Poor capacity management in the fishing industry has been ascribed as the reason for the issuance of a warning (yellow card) against Ghana over illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in its marine territory.
According to Richester Nii Armah Amarfio, Secretary to the Ghana Tuna Association, Ghana’s fishing industry is currently in a ‘survival of the fittest mode’ due to the over-dependence of fishers on the industry for their livelihood.
“We have a fishery sector that is now a survival of the fittest, particularly at the artisanal level, you have about 14,000 canoes and let’s even say they are 9000 canoes, if you even have 10 people on each canoe you are talking about more than 90,000 fishers in the industry and they all have to survive.”
“And because the fish stocks are now declining they have to find ways and means to able to survive and that includes doing illegal things, so if you don’t address the problem of over-capacity, you will always go round particularly in the artisanal sector trying to fix a problem which you can simply fix by reducing the numbers of fishers in the industry,” he said.
Read: IUU Fishing Ban: Ghana-EU IUU working group sessions to be activated by Fisheries Commission
Speaking on the Eye on Port programme monitored by norvanreports, Mr Amarfio, as part of efforts to reducing the number of fisher folks in the industry and thereby managing capacity in the industry, suggested that elderly persons engaged in fishing should be retired by government and be placed on monthly stipends.
“You can reduce the number of dependents on the industry by having a pensions scheme for the elderly or to retire them on LEAP (Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty) with monthly stipends,’ he stated.
“We should also identify young ones who are in school but also in the industry and find ways of putting them back in school or give them some skill training to reduce the human dependency on the fishing sector,” he added.
He continued saying, “We need to have a regime that checks or manage how people enter into the industry, so we can manage capacity and align resources to the capacity we have because if we don’t do that, we will still have a lot of people fighting to survive in the industry and who will doing a lot of illegal things to survive.”
The yellow card issued Ghana by the EU means that, Ghana risks being identified as a non-cooperating country in the fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, hence also risk being sanctioned and restricted from exporting its fishery products to the European market.
Also: EU warns Ghana against IUU fishing; threatens to ban fishery exports from Ghana
The yellow card or warning is based on various shortcomings in Ghana’s ability to comply with its duties under international law as “flag, port, coastal or market State.”
The identified shortcomings include; illegal transhipments at sea of large quantities of undersized juvenile pelagic species between industrial trawl vessels and canoes in Ghanaian waters, deficiencies in the monitoring, control and surveillance of the fleet and a legal framework that is not aligned with the relevant international obligations Ghana has signed up to.
Speaking on the same programme was the Deputy Director of Fisheries at the Fisheries Commission, Emmanuel Kwame Dovlo, who asserted that the Commission following the yellow card by the EU has activated a Ghana-EU working group session to discuss and find solutions to the concerns raised by the European Union (EU).
