situation with the residents.