Binh Thuan province takes drastic measures to prevent illegal fishing

Nguyen Van Chien, director of the provincial Agriculture and Rural Development said the whole political system of the province had taken the measures since 2017 to prevent illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and stop the situation that local fishing vessels and fishermen catching fish in foreign waters following directions of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The provincial People’s Committee had issued many documents to order relevant agencies to fix the situation, Chien said.

Accordingly, the relevant agencies had seriously implemented the installation of vessel monitoring devices and processing the data on Vnfishbase software, he said.

Data from the province said 93 per cent of local fishing vessels already equipped vessel monitoring devices so far.

The province also set up the centre for monitoring data of fishing vessels and established three data stations in three Fisheries Control Representative Offices at fishing ports.

Based on data from the centre, authorised agencies had warned and called back dozens of fishing vessels at risks of crossing over the Vietnamese territorial waters.

As a result, the province has step by step controlled the situation of illegal fishing in foreign waters since July 2019. Besides, the province also dealt with 438 violations of regulations on protecting aquatic resources last year.

Huynh Quang Huy, head of the provincial Fisheries Division, said installing the vessel monitoring system not only helped authorised agencies to closely monitor the operation of the vessels but also quickly identify the location of the vessels to promptly rescue if any incident occurred.

Shortcomings, solutions

According to Chien, shortcomings are still ahead. For example, although the situation of illegal fishing has been controlled, there is still a potential risk of illegal fishing while some offshore fishing vessels operating on Viet Nam’s sea boundary often reportedly lose their connection with the monitoring centre. 

Additionally, about 7 per cent of fishing vessels had yet to install the vessel monitoring devices due to financial difficulties, he said.

Violations against IUU under the 2017 Fisheries Law were still quite common in the province, especially, the situation that fishermen did not record and submit the fishing diary as well as not declaring when entering and leaving the local fishing ports, he said.

The enforcement of the regulations on fishing vessel management, controlling of fishing vessels’ arriving and departing, reporting fish yield and tracing the origin of fish still showed little effective as expected, he said.

Sanctions to deal with the violations was believed to not strong enough in some cases, he added.

Degraded infrastructure of some fishing ports, human resources at some fishing ports had yet to meet job requirements and limited budget for related activities were also blamed as shortcomings, he said.

Therefore, Chien said the province should continue implementing synchronously solutions to fix the shortcomings in the future.

It was necessary to add fishing vessels that once illegally went fishing in foreign waters and fishing vessels often lost their connection with the monitoring centre when operating in the Vietnam’s sea boundary into the list of fishing vessel under special supervision, he said.

The province was advised to order fishing vessels’ owner to sign a commitment to not illegally catch fish in foreign waters, he said.

The Coast Guard force and the Navy force were suggested to co-operate to prevent illegally fishing in foreign waters, he said.

Relevant agencies were also told to seriously supervise the entering and departing of fishing vessels at fishing ports and verify the origin of fish in the coming time, he said.

Chien said, as scheduled, the province would restructure the fishing industry in the direction of reducing the number of fishing vessels, strengthen linkages among offshore fishing vessel, re-organise the local fishing ports’ management board, train more qualified human resources, improve the infrastructure of local fishing ports and invest in building storm shelters and fishing ports in key fishing areas of Mui Ne, Chi Cong, Ba Dang.