The group Fishermen and Friends of the Sea said that existing laws require that the shrimp trawlers must be boarded by a Coast Guard officer while trawling and only global position satellite (GPS) readings taken at the time of boarding are acceptable to the court.
In a recent letter to Agriculture Minister Arnold Piggott, FFOS secretary Gary Aboud said that every effort must be made to ensure that the “one strike out” ban on trawling off Trinidad’s north coast is rightfully enforced.
It is said that the shrimp trawl regulations, updated annually by Parliament, arose out of the 1999 north coast/shrimp trawler stake-holder agreement. Aboud informed that this agreement cites a trawler may carry out demersal trawling for fish or shrimp only west of Saut d’Eau Island, only outside of two nautical miles off the north coast, between November 15 to January 15 and from 6 am to 6 pm. Apart from this no trawling is allowed at night and if any single shrimp trawler is caught and convicted then the “one strike out principle” would apply.
According to Aboud there are some locally owned industrial shrimp trawlers that have been engaging in night trawling in contravention of the agreement. He further alleged that their actions are scraping fishermen breeding grounds and destroying their nets, pots and their livelihoods.
It is true that the destructions of the sea beds, fisheries and rural economies has brought the situation in such a worse condition that trawling is banned completely in other parts of the world, most recently in Venezuela. Aboud is confident that once all stakeholders work together and in a responsible manner Trinidad & Tobago can intelligently manage a sustainable fishery.
