The artisanal fisheries sector has experienced huge economic losses in recent years because of a fishing management decree that “has never had any scientific basis,” denounced the president of the Committee for Fisheries and Aquaculture of the National Society of Industries (SNI), Alfonso Miranda.
According to the official, the implementation of Supreme Decree No. 011-2013 of the Ministry of Production (PRODUCE) has meant that “around annual 50,000 tonnes of anchovy have been stopped catching for human consumption and this has implied rising annual economic losses of about USD 240 million (2013-2015)”.
Miranda stressed that this standard has been tainted since the origin and that the hardest hit has been the smaller scale fishing fleet, which caught anchovy for human consumption because it has been left out of the fishery due to poor planning, Gestion reported.
Therefore, he stressed the need for PRODUCE to correct the existing inequities in the aforementioned standard, which harm mainly canneries and frozen product firms.
In his view, in their agenda the fisheries authorities should as soon as possible include “urgent issues of the fishing activity for human consumption”, such as canning, frozen and cured product industries, which are those that generate more labour in the sector.
“About 150,000 people directly work, but this figure has a multiplier effect that, in the end, could amount to a million people working for the fishing industry,” the entrepreneur stressed in statements gathered by Gestion.
Moreover, Miranda expressed concern at the delay experienced by Peruvian seafood exports for human consumption, which was one of the conclusions of the Second International Symposium on Fisheries and Aquaculture for Human Consumption held earlier this month in Lima.
In this regard, he stressed that despite their greater fishing wealth, Peru exports four times less than Ecuador and six times less than Chile.
He also regretted that the measures announced by PRODUCE for the first 100 days of the new Government do not include a scientific investigation of the Peruvian giant squid in the Peruvian sea, an omission that is expected to be corrected.
FIS.com, 2016