Vietnam will restructure its seafood industry by allocating more resources to develop its aquaculture sector while downscaling its fishing activity, Deputy Prime Minister Trinh Dinh Dung said on 23 October.
“Currently the fishing capacity is too large, exceeding the reproducibility of the aquatic resources. The seafood industry cannot be developed if we solely rely on fishing,” Dung said during a working visit to review the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in Kien Giang, a southern province in Vietnam.
Vietnam has a fishing fleet of about 120,000 fishing boats, many of which are of small sizes.
As domestic aquatic resources have decreased in recent years, fishermen have shifted to new fishing grounds in other countries, in violation of the law.
The General Department of Fisheries has named 59 local boats found to have been operating illegally, mostly in the waters of other countries, as of 19 September this year. Of the total, 23 boats were caught fishing illegally in Indonesia, 13 in Malaysia, four in Thailand, and the remainder in other countries.
These violations must be stopped as soon as possible because the European Commission may consider imposing a red card if the situation gets worse, the deputy prime minister said. He asked local authorities to implement recommendations made by the E.C.'s Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries as part of the country’s path away from its yellow card status, which it received in 2017. E.C. inspectors are expected to visit Vietnam from 4 to 12 November this year to review the yellow card, including checking to see what improvements have been made in the country’s fight against IUU activity.
Dung said to develop sustainably in the long term, the seafood industry needs to be restructured by focusing more on aquaculture, especially ocean farming, and that it must reduce its fishing activities.
Dung asked the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to closely coordinate with Kien Giang and other coastal provinces to push the shift. As part of the measures, local authorities have been told to identify difficulties faced by local fishermen during the shift and recommend suitable measures to support them.
The officials have also been asked to find ways to attract investors to the aquaculture sectors, particularly those willing to apply advanced technologies to ocean farming in Vietnam.
Vietnam produced 5.96 million metric tons (MT) of seafood in the first nine months of this year, up 5.4 percent from last year, comprising 3.11 million MT from aquaculture and 2.85 million MT from wild-catch fisheries, the General Department of Fisheries under the Agriculture Ministry said earlier this month.
Photo courtesy of Toan Dao/SeafoodSource
