New regulations to please the European Union (EU) will not lead to sustainable fishing, a major commercial trawler association said on Tuesday.
"Fishermen are now unhappy with fishing regulations prescribed by authorities. These regulations have put us in a tough situation. The practices are overly complicated and unrealistic and will not lead to the betterment of the industry," Mongkol Sukcharoenkhana, president of the National Fisheries Association of Thailand, said.
The association on Tuesday submitted a formal complaint letter to Deputy Prime Minister Gen Chatchai Sarikulya, who is in charge of resolving IUU (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated) fishing.
Earlier in the week, the group that represents the majority of commercial trawlers began strike action as a thousand trawlers in southern coastal areas docked and demanded the authority to set up a committee with the remit of re-examining the measures.
"These regulations are too painstaking. It is like the authorities that make these rules did not consider whether these measures were realistic or not," Mr Mongkol said.
He was referring to directives under the government's new "IUU-free Thailand" environmental and labour policy.
One of the regulations the association is railing against is the Ministry of Labour's requirement that trawlers present all their crew's payslips to officials. Moreover, each slip must have signatures from both the crew member and captain to ensure the accuracy.
Another overly demanding order is that all equipment must be licensed and registered prior to a vessel being deemed fit to fish.
He also said that break times allotted to each crew member must also be included in the report, which he said would achieve nothing other than adding to the amount of paperwork that each vessel's crew would be expected to process.
"We want the government to provide a manual of what they want us to check both in port and when we're out at sea. And those overly demanding orders must be eradicated. We do not see how they will benefit the fishing industry or contribute to sustainable fishing practices in the industry," he said.
In 2015, EU issued a warning to the country to correct IUU fishing violations, and threatened that all seafood shipments from Thailand could be banned by the EU if sufficient measures to curtail the issue are not put in place as a matter of urgency. It has been estimated that such a ban could cost Thailand over US$300 million (about 9 billion baht).
The Command Centre for Combating Illegal Fishing (CCCIF) was established that year under the National Council for Peace and Order's (NCPO) command for dealing with the problem. Many measures were implemented, including a fishing decree, the establishment of Port-in Port-out tracking systems, and a traceability system to ensure that the industry would meet standards required in anticipation of EU inspections.
Currently, the centre is no longer active, but state agencies are still working together to fight illegal fishing activity.