Mozambique: Reference interest rate for credit remains at 24.10% for the fifth straight month
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Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is a common enemy that all states should fight against, declared Mozambique’s Deputy Minister of the Sea, Inland Waters and fisheries, Henriques Bongece, on Monday.
Speaking at the opening of a technical assistance seminar on formulating national strategies, aimed at improving fisheries control measures, Bongece stressed that illegal fishing “significantly reduces the economic and natural resources of the global economy and the marine environment”.
Its effects, he said, are felt most severely on low income developing coastal countries and small island states which depend on fishing.
The cost to the Mozambican state of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is estimated at 67 million US dollars a year, according to the statistics from the Ministry’s National Directorate of Operations.
The Director of Operations, Leonid Chimarizene, told the seminar that measures are now under way to reverse this trend. One of these measures is the installation on board about 270 licensed industrial and semi-industrial fishing boats of VMS (Vessel Monitoring System) equipment.
This is a system that allows fisheries regulatory bodies to track and monitor the activity of fishing vessels. Such systems are used in various countries to improve the management and sustainability of the marine environment, through ensuring appropriate fishing practices, and preventing illegal fishing.
Boats carrying VMS equipment can be visualized by regulators, who receive information on exactly how they are fishing. But the major problem now, Chimarizene said, is posed by foreign vessels without VMS equipment, which enter Mozambique’s territorial waters and are difficult to control.
“We have partnership agreements with neighbouring countries”, he said, “and in the event that any illegal fishing is suspected, we activate measures of collaboration with other countries to monitor the vessels concerned”.
He stressed that no country should allow any vessel suspected of illegal fishing to enter its ports, under the Agreement on Port State Control.
Chimarizene added that recently regional patrols allowed the detection of two foreign vessels from the Comoro islands who were caught fishing illegally in Mozambican waters, and were each fined 5,000 US dollars.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) regards illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing as a threat to conservation and to the efficient management of fishery resources.
FAO representative Castro Camarada told the seminar that, although the impact of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is not well documented, there is a general sense that its costs and impacts are serious both for coastal states and for legal fishermen, whose livelihoods depend on these resources.
He said that technologies are being developed that will allow better tracking of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and that there is a growing political will to implement policies that tackle this problem.
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