From July 1 hundreds of fishing boats, most of them unregistered, will stop operating in the face of a government crackdown on illegal fishing. Any fishing vessel caught working without an operating licence faces a fine of up to 100,000 baht.
Pote Aramwattananont, president of the Thai Frozen Food Association, said owners of unlicensed boats would stop fishing for two months while they upgrade their vessels and fishing gear to meet the required, legal standards. This would affect supplies to the frozen seafood sector, he said. But why now? Why did the owners of these fishing boats not start improving their vessels and replacing their illegal fishing gear, such as fine-mesh nets, several months ago, when they were notified by the Fisheries Department of the need to comply with the IUU (illegal, unregulated, unreported) fishing rule? The real reason is, quite clearly, these boat owners just wanted to buy time, procrastinating in the hope the government would give them a reprieve so they could continue their illegal operations and continue to fatten their wallets. It was reported the owners of these illegal fishing boats had asked for financial help from the government, to replace their unseaworthy vessels or to replace their illegal fishing gear. Their argument being that they did not have the money to fix the wrongs in order to comply with the IUU rule. To begin with, they were all wrong from the start. Their boats were never registered. They used illegal fishing gear, and many of them operated illegally within the off-limits three-mile zone from the coast and use destructive bottom-fishing gear, in which the nets scoop up everything on the seabed. Most of them were driven by greed, to make money with no respect whatsoever for the law, ecology and the environment. The Gulf of Thailand, which once teemed with marine life, has been stripped almost bare of fish stocks and other sea creatures by these illegal fishing boats. And now they are asking for financial help from the government -- taxpayers’ money in fact -- to right their wrongs. How ridiculous. There are simply too many fishing boats operating off our shores for the limited fish stocks in Thai territorial and nearby international waters. Their numbers should be slashed, with the illegal boats the first to go. I totally disagree with the idea of helping these destroyers of our seas. They must give us a good reason why they are worth helping with taxpayers’ money. If the government really wants to help, it should help the small operators, inshore fishermen who tap the coastal areas using simple eco-friendly fishing gear. Most certainly not the owners of big, illegal fishing vessels. The government, the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives in particular, must bear in mind that it has its own deadline to meet. That is that the IUU fishing rule must be enforced by Sept 30 -- or frozen seafood exports to the European Union will be affected.
Fishing boats await the high tide at Samut Songkhram (Bangkok Post photo)