On April 18, the delegation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, led by Mr. Nguyen Quang Hung, Deputy Director of the Directorate of Fisheries, had a meeting with the People's Committee of Ba Ria-Vung Tau and other departments and sectors. The meeting mentioned the situation of production, management of fisheries activities and the implementation of anti-illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) in the province.
Speaking at the meeting, Mr. Nguyen Quang Hung pointed out that the Provincial People's Committee and the provincial agricultural sector have implemented 19 documents related to anti-exploitation of IUU over the past time. However, the actual implementation is very limited, the inspection and supervision of fishing vessels of the authorities in the province are insufficient, unable to control the leaving and docking vessels; captured products has not been controlled fully, thus it has not met the traceability. These are the problems of the province.
Mr. Hung suggested that the province established a working group to implement the Fisheries Law. At the same time, group also review and advise on the evaluation of specific action plans for the implementation of IUU. The province should direct border guards and police soon to deal with; At the same time, functional departments also need to promote propaganda to ship owners and captains in order to stop illegal fishing. Along with that, it is proposed to build a plan a roadmap to monitor and supervise the journey of fishing vessels in the province.
Mr. Tran Van Cuong, Director of Department of Agriculture and Rural Development said that there are 5,870 fishing vessels in the province with a capacity of 1,430 thousand CV. The ship with a length of 15m or more currently has 2,809 units focusing on seine net, gill net, trawl, etc.
The province also has 170 enterprises processing and trading aquatic products, with a total capacity of 250,000 tons of finished products per year; in which, 33 firms have been granted certificates of eligibility to export to markets such as European and Japanese, Korean, American and Russian, etc.
For the implementation of IUU, the provincial agriculture sector has conducted many training courses, propaganda and dissemination of laws related to fight IUU fishing. Currently, the province has established six (6) representative offices for fishery inspection and control located at fishing ports in the province. At the same time, province also built operational regulations, coordination regulations, assigned specific tasks to each implementing agency and unit.
With the participation of the Provincial Border Guard, Fish Port Management Board, Agriculture and Rural Development Inspectorate, Fisheries Sub-Department, Fisheries Control Representative Office at ports, with inspection tasks, control ships exporting, importing, fishing, collecting log books for exploitation and logging, exploitation reports from ship owners, captains or owners of purchasing establishments; making statistics on seafood production to ports, etc are implemented. The recording of diary books, certification of the origin of aquatic raw materials exploited and installing of equipment for fishing vessel monitoring system has also been actively implemented by the province since 2018 up to now.
Currently, Ba Ria-Vung Tau is still facing many difficulties and obstacles in implementing IUU such as: the decentralization of management of fishing ports and landing sites has not been unified. This leads to difficulties in operating and the establishment of relationships between fishing ports to exchange information and coordinate the activities of fishing vessels in and out of ports.
In addition, it is difficult to synthesize periodic data on output at the ports. The fishing port management boards still lack professional personnel, material facilities and equipment to serve the inspection and certification of the traceability of exploited aquatic resources.
In addition, there are no regulations, specific guidelines on conditions, standards, certifications of conformity, types and origins for cruise monitoring equipment to meet operational supervision requirements.
Lê Mai