The 39th Annual Meeting of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) took place last week Montréal. More than 180 delegates from eleven NAFO contracting parties were welcomed to Montréal by NAFO President, Stéphane Artano, and the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard.
Europêche representatives defended and promoted full respect for the social and labour rights of all fishing vessel’s crews and demanded that the same level of compliance must be required for all countries during the Tripartite Meeting on Issues Relating to Migrant Fishers held by the International Labour Organization (ILO) during the last week in Geneva.
Russian landings as a whole so far this year have totalled more than 3.5 million tonnes, which includes production of 64,000 tonnes of freshwater fish, according to the Fisheries Monitoring and Communication Monitoring Centre, which puts the current figures as being 4000 (+0.5%) tonnes up on last year’s.
‘It’s not enough to talk about transformation, businesses need to show shareholders, customers and especially government stakeholders that they are transformed,’ said Mary-Lou Harry, human resources director at South African fishing company Sea Harvest.
Norwegian fishing vessel operators’ federation Fiskebåt has written to the authorities, asking for restrictions to be placed on Icelandic and Greenlandic vessels landing mackerel in Norwegian ports.
The Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organisation’s 39th annual meeting is taking place this week in Montreal, with representatives of the twelve contracting parties discussing conservation and enforcement measures for the region.
The European Commission’s proposals last week to ban both commercial and recreational eel fishing as part of a package of measures for the Baltic Sea are a radical measure that would hit small-scale fishermen hard, as many depend on this fishery.
Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum, Ilya Shestakov, head of the Russian Fisheries Agency, announced that in the next five to seven years investment quotas will help to build more than a hundred fishing vessels and an estimated twenty shore processing plants.
Fisheries ministers, from the Nordic countries of Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Åland, have issued a joint statement against transnational organised crime in the global fishing industry.
NOAA Fisheries has designated critical habitat for Atlantic sturgeon as an important step to ensuring their recovery.